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I grew up working around agriculture in Oregon's fertile Willamette Valley, and was close enough to those who made their living from farming to know better than to go into it myself--or so I thought anyway. Farming is a lot of things, and worth it most of all, but it can be quite unromantic and unforgiving when it becomes more than a hobby.
So I studied my way out, focusing on math and science in high school, then biology and philosophy at Stanford and ecology and evolutionary biology in Hawaii. |
My greengrocer father in front of his produce market in 1983.
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And I worked my way out, trying my hand at commercial fishing in Southeast Alaska, wildland firefighting in Montana, journeyman carpentry in Hawaii, and whatever else I could talk my way into, including pouring concrete as a military contractor on an air force base in interior Alaska and swabbing the decks of a meat industry tycoon's luxury motoryacht on the way to Tahiti.
But that same trip to the South Pacific landed me at UC Berkeley's Gump Research Station in Moorea, where I spent the summer working with an ethnobotanist, Dr. Orlo Steele, whose tales of the Pacific helped me to see the beautiful complexity of traditional farming systems. This interest led me into agroforestry and landscape management, and from there into soil science, agroecology, agronomy, and whatever else seems relevant. |
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My work has since taken me to the remote islands of the South Pacific, to the diverse intensive systems (organic and otherwise) of the Western US, and more recently to the hot, sandy, and semi-arid plains of West Africa.
I recently completed my dissertation at UC Santa Cruz while working in Senegal and The Gambia as a project manager for an international non-government organization. This position required that I balance theory with practice and engage with political, social, and economic issues that lie far outside of conventional agronomic and ecological research. |
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More information about my work in the Pacific can be found on the website of the Bushmen Farming Network, a partner organization in the Solomon Islands. More information about my work in West Africa will be out soon in the form of a dissertation and associated peer-reviewed publications.