Confessions of a Time Traveler

This collection concentrates on essays and articles written for the North Forty News, Colorado Gardener magazine, and other Colorado regional publications over the last twenty years, but the reader will also discover excerpts from longer works—including a bit of science fiction. I often chuckled as I wrote these pieces and hope you do too. The book also contains over ninety illustrations, fifty-six in full color, created by the author. Enjoy the view from a mountaintop. Learn about the microbial conquest of Earth, and how flowering plants remade the world. Visit Pleistocene ghosts at large in the modern world and discover how to make postmodern decisions with prehistoric brains. Upon completing the book, the reader will be prepared to tell their child why plants are green and how to find Great Blue Dinosaurs along the meandering shorelines of majestic desert canyons. And I hope you’ll enjoy my closing letter to our successors (of whatever species) 50,000 years hence.

I confess: I plan to enter your mind and twiddle a few neurons with words and images in a blatant attempt to allow you to see the intricate edifice of life on planet Earth through my eyes. If that seems scary, it is. But it’s what human beings—the master storytellers of planet Earth—do best. They read and rewire minds. Sometimes their fictions even morph into new realities.

“Overall, the well-rounded collection testifies to the riches gained by sustained dedication to scientific inquiry, an enterprise that involves patience, persistence, and original thinking. Though the pieces differ in style and intent, the general outlook is broadly humanist, emphasizing the importance of scientific experimentation as a fundamental component of our collective self-understanding as a species. And yet this enthusiasm is tempered by humility about our place in an incomprehensibly large cosmos.”
Excerpt from Kirkus Review, May 2015.