Introduction - David Biggs

 Introduction - David Biggs

Welcome to HIST 197 - Environmental Problems in California. I'm David Biggs, your tour guide and professor. I have been a prof at UCR since 2004, and my research interests are environmental history with a special focus on Vietnam. I've written some articles and two books, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta and Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam. If interested, you can find out more about my work at http://davidbiggs.net. Besides my main research, I am also involved in  local environmental policy issues. I have served as an expert witness on federal environmental cleanup cases involving a military herbicide called Agent Orange that is linked to all sorts of illnesses, and I wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times about chemical warfare in Vietnam. At UCR in the past, I've taught a Public Policy course focusing on local environmental history case studies, and that is where the research materials and case studies come from in this course. I am currently writing two books, an Environmental History of Southeast Asia and a more popular history of the 20th century focusing on environment, technology and the Great Acceleration. My hobbies include gardening, surfing, freediving, swimming, and spearfishing. My new research interests include urban shorelines and mangroves in Southeast Asia.  One story from my family: my grandfather was a boxer from rural Kentucky, but he had to drop out of that and college during the Great Depression when his father disappeared left him to care for the family who lost their farm and everything. He worked as a butcher for ten years and then expanded it into a small grocery and eventually into a supermarket called "Biggs Market." He worked until he was 80, and he was even shot twice but survived, thanks to a lucky rabbit's foot keychain he carried in his breast pocket that stopped the bullet. My interest in Vietnam came from my dad who joined the Navy as a way to attend college and became a nuclear engineer during the Vietnam War era. My interest in environment war shaped by growing up near nuclear power plants where he worked. I've even taken a tour inside a nuclear reactor - before they switched it on!

Addendum: I forgot to add pics from Grandaddy Biggs! My cousin sent these, of my grandpa during the Great Depression, when he hung a sign up, then 15 years later when he upgraded into a "Market". There appears to be a car crashed out front.