Sally Fairfax

I taught natural resources policy, administration and law for 35 years at the School of Natural Resources of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley. I am the author, frequently with students, of numerous books and articles, most recently California Cuisine and Just Food [2012] and Buying Nature: The Limits of Land Acquisition as a Conservation Strategy 1780-2004 [2005] both from MIT Press. I served as Title IX Coordinator on the Berkeley campus from 1989 to 1992 from Cal.

I began working in stained glass just after coming to California in 1978. Upon retiring, I branched out and started fusing and beading. Since taking up casting glass in 2014, I have studied with Matthew Day Perez, Alicia Lomne, Gina Zetts, Joanna Manousis, and Erica Tada. I exhibit at Gallery Route One’s annual Box Show and have shown my work at GRO, many regional galleries and shows, at a solo shows at the Dance Palace, and most recently at the Bolinas Museum.

As a professor I had a role in training students who would graduate and make their careers managing valuable resources, doing things and confronting issues that I had never heard of as a student, e.g. global climate change. As a professor, I felt a need to be relatively non-partisan, focused on inquiry. Now retired, I pursue the same issues, with no detachment whatsoever [and no footnotes] required. I use the fragility of glass to call attention to the fragility of places I love. Currently I am drawn to two particular landscapes: Tomales Bay, where I live, and the Polar Regions, where I have been a frequent visitor. Most particularly, my climate change work is designed to put melting ice on prominent view in peoples’ daily lives.