I am a writer, naturalist, and educator whose work has grown through more than fifty years of involvement with Alaska’s Wrangell Mountains. I serve as academic coordinator and an instructor with Wrangell Mountains Field Studies.

My connection with field education in the Wrangells began on staff with the environmental studies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I coordinated student research based in McCarthy in 1971 and 1972. In 1983, colleagues and I established the summer college program that became a cornerstone of the Wrangell Mountains Center and continues today.

My work in conservation and public policy has included wildlands and community advocacy and land-use planning in Alaska and Washington State, along with consulting internationally on issues of urban development and sprawl.

I have taught through programs at UC Santa Cruz, The Evergreen State College, and the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, and helped teach strategic advocacy seminars for law students at Vanderbilt.

My novel, Alaska Dragon, published by Fireweed Press, explores themes of contemplation and action in the context of the American wilderness.

Current work

I am developing writing and teaching materials on the natural history of the Wrangells, with particular attention to relationships among geological, ecological, and human processes. My questions concern change across scales of time and space, conditions that sustain relationships, and the emergence of new possibilities in complex systems.

I also explore how scientific study, literature, philosophy, and contemplative practice inform our attention to the world. Recently, collaboration with AI has become part of my inquiry into writing, learning, and conversation: what these constructed systems make possible, how they shape our thinking, and relationships between their interpretations and human experience.

This website offers entry points into those current inquiries, alongside my earlier work and publications.

See my biography and current projects.