[1] Susan Schrepfer was born in San Francisco in 1941, and grew up in Gilroy, California.
After graduating from high school in Gilroy, she worked as a farm labourer before studying history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, receiving her AB in 1963.
[1] As a researcher at the Forest History Society, Schrepfer combined archival research and oral history to reconstruct the differing priorities of environmentalists, scientists and timber industry executives in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.
She revised her PhD dissertation, publishing it as The Fight to Save the Redwoods (1983), winning the Forest History Society's Biennial Book Award.
[1] In 2005 she published Nature's Altars, praised by one reviewer as "the best monograph in US environmental history yet to appear to use gender as its central category of analysis”.