With my artist wife Penny Baugh, I live at Hidden Springs, our home in the mountains of Western North Carolina. We share our neighborhood with bear, bobcat, foxes and coyotes, and a number of species of fascinating bats, birds, and bugs and tolerant human neighbors.
At Hidden Springs we work with dedication to lessen our impact on Earth, each year reducing our draw on the grid and the water supply, replacing exotic plants with species native to our region, and converting vegetable 'waste' into compost and mulch.
I am an Ecologist with 40-plus years experience in various aspects of conservation biology. My professional work is built on a fascination with life on Earth, the places we find life, and our human interactions with other life. I have hovered above the oceanic abyss, explored flooded caves, wandered deep into interior and coastal wetlands, and climbed high along the ridges of the newest and oldest mountains in North America. My reports, papers, and lectures have taken me from class rooms to meeting rooms to lecture halls and, very often find their way into magazines and journals.
My work has not been limited to the physical world but has also delved deeply into aspects of the social sciences and the humanities. Over the years I have moved away from strict adherence to the 'ologies,' choosing instead to explore interdisciplinary possibilities such as conservation biology, and always moving toward a transdisciplinary perspective. TIME TRAVEL
I have read that travel into the future is impossible,
but I know that this must be wrong,
for each day, I visit a dozen possible futures.
I taste each one of them as if they were the real stuff of now,
they are the real stuff of now that may happen tomorrow,
I live fully today in anxious and eager anticipation of those possible tomorrows.
