Until 2004, Geoffrey Wandesforde Smith was in the Department of Political Science at the University of California at Davis, where he taught environmental law, politics, and policy. He held a joint appointment in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy, formerly the Division of Environmental Studies (DES). He was a founding faculty member of DES in 1970, and later both divisional chair and associate dean for Environmental Studies at UC Davis. He is also a member of the faculty in the Graduate Group in Geography.
Early work dealt with the history of the National Environmental Policy Act and the ability of the environmental impact assessment process to constrain the behavior of public agency and private sector developments; work later extended to other countries through Senior Research Fellowships at the Science Center Berlin and the East-West Center in Hawaii.
He was for many years Faculty Director of the Political Science and International Relations Internship Programs and a faculty founder along with Ed Costantini and Gary Dymski of the University of California Center Sacramento (UCCS). His innovative instructional uses of technology pioneered in the late 1990s with major support from Microsoft, AT&T and Sun Microsystems earned the Academic Senate's Distinguished Teaching Award.
None of this interfered with a very active extra-curricular life as a high school, collegiate, and national soccer referee and field hockey umpire.
He is Senior Editor of the Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy, a Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group publication now nearly twenty-five years old, and has more recently served as Guest Editor of the Global Journal of Animal Law for a set of articles published in 2022 on international law and animal welfare . Ongoing research and writing focuses on the relationships between wildlife conservation and protected areas, both terrestrial and marine, including a Journal special issue on "Biodiversity Conservation and Protected Areas in China," co-edited and co-written with Kristen Denninger Snyder and Lynette Hart and published as 17(3) JIWLP (Sept. 2014). Other publication projects have focused on the value and relevance for ecosystem management of the distinction between wild/non-wild animals and what it means to provide justice to wild animals. A new eBook on the compassionate conservation of wild and free-roaming cats and, thus, the mitigation of their impacts on other species was published at the end of 2019.
He retains a long time and active interest in California politics and was for two decades the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the California Voter Foundation (CVF), the major source of fresh ideas for the reform of voting and elections processes in the state and a major participant in the Future of California Elections project, funded by the James Irvine Foundation.
He graduated from the University of Nottingham (B.A. (Hons.)) and the University of Washington (M.A., Ph.D.), is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Royal Geographical Society, and a founder and Fellow of the Henry Dunster Society. The Society communicates with overseas alumni/ae of Bury Grammar School and memorializes Dunster as the first President of Harvard. In the mid-seventeenth century, Dunster was first a student and later headmaster at the Bury Grammar School before emigrating to Massachusetts in the summer of 1640 and becoming the first President of Harvard soon thereafter.
Early work dealt with the history of the National Environmental Policy Act and the ability of the environmental impact assessment process to constrain the behavior of public agency and private sector developments; work later extended to other countries through Senior Research Fellowships at the Science Center Berlin and the East-West Center in Hawaii.
He was for many years Faculty Director of the Political Science and International Relations Internship Programs and a faculty founder along with Ed Costantini and Gary Dymski of the University of California Center Sacramento (UCCS). His innovative instructional uses of technology pioneered in the late 1990s with major support from Microsoft, AT&T and Sun Microsystems earned the Academic Senate's Distinguished Teaching Award.
None of this interfered with a very active extra-curricular life as a high school, collegiate, and national soccer referee and field hockey umpire.
He is Senior Editor of the Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy, a Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group publication now nearly twenty-five years old, and has more recently served as Guest Editor of the Global Journal of Animal Law for a set of articles published in 2022 on international law and animal welfare . Ongoing research and writing focuses on the relationships between wildlife conservation and protected areas, both terrestrial and marine, including a Journal special issue on "Biodiversity Conservation and Protected Areas in China," co-edited and co-written with Kristen Denninger Snyder and Lynette Hart and published as 17(3) JIWLP (Sept. 2014). Other publication projects have focused on the value and relevance for ecosystem management of the distinction between wild/non-wild animals and what it means to provide justice to wild animals. A new eBook on the compassionate conservation of wild and free-roaming cats and, thus, the mitigation of their impacts on other species was published at the end of 2019.
He retains a long time and active interest in California politics and was for two decades the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the California Voter Foundation (CVF), the major source of fresh ideas for the reform of voting and elections processes in the state and a major participant in the Future of California Elections project, funded by the James Irvine Foundation.
He graduated from the University of Nottingham (B.A. (Hons.)) and the University of Washington (M.A., Ph.D.), is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Royal Geographical Society, and a founder and Fellow of the Henry Dunster Society. The Society communicates with overseas alumni/ae of Bury Grammar School and memorializes Dunster as the first President of Harvard. In the mid-seventeenth century, Dunster was first a student and later headmaster at the Bury Grammar School before emigrating to Massachusetts in the summer of 1640 and becoming the first President of Harvard soon thereafter.