Paul Star was born in England in 1950 and has lived in New Zealand since 1972. He holds a masters degree in European history and English literature from Cambridge University. He gained a further masters and a doctorate from the University of Otago, focusing on nineteenth-century New Zealand environmental history. As a postdoctoral fellow at Otago he contributed to the Marsden-funded Empires of Grass project, which studied the transition of much of New Zealand from native forest to exotic pasture. Paul has published 30 articles in New Zealand, Australian and British journals, and wrote the chapter on environmental history in the new Oxford History of New Zealand. He lives and gardens on the Otago Peninsula.