About…
An ancient European beech (Fagus sylvatica) pollard at Epping Forest, Greater London, England. Working with ancient tree groups, historical ecologists, and walking the land in the UK has allowed me to adapt their deep understanding of landscape history and biocultural landscapes to the American landscape.
Discovery depends on the lens you carry with you. Ages ago, those lenses sought lost cities, unbound resources, and new routes to those places. Today, people look for beauty, for old growth, and for quiet spots in a bustling world. We look for places that tell the stories of our communities. I’m asked to find these things.
I grew up roaming the sandy oak-pine woodlands of Glacial Lake Albany (Saratoga County, NY). I earned a B.A. in Natural History from Prescott College (Arizona) and a M.S. in Conservation Biology from Antioch University (New Hampshire). Prescott College then offered higher ed.’s most impressive suite of environmental studies field courses. At Antioch I was mentored by Tom Wessels, author of the eco-classic Reading the Forested Landscape.
As a graduate student, I was hired by Dan Jones, founder and chairman of 21st Century Parks Inc., to explore 4,000 acres of Kentucky countryside as my own Louisiana Purchase. He commissioned me to find landscape patterns and special places so as to provide park planners, designers, and interpretive consultants a medium from which to carve. They sculpted The Parklands of Floyds Fork—the country’s most ambitious and successful city park project.
Today I consult—a somewhat heavy term for walking around beautiful places, shooting photos, and scribbling notes. I uncover the landscape’s hidden history and find the special places that showcase a site’s story. I work with organizations, landscape architects, and private landowners—anyone planning a piece of land, or who loves a piece of land and wants to know it with depth and breadth. I’ve surveyed weed-ridden successional woods on old shale mines in Chattanooga, to the floristically incredible limestone ravines of Southern Indiana, to bear-filled fens of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Every property has an ecological present; it is shaped by a unique geological, ecological and cultural past.
For nearly 20 years I’ve taught undergraduate and graduate classes. For six summers I taught Prescott College’s Summer Studies in Alaska field semester. I’ve also taught Alpine Ecology, Mountain Landscape Geography, and Explorations of Norway: Nature and Culture. I’ve taught field classes at Antioch University, the Community College of Vermont, Sterling College, and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Presently, I teach a course called Landscape Dynamics of the Saratoga Region at Skidmore College. I’ve lead hundreds of people on interpretive walks, talks and field workshops.
My landscape lens is shaped by over a thousand nights in the backcountry. As a wilderness traveler, I’ve journeyed long Arctic canoe trips with students to solo packrafting journeys across Patagonia. My family and I have done three 200-mile canoe trips. My landscape lens sees three interwoven landscape layers: the physical (geology, water, climate); the biological (plants, animals); and the cultural (the ways humans have shaped the former). These layers build a story of landscape evolution that is, on account of ecology and history, unique to every site.
My enthusiasms include paddling and trekking adventures with my family, photographing ancient trees, tinkering an old Land Rover, and unraveling landscapes.