The Rad Naturalist
Hello! If you’re a nature lover, but wonder (or even despair) sometimes about whether our approach to nature is adequate to these times of so much change, you’ve come to the right place. My creative non-fiction writing and my speaking engage this very question. I’ve been studying nature and been passionate about conservation since the age of seven, beginning with birdwatching, then learning plants, then insects, then mosses, through to a Master’s degree in pollination ecology. Yet I also came to realize that conservation is as much about people as biodiversity, so my writing and speaking as a professor over the past few decades have focused on social and philosophical paradoxes of how we conceptualize and connect to nature. I invite you to become a radnaturalist, too, in my upcoming book, The Naturalist’s Paradox: How Our Love for Nature May Harm It.
Extended Bio
I was raised in an agricultural landscape in Essex County, Ontario, where I began exploring nature at a young age with my father. Fortuitously, this is one of Canada’s biodiversity hotspots, with rare and endangered species being commonplace in nearby locations such as the Ojibway Prairie Provincial Nature Reserve and Point Pelee National Park. While learning local species, starting with birds and plants, I became concerned about nature’s decline in my early teens and devoted my life to understanding nature and helping to generate care and conservation action. I also realized that farm labour is really difficult; instead, I turned to biodiversity inventory for my next jobs, on Pelee Island, along the Niagara Escarpment, and to contribute to ecological planning across southern Ontario.
During an undergrad at the University of Guelph, I studied ecology and taxonomy, with a focus on insects and mosses. I became passionate about the relationship between organisms, so completed a Master’s degree on pollination ecology at the University of Toronto based on field work on the Tobermory Islands and in Muskoka. I then left academia to work as a consultant to write a book on the old-growth forests of southern Ontario that contributed to conservation of several of them. A subsequent half-year trip in India opened my eyes to how values and worldviews influence our relationship with nature. Thus, by the time I began my PhD at the University of California at Santa Barbara (drawn by the surfing and Mediterranean ecosystems), I was ready for something different, something that would get to the root of our relation to nature. I ultimately wrote an interdisciplinary dissertation on paradoxes in our language about nature – how words shape what we see – that became an award-winning book, Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability: Redefining Our Relationship with Nature.
I’ve spent most of my career as a Professor in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo. I teach a field-based natural history course, introductory ecology, and a course “At Home in the Universe” that surveys 13.8 billion years across worldviews and physical, biological, and human domains. During this period, I’ve continued to ask critical questions about our conventional understanding of nature and other species, and how we connect to them and conserve them. There are so many concurrent ecological, social, and technological changes that I’m unconvinced that our established ways are always appropriate. I’ve published widely on these questions and been invited around the world to participate in academic workshops and conferences, to deliver lectures, and as a visiting scholar (in Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and South Africa).
I’ve also devoted myself to leadership roles that contribute to direct outcomes, including numerous not-for-profit and editorial boards. As President of the board of Ontario Nature, Ontario’s largest organization of naturalists, I ensured our fiduciary responsibilities while also overseeing concrete outcomes in education, policy and land protection. As Associate Dean – Undergraduate Studies in Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment, I oversaw the programs of thousands of students and created a new university-wide Diploma in Sustainability.
I continue to study other organisms as a hobby; just among groups of organisms that start with ‘s,’ I’ve lived through passionate stages on sedges, syrphids, and sphagnum mosses. I’ve travelled widely to experience cool ecosystems and their beings. I also enjoy hiking and canoeing to explore nature with my family, being active (badminton, soccer, hockey, swimming, yoga), and reading (just about anything from poetry and the classics through pop non-fiction and socio-environmental theory).
My writing journey has evolved from the passive voice of scientific writing to creative non-fiction that provides a first-person perspective and delights in storytelling that weaves my adventures in the natural world with philosophical reflections. My upcoming book, The Naturalists’ Paradox: How Our Love for Nature May Harm It, collates decades of personal experience across the realms outlined above.