Meredith Barges, MDiv, PhD (ABD)

I am a bird-friendly building policy researcher and advocate working at the intersection of bird conservation and sustainable planning. As part of my research, I developed an approach akin to the “Rights of Nature” that treats birds (and more-than-human subjects, more generally) as legitimate political subjects and historical actants in policy theory. A central line of inquiry in my research is understanding how wild birds assert agency in the unfolding negotiation of human land use and creations of the new urban wild.

From 2024-26, I chaired Lights Out Central New York, a nonprofit project of Onondaga Audubon Society dedicated to making the night sky dsrker and safer for migrating birds. I also co-founded and co-chaired Lights Out Connecticut, where I led a successful statewide effort to pass Connecticut’s Lights Out Law (Public Act 23-143), which requires state agencies to turn off all unneccessary lights by 11pm—for birds! I also served as the policy researcher for the award-winning Yale Bird-friendly Building Initiative, a collaborative project of the American Bird Conservancy, Yale Law School, and Yale Peabody Museum. In that role, I co-authored the first policy report on bird-friendly building policies, Building Safer Cities for Birds: How Cities Are Leading the Way on Bird-Friendly Building Policy.

At SUNY ESF, my PhD project examines the dynamics driving the adoption (and non-adoption) of municipal bird-friendly building regulations in the U.S. and Canada. I combine policy analysis, environmental ethics, and urban political ecology to explain the factors driving some cities to adopt mandatory protections for wild birds against urban threats—as well as the factors that hold other municipalities back. This research informs and underpins my advovacy work.

At SUNY ESF and Yale University, I have been recognized for my bird-friendly building advocacy with awards in sustainability and public service. Working with SUNY ESF's Office of Sustainability, I helped to secure a mandatory bird-friendly building policy as part of SUNY ESF's 2025 Sustainability Action Plan. I also led a community-based retrofit pilot project that mitigated several large glass windscreens on our Syracuse campus, to reduce bird building collisions, and helped create an iNaturalist SUNY ESF Community Bird Collision Project to track collisions. In 2021 at Yale Divinity School, I led a successful campaign to convince our seminary leadership to join National Audubon Society's Lights Out program, to support migrating birds.

I hold an MDiv in ethics and ecology from Yale Divinity School and an M.A. in history from the University of Chicago.