Meredith Barges, MDiv, PhD (ABD)

I am a bird-friendly building policy researcher and advocate working at the intersection of sustainable planning and bird conservation. Every year in North America, over 1 billion birds die from building collisions, making it a leading cause of anthropogenic bird mortality. In my work, I help people to appreciate the complex lives of birds and how our decisions about building and planning can impact them and our connection with nature.

I served as the policy researcher for the award-winning Yale Bird-friendly Building Initiative, a collaborative project of Yale Law School and American Bird Conservancy. In that role, I co-authored Building Safer Cities for Birds: How Cities Are Leading the Way on Bird-Friendly Building Policy, the first comparative report analyzing bird-friendly building laws. Prior to that, I co-founded and co-chaired Lights Out Connecticut and helped lead a successful statewide campaign 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! From 2024-26, I chaired Lights Out Central New York, a nonprofit project of the Onondaga Audubon Society dedicated to making the night sky darker and safer for migrating birds.

My PhD project at the SUNY School of Environment examines the dynamics driving the adoption (and non-adoption) of municipal bird-friendly building policies in North America. I combine public policy analysis, environmental ethics, and urban political ecology to explain why some cities have mandatory bird-friendly building laws, while others don't. I have also developed a theoretical approach akin to the “Rights of Nature” that recognizes birds — and other more-than-human subjects — as vital political subjects and historical actants in the unfolding negotiation of human land use. My research asks, how do we legislate for the presence, survival, and thriving of wildlife in and around urbanized, human-developed areas as recognized political subjects?

Both Yale University and SUNY have recognized me for my advocacy with awards in sustainability and public service. Collaborating with SUNY ESF's Office of Sustainability, I helped to secure a mandatory bird-friendly building policy as part of our 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, I led a successful campaign to convince Yale Divinity School to join the National Audubon Society's Lights Out program for migrating birds.

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