Elizabeth “Liz” Koonce holds a master’s degree in landscape architecture with a focus on public lands and animals as ecosystem engineers. Her thesis The Grass Remembers the Horses was honored by the University of Oregon for its narrative prose and its exploration of the management of wild horses on public lands in the western United States. Her brand of landscape architecture synthesizes policy, physical design, conservation goals, livestock and agriculture with the restoration of land and habitat. Land management design removes the administrative and political blinders from land management, and adds the ideals of land ethics, and of the designer’s belief in the intrinsic values of nature and the extension of ‘community’ to the natural world.

After graduate school Liz worked for a large public and private commercial landscape architecture firm where she coordinated with multi-disciplinary teams on projects including state park trail systems, public parks, shoreline systems, land trust acquisitions, and large-scale ecological restoration endeavors. These experiences in the public sphere give her a unique and human-oriented perspective to covering issues of conservation and land management.