Nick Menzies was born in Uganda and brought up in Zambia until he was twelve, when his family moved from Africa to his mother’s home village in Switzerland. He has a degree in Chinese Studies from Cambridge University (UK), and completed his PhD in Wildland Resource Science at the University of California at Berkeley in 1988.

After leaving Berkeley, Nick worked on issues concerning communities and forest resources management with the Mountain Institute in what is now the Qomolangma (Mt. Everest) National Park in Tibet. He served from 1989 to 2001 as the Ford Foundation's Program Officer for Environment and Development, first in China and then in East Africa.

Nick moved back to California in January 2002 to take up a position as a Visiting Scholar at U.C. Berkeley carrying out research and writing on communities managing forest resources in Asia, Africa and Latin America. His book Our Forest, your ecosystem, their timber: communities and the state in community-based forest management, which includes case studies from Yunnan province in China and the Kangra Valley in Himachal Pradesh, India, is to be published in April 2007 by Columbia University Press.

Nick has published a number of papers on environmental history with a focus on communities, natural resources, and development. He is the author of the volume on Forestry in Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China (Vol. VI.pt 3. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 1996), and of Forest and Land Management in Late Imperial China (London, Macmillan Press. 1994)