Mark Bomford

Sustainable food systems · agriculture · environment

Mark belongs to a settler family, raised on and off-grid in northern British Columbia on Treaty 8 territory, and farmed for a decade on the unceded ancestral territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.

He was the founding Director of the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at the University of British Columbia, where over a decade he established the centre on the campus farm and helped secure the legislation that protects its farmland. From 2011 to 2026 he directed the Yale Sustainable Food Program, and continues at Yale on the advisory board of the Program in Agrarian Studies and as a Research Affiliate of Agrarian Studies and the Applied Science Synthesis Program.

His current research, with the University of Oxford's School of Geography and Environment, explores Controlled Environment Agriculture, more-than-human ecologies, and enclosure in practice and theory. He has worked at the challenges and contradictions of climate change and sustainable agriculture since the mid-1990s — through physics, philosophy, art, agroecology, commercial farming, community activism, science and technology studies, and human geography.