The longer well-traveled version
Traveling in the hostile desert lands of Ladakh was a transformative experience, for there, in the shadows of the Himalayan mountains, exists a people who live as sustainably and happily by farming as any hunter-gatherers of antiquity. Even more than just sustainably, for, in this world of harsh winters and piercing summer sun, more trees grace the valleys now than when these people arrived one thousand years ago. In contrast, any direction will take you to the rest of the civilization project, where the results of agriculture and industrialization have wrought such devastation that billions of humans—a truly unfathomably number—will soon suffer in mass famine.
In 1994, I completed my yearlong travels through the human multitudes in India, Nepal and Southeast Asia, and have witnessed a similar human ubiquity in Europe, and then again felt viscerally the very thickness of it in my adopted city of twenty-two years, New York City. There, I taught the Earth Sciences and Environmental Studies to high school students for many of those years.
I began giving talks on the subjects of Sustainability, Dieback and Spirituality in 2001, first at Manhattan’s salon, Poetry Science Talks, then broadening my audience to include high schools and the Old Stone House in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, I have given readings of my fiction at the Dance Studio and the Old Stone House. The novel that I was working on—and look forward to one day finishing—is an allegory in which prison represents culture, a theme that is central to Dieback: The Science and Soul of the Coming Collapse. That is, in exchange for its advantages culture sets severe restrictions on what we can know and believe, thereby preventing its members from experiencing the full spectrum of consciousness.
In 1985, I received a Masters Degree in Geology at Florida State University and published several papers from my thesis in scientific journals, such as the Geological Society of America. I returned to the academic world in 1992 as a PhD candidate in New York University’s Applied Science Department, studying the causes of mass extinctions under Michael Rampino and energy systems with Gabriel Miller, using many of the ideas of Marty Hoffert, a respected guru on the topic of energy. My interests, although always eclectic, seemed focused around the big human story—philosophically, anthropologically, environmentally, biologically, historically, spiritually. However, writing as an art form and as a method of communication seized me, and after two years among the library stacks I left the cloistered world of academics to pursue the wide-open world or writing.
My private life has been devoted principally to living the civic life of a householder, as a devoted husband, the fortunate father of a daughter, and a Vipassana meditator. For years we lived in what is one of this nation’s few true communities—Park Slope in Brooklyn. Recently, we’ve moved to a beautiful spot near Sag Harbor, New York. Trees rustle outside, and yet the bustle of the city is but two hours away.