Bill Borrie PhD » Team

Bill Borrie, PhD is a conservation social scientist who is fascinated by human-nature relationships. For many years he has researched the wild, wilderness areas, and the lived human experiences of them.

Bill’s writings have raised issues of technology and wilderness, the ‘disneyfication’ of wilderness, the privatization of nature, the difficult notion of primitiveness, the role of wilderness as a sanctuary, the engendering of wilderness, and on the measurement, monitoring, and management of quality visitor experiences.

Bill has conducted research in Yellowstone National Park; the Bob Marshall Wilderness complex; the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge; the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness; the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and Petrified Forest National Park. Bill has a Ph.D. in Forestry from Virginia Tech and a B.S. and M.S. in Forest Science from the University of Melbourne, Australia. For over twenty years, he taught in the Society and Conservation department at the University of Montana.

Recently, Bill and his colleagues have been investigating the measurement of environmental values, including intrinsic value, and call for methodological pluralism in the evaluation of sustainable ecosystem services.

Bill is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Leisure Sciences and has twice received the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service’s Excellence in Wilderness Stewardship Research Award.