I lived in Zürich, Switzerland, from August 1973 till August 2009, but I was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA. After moves to Houston, Texas and Darien, Connecticut, I spent two undergraduate years at Oberlin College in Ohio, one year at Osmania University, Hyderabad, India, then in 1968 received my B.A. in philosophy from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.
I dropped out of philosophy graduate work at Columbia University after a record three hours; it was, after all, 1968. After jobbing in New York City and Sydney, Australia, I became a cabinetmaker in Los Angeles, and had my own workshop in Zürich from 1974 till 2001, when I decided to educate myself full-time in my hobby, ecological economics. The work of Kenneth Boulding, Herman Daly, and Joan Martinez-Alier made, and still makes, a great and good impression on me.
I was active in local green politics from about 1985 on, fighting against traffic, garbage, and the demolition of old historical houses and gardens. From 1998 on I took part as a volunteer in perhaps 20 actions for Greenpeace. My reading took me not only further into ecological economics but also into Darwinism, evolutionary psychology and environmental economics. To bring the autodidactic period to an end, I spent the academic year 2005-2006 at Cambridge University, England, earning a Masters (in Cambridge quaintly called an MPhil) in the Department of Land Economy’s ’Option A’, after spending the first term in the closely related Environmental Policy program. I'm now (2010-2013) a PhD candidate at the Sustainability Research Institute, U. of Leeds, working on the two-factor production function found in classical economics, where product is a function of labor and land only, capital being a subset of product.
I keep postponing work on the delicious subjects of epistemology, ontology, evolutionary psychology and the one-state solution in Israel/Palestine, apparently preferring to work on solutions to sustainability problems. Not even time for a capella singing at the moment...