About me

Should I get the boring stuff (facts) out of the way first or dive into the fun stuff immediately?

Facts: I’m a “recovering” academic. Most of my life has been spent in academia as a student (BS Biology, with additional studies in geology/paleontology, MS Educational Psychology and Counseling, PhD Planning and Policy), and a lecturer and researcher (US, UK, Australia). A good part of my professional work has focused on sustainability and climate change adaptation and resilience. I’ve been working on these issues through building and empowering community and individual capacity so people can participate in society and polity more comfortably, easily, and meaningfully, as an academic and consultant. As part of that work, and as a natural systems thinker I’ve spent some time thinking about how those challenges are best understood from the perspective of interpenetrating complex adaptive systems, which has become a major focus of my curiosity.

The “recovering” is because I left academia after becoming disillusioned with the corporatization of universities. I’m old enough to remember when their mission was to provide a liberal arts-style education comprising the sciences, humanities, and their practical applications, such as urban planning. They were also dedicated to training new researchers and teachers. But especially for the past decade or two, there has been mission creep. IMO, universities are now so intertwined with major corporations (and their important and large donations to research), that they’re now focused on interrogating corporate needs and developing programs to train workers and design research to meet them. The liberal arts undergraduate breadth of exposure to knowledge is condensing into nothingness under the pressure of that and the need to master the ever-increasing body of discipline-specific knowledge. I think that does everyone a disservice. How can we navigate our current challenges if even fundamental learning is co-opted by the system for self-reinforcement?

During my research for Things I Wish I’d Said, I discovered I’m autistic as well as having CPTSD.

Fun: I like to travel, mostly because when I do, I learn, and that is my greatest passion. In addition to living overseas for nearly 9 years (Australia, UK), I’ve spent several months in Provence, Baja California, and British Columbia, and traveled for shorter periods of time to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Sweden, and Switzerland. Places I’d like to go: Costa Rica, Greece, Iceland, and New Zealand.

Music, dance, writing, walking in nature, cooking and baking (for fun as well as professionally), and other activities nurture me. I’ve been able to do many things from photography to drone flying to communing with redwoods to posing with a koala and feeding kangaroos to making four legged friends to punning unapologetically and beyond. And there’s still a lot to do.