Who I am:

I'm a geographer.

Sometimes I tell people I'm a botanist, or ecologist, or just a field scientist. Sometimes I tell people I'm a Sovietologist. Often they have their own ideas.

I'm interested in landscape ecology, plant geography, and the nature of northern areas. That's when I'm attempting to explain my interests in the study of plants and what explains their distribution throughout northern lands, especially rare or disjunct ones [*victim goes for another drink*].

Also anything and everything about the USSR. I'm a specialist in the culture; geography; and nature of the former USSR. That type of person used to be called a "Sovietologist", or a "Soviet geographer", back when there was a USSR, but now it's really difficult to tell people that... "Yeah, I'm a geographer of the former USSR, mostly Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, but the rest of the place too, and a little of the former Warsaw Pact countries and...", but by the time I get that far most people have already disappeared under the excuse of needing another drink.

Besides that, I'm also interested in protected areas (why, how, and where to make them), geography of mountains, island biogeography, and the general geographical makeup of all northern lands (Canada, Scandinavia, Alaska, etc.) [*drink*]

I am, furthermore, obsessed with large lakes and their influence on their surroundings (including me). This is actually, I think, the strongest force on me (Lake Superior), like a huge unseen star that nobody can see (at least in alaska) making a planet move erratically.

There's a small list of "additional interests" on the CV, to which I again refer you.   There are other things, too, but by now you may be too drunk.

What I do:

See current CV here.

I'm a geographer... and I work as a vegetation ecologist for the US Department of Agriculture, in an agency called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in Fairbanks Alaska. The NRCS was called the Soil Conservation Service until the early '90s. NRCS is most famous for the soil surveys made for most counties in the lower 48 states, and that's what I'm working in here, Alaska style. I am the lead vegetation ecologist for the Alaska NRCS's cooperative project wit the US National Park Service to complete intensive soil and vegetation surveys for Alaska NPS lands (and there are a lot of NPS lands in AK). I joined NRCS in 2008 as we were starting up the current project in Yukon-Charley National Preserve, in interior Alaska on the border of and the Yukon. It's pretty remote! In the meantime before I can get a little bit more on that on my own website, here's a link to a very general overview of the Yukon-Charley project.

Previously I have worked for the World Wildlife Fund's Bering Sea-Kamchatka program in Anchorage, digging up Bering Sea regional conservation and geographical data for WWF - my job title was 'program officer', but that doesn't make much sense, so feel free to say I was a 'conservation geographer'. I was an ecologist for the US National Park Service at Denali National Park and before that at Glacier Bay National Park for a couple years, minus some travels and a little time in Athens, GA.

I'm also a long lost graduate student of Geography, University of Georgia, USA. My doctoral work was on the landscape conservation and natural areas connectivity in the Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine (Central Europe); read about that here. I admit, that I did all the fun part of that project but didn't finish the dissertation...

My graduate and later undergraduate research was in phytogeography (the distribution of plants and the history and ecology behind it) and the geography and conservation of northern lands.

Why I do it:

Because it takes me to interesting lands, in beautiful surroundings, where I frequently - but not always - enjoy pleasant weather, good food, interesting people, and strange experiences. 

Where I am from, how I got here, and where I am going:

I am from Michigan! I am proud to say I lived my first years in Lake County, which was in the 1970s (maybe now too) the poorest county in Lower Michigan (Keewenaw, in the UP was poorer). So the first part of my life I spent wandering the woods, collecting mushrooms and berries, trying to catch salamanders and frogs, getting pinched by ants and fearing blue racers, and looking at flowers and trees. Later I lived in Ludington, where I got into bicycles, rockets, cameras, and some other stuff. Still later, in my 'juvinile deliquent years' (most of the 1980s), I lived the much less understandable Grand Rapids.

I spent a few summers in Vandalia, Missouri in the late 1970s.

I went to college first in Grand Rapids (ITT Technical Institute, which was actually a fairly decent technical education in industrial controls and so forth despite their rather for-profit predatory advertising) and nearby Allendale (Grand Valley State) before transfering to Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant. Then I went to Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo for a master's degree and University of Georgia for doctoral study (which I got as far as candicay for, but fled the politics, poverty, heat, and other bullshit of to go to Alaska to get a real job).

During the CMU, WMU, and UGA years I started spending a lot of time in the USSR and 'former USSR' (which I refer to as the USSR). I went first during spring break 1991... to my mind at least, vastly more profound, exciting, fun, and carefree than any lame trip to some student vacation slum of Florida or Mexico. Over the years I spent most of my time in Minsk (Belarus), the Lake Baikal area and Orel (Russia), northwest Russia, and the Crimea and Lviv (Ukraine), with less time in the Baltics (especially Kaunas (lithuania), Voronezh and Moscow (Russia), and the republic of Georgia.

Back to Athens, Georgia and then away from Athens - to Alaska. I had the chance to work seasonally for the Park Service in Alaska in 2002. I guess I make that sound like they contacted me and asked - they didn't, at least not until I contacted them and applied for a job first. After so many years of college and graduate school I started to wonder if I was going to be employable... this feeling was enhanced as I began to notice around me the increasinly unrealistic ideas and expectations expressed by fellow graduate students (and faculty) regarding conservation, etc. as I had experienced it in my time in the USSR where I had extensive contact with actual botanists, conservationists, ecologists, geographers, and other doing the work I wanted also to do, as well as the decreasing amount of actual experience new faculty had in the fields they professed to professor. It seemed that grant record and general ass-kissing as graduate students was what counted, not actual experience solving problems and creating knowledge within the real-world constraints that future scientists would likely experience. In short, i didn't think they had enough grounding in reality. I began to wonder if I would also appear to know little of the actual field i claimed to be an expert in when it came time to try and do so. So to see. I applied for the seasonal biotech job at Glacier Bay and haven't looked back (much) since.

Values:

Original thought, autonomy, effort with purpose, civility, individuality (even eccentricity!), creativity, curiosity (maybe not a value - not sure). Also good bargains.   Levity, irreverence, iconoclasm - also good. But see disclaimer by Ovid, below.

One interest:

Photographia - see pictures here.

Other interests:

Bicycle tours, books, philosophy....

Further interests can be discerned from the CV, the research, the links, etc. There's also the idea of actually talking to the person.