I am a not-quite-retired professor who spent 34 years teaching natural history at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. My specialty is birds, but I made a career of taking students to wild and nearly wild places in the Pacific Northwest and many places in Mexico, Central and South America. I made these field trips academically rigorous by teaching and requiring students to maintain a field journal and species accounts for every field day. Typically we would spend an hour or more every evening transcribing and editing material in field notebooks into our formal journals, all with a technical pen.
I have been active in conservation most of my life. I was involved in the near-banning of DDT in the seventies, and studied Peregrine Falcons in conjuction with that. In the eighties I studied the northward shorebird migration on the Washington coast; the work my students and I did on that helped create the Grays Harbor National Wildlife Refuge.
One of my major conservation issues is Public Lands grazing, and the damage and inequities associated with this practice. I have been concerned with the destruction of the endangered landscape called "shrubsteppe" in particular, and the present photo-essay is one manifestation of that interest.
Steve Herman