Fellows

The Orton Family Foundation Fellows program supports land use innovators engaged in pathbreaking research, writing and practice, and it encourages new approaches to the land use planning challenges facing America’s small towns as well as solutions rooted in community heart and soul. The Fellows program helps the Foundation, its partners and communities better understand and influence the land use planning system as a whole.

The Foundation does not encourage unsolicited Fellowship applications or inquiries at this time.

Orton Family Foundation

William Travis

2005-2006 Fellow

William Travis, a leading scholar on regional trends and land use in the American West, is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado-Boulder and directs the Western Lands Program at the University’s Center of the American West.

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William Travis, a leading scholar on regional trends and land use in the American West, is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado-Boulder and directs the Western Lands Program at the University’s Center of the American West. He is editor-in-chief of the Atlas of the New West (W.W. Norton and Company, 1997) and has authored several studies on rural and suburban land use change, resort growth and ranching—often using maps to help people better understand the patterns and implications of land use change.

As an Orton Family Foundation Fellow for 2005-2006, Travis wrote a sweeping diagnosis of land use trends in the West and a prescription for better planning and policy decisions, entitled New Geographies of the American West: Land Use and the Changing Patterns of Place,published by Island Press in early 2007.

Travis received his PhD in Geography from Clark University, has taught at the Universities of Wyoming and Colorado and is a Trustee of the Colorado Chapter of the Nature Conservancy. He has conducted research on agricultural development in the Great Plains, federal range policy in the West, the impact of natural hazards and climate change and regional development. His students work across the country in planning departments, open space programs, land trusts and non-profits engaged in conservation and community development.