I feel like I've been living two incompatible lives ever since I graduated from high school-- at once a nature-loving hippie farmer wannabe yet also a tunnel-visioned problem-solving scientist wannabe. Reading Thoreau's Walden in high school was my first glimpse of a life beyond the constant, latent, unsettling feeling I had while growing up in the suburban world. Despite this, I went to college and studied chemistry to gain the practical knowledge I needed for a career and live in the "real" world. I got bored very quickly with my environmental testing lab job after college, so in 2011 I went on a 1,400 mile bicycle tour from Oklahoma to Florida. Along the way I worked on a WWOOF goat farm in Missouri, which I eventually realized was the best part of the bike tour. My first attempt to reconcile the hippie and the scientist in me transpired when I went to graduate school in Colorado in 2012, doing organic chemistry research on dye-sensitized solar cells. The idea was that through this I would satisfy both my predilection for solving problems through developing creative solutions and my desire to help save the planet from the multifarious ills of petroleum-powered industrial civilization. But I soon realized the industrial machine would continue grinding away at the Earth regardless of it's energy source. Sometime during this realization I stumbled upon permaculture. After reading Hemenway's Gaia's Garden, I'm convinced that I've finally found a way to harmonize the hippie and the scientist--by creatively developing self-sustaining systems of life and culture that can effectively replace, rather than merely attempt to fix, the industrial machine of insanity.

Currently (summer 2015), I'm in Meeker, OK, helping my cousin with his organic veggie and chicken farm. I'm also in the process of planting my own polyculture veggie garden, experimenting with sheet-mulching, hugelkultur beds, the Three Sisters guild, lots of salad greens and insectary plants, etc. And I'm getting hands-on experience cleaning up a defunct peach tree/hackberry/black walnut grove and blackberry patch. I'm learning so much and working a ton, but loving every minute of it.