Laura Dev

I am an environmental social scientist whose research and teaching explore how relationships among people, plants, and places are being reshaped by globalization, climate change, and struggles over land and resources. Drawing on political ecology, science and technology studies (STS), and environmental anthropology, I examine questions of environmental justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and the movement of ecological knowledge across cultural and geographic boundaries. I teach courses on land, justice, and conservation.

Much of my research centers on plant-human relationships. My current book project, based on doctoral research in the Peruvian Amazon, follows the plants, healing practices, and knowledge associated with ayahuasca as they travel between Indigenous Shipibo communities and the Global North. Using multispecies ethnography, I explore how plants and people jointly shape these pathways and how the growing commodification of ayahuasca creates both challenges and opportunities for Indigenous communities. This work asks broader questions about who benefits when culturally significant plants and practices circulate globally and what ethical relationships across these worlds might look like.

I also collaborate with Indigenous Peoples on community-led responses to environmental threats and the defense of land and territory. My postdoctoral research examined Indigenous-led forestry and climate justice collaborations, with particular attention to the ways communities define their own priorities and bring distinct forms of knowledge and governance to environmental decision-making. Across these projects, I combine ecological and social-scientific perspectives to understand environmental change not simply as a biophysical process, but as a matter of culture, power, responsibility, and justice.

Ph.D. | Environmental Science, Policy & Management | University of California, Berkeley

M.S. | Graduate Degree Program in Ecology | Colorado State University

B.S. | Biology & Mathematics | Tufts University

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Tracey Osborne, Silvia Cifuentes, Laura Dev, Seánna Howard, Elisa Marchi, Lauren Withey, Marcelo Santos Rocha da Silva. “Climate Justice, Forests, and Indigenous Peoples: Toward an Alternative to REDD+ in the Amazon.” Climatic Change. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-024-03774-7

Juliet Lu, Laura Dev, Margiana Petersen-Rockney. “Criminalized Crops: Environmentally-justified illicit crop interventions and the cyclical marginalization of smallholders.” Illicit Geographies Special Issue. Political Geography (2022). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629822001950

Laura Dev, Karly Marie Miller, Lauren Withey, Juliet Lu, Tracy Hruska. “Ambiguous Spaces, Empirical Traces: Accounting for Ignorance when Researching Around the Illicit.” Progress in Human Geography (2022). https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325211058898

Laura Dev. “Healing in the Chthulucene: Becoming Beyond Human with Medicinal Plants.” Dialogue and Universalism, 29 no. 3 (November 2019).

Ashton Wesner, Sophie Sapp Moore, Jeff Vance Martin, Gabi Kirk, Laura Dev, and Ingrid Behrsin. “Left Coast Political Ecology: A Manifesto.” Journal of Political Ecology 26, no. 1 (October 6, 2019): 529–44. https://doi.org/10.2458/v26i1.23539.

Laura Dev. “Plant Knowledges: Indigenous Approaches and Multispecies Listening Toward Decolonizing Ayahuasca Research,” in Labate, Beatriz C. & Cavnar, Clancy (Eds). Plant Medicines, Healing and Psychedelic Science: Cultural Perspectives. (Cham: Springer, 2018).

Reports & Other Publications

Brian Ikaika Klein, Stephanie Postar, Laura Dev, Hilary Faxon, and Matthew Libassi. “How COVID is Reconfiguring Labor in Extractive Industries.” Edge Effects Magazine. (October 14, 2021). https://edgeeffects.net/malagasy-gold/

Paul Roberts and Laura Dev. “Learning from the Peruvian Amazon.” Val Hammond Research Report. (West Sussex, UK: Roffey Park Institute, 2016).