Laura J. Martin is a historian and ecologist who studies how people shape the habitats of other species. She is the author of Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration and numerous articles on just solutions to the global biodiversity crisis. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The Los Angeles Times. She is an environmental studies professor at Williams College and a former fellow of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She is working on a book about how synthetic herbicides have reshaped life on Earth.