Born in Minnesota, I grew up in Missouri, then at eighteen realized my California dream with undergraduate years at Stanford, including two years on the tennis team. After med school back in my home state, I completed a residency at UC San Francisco, during which I gave my first public lecture, a talk on nuclear power. Two weeks later I started teaching full time in a UC Davis-affiliated family medicine residency, with much of my practice focused on obstetrics but also HIV care starting in early 1983. I taught full time for sixteen years, with my main academic appointment at the public university, but coming full circle, a community faculty appointment at Stanford Med Center as well, since I taught a number of their PA students.

I lost my heart in San Francisco, and my wife became a certified nurse-midwife, and between the two of us, we delivered thousands of babies and had three of our own, all graduated, married, and two of them with a couple of sons apiece. We moved up to Bellingham almost thirty years ago, and are now both retired. Over the last dozen years, I have continued to lecture widely, including several seminar series at Western Washington University, plus many other venues, including a couple of out-of-state conferences. But I no longer teach medicine, rather about the climate system, energy systems, epidemiology, and the electric grid, and this set of fourteen or so lectures form the basis for many of the chapters in all three books.

Our biggest climate-related trip was in Europe in 2015, which included biking in Berlin, Copenhagen, and Oslo, then a two-week cruise from Svalbard to Greenland and Iceland. We accomplished hiking, kayaking, and a true polar plunge well north of the Arctic Circle while in Greenland. Additionally, we explored some of the eastern Canadian maritime islands in 2023. We attended a geothermal conference in El Salvador on our calendar in the last month of 2024. Puerto Rico, after a Covid delay, will be a destination in 2025.