I study the culture and livelihoods of natural resource-dependent peoples, such as fishers and coastal resource users, with special interest in how cognition, culture and society influence the interaction between people and the non-human environment, as well as who bears the impacts and the responsibility for environmental problems. My research focuses largely on three tasks associated with developing and applying knowledge about culture, society and environment interactions in coasts: 1) describing and assessing coastal people’s knowledge about- and dependence on their local environments for their well-being with the applied goal of informing public policy decisions about the future of coastal area amidst social and ecological change, 2) developing ethnographically sound and widely applicable approaches to assess the well-being and social resilience of natural resource-dependent peoples, and 3) studying coastal peoples’ interactions with changes in visible species assemblages brought by processes such as species introductions, conservation and climate change.