I was born and raised on a family farm in Prairie Ronde Township, southwestern Michigan.  The farm remains in family ownership.   

As a kid, it was a free-roaming life of walking across the farmland to visit friends, playing in the barns and woods, going to a one-room country school for two years, and graduating from high school in a class of twenty-one students.  Each summer, my family would take camping trips - we could only afford to camp - around the USA.  We visited all the lower 48 states (when we crossed into the last state, Florida, we celebrated with a five cent Coca Cola).    

Around Christmas of my senior year, I realized that there was no grade 13, and that I had to make a choice - look for a job, go into the Army, or go to college.  I opted for college, even though I had been an indifferent student.  Expressing some anxiety about it all, the taciturn high school principal said to me, "You'll do fine."  It was about the only exchange I had with him (another time we talked was when he told me I was not eligible to run for student council president because of poor grades).

I went to Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo in 1963.  On the first day of my first college class, the professor lectured on how glaciers shaped the physical landscape.  I was blown away.  I got serious about "education" and never looked back.  

During the summer of 1965, I went to Yugoslavia as Kalamazoo's Community Ambassador.  This was my first trip abroad and it, a summer in Tito's communist Yugoslavia, was an eye-opener.  Not able to resist waiting to graduate from college before another adventure, I joined the Peace Corps after my junior year and spent two years in Nepal's Tarai region (the flat Gangetic Plain that abuts Nepal's foothills and Himalayas).  I was an agricultural extension agent, working as an intermediary between government research farms and farmers, on the ground end of the Green Revolution.  The exposure to a totally new culture(s) on the other side of the globe was powerful, but a side benefit was being around other Peace Corps Volunteers.  It was the vigorous discussions with them - young men feeling their oats, so to say - that prompted my interest in philosophy.

After completing my senior year at Western, and with the approval of my draft board, I returned to Nepal to work again in agriculture extension, but this time in the foothills of the Himalayas.  My small village, largely populated by Tibetans, was on a 6,500' ridge in eastern Nepal, in the shadow of Makalu, the world's fifth highest mountain, and with the near daily views of the plume coming off Mt. Everest to the north.  When I landed in Kathmandu in 2019, after having been gone since 1971, I took in the scene and thought that I had, in a way, returned to the mothership.  

After Nepal, I attended graduate school at the University of Maryland, College Park, in part because it was close to the national political scene.  At Maryland, I gravitated toward my philosophical interests and ended up specializing in political theory.  I had found myself drawn to our biological lineage and was increasingly skeptical of the argument that humans had emancipated themselves from their biological past.  I was able to pursue this line of thought in my PhD dissertation on the political implications of Jean Piaget's psychological work since he was focused on the cognitive and affective bridges between humans and the rest of life.  When my mother listened to my long explanation of my dissertation, she finally said, "It's on the Golden Rule."  Four years of thinking and writing and she summed it up in a nutshell.

Prompted by my wife-to-be who was well-schooled in such things, I came to appreciate the role of the viscerally powerful but unseen drivers in one's life.  In time, this led me to incorporate the role of the unconscious - I'd say our animal brain - in my thinking about philosophy.

While in graduate school, I was on the staff of Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson for nearly seven years.  It was a great experience seeing national government and politics close up like that, but I also wanted the wide-open vistas of the western United States after visiting my parents who spent their retirement years traveling there.  On my first visit with them, I remember falling in love with a large rock formation behind their campsite. It might be fair to say that I was never the same again.

My dilemma was to stay in DC and work in government and politics, or to move to the western U.S. and enjoy a closer life with the environment.  The way I resolved that problem was to move to the state of Washington where I spent the rest of my career working for four governors as an environmental and natural resource policy advisor.  It was a perfect job - working on issues I cared about in a government-political (legislative) setting.  I was educated as an academic, and certainly had that bent, but 25 years in the middle of practical governance issues certainly took the "idle" off my academic handle.  Getting out into the landscapes that I loved was as they say a re-creation, and I was able to offset the tensions of the job with freedom and nature.  For me, that meant mostly the lands east of the Cascades in Washington, Oregon, and northern Nevada.  But it also meant a good part of the interior western U.S.   

Reflecting some, everything turned out the way the way it was meant to be.  It's almost like I had this inner gyroscope that kept me on track despite my propensity to veer.

A brief autobiography in photos follows below.