In 1988, wearing a High School letterman jacket one size too large and braces minus the wire that I habitually removed, I entered Lewis and Clark College. Carl Sagan's Cosmos yet ruled the universe and Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth was the preferred stocking stuffer for many a Lewis and Clark freshman. Two of the...Read More

Crossing boundaries in their disparate forms is the single greatest purveyor of wisdom in travel abroad. With each boundary crossed comes a deeper awareness of place. And, sense of place is what separates the traveler from the tourist. In 2003 I led twelve U.C. Santa Barbara students on a six-week field course to Fiji. As a...Read More

My last border crossing into a communist country was ten years ago: a horseshoe up through Norway and down into the iron belly of the Russian rust belt. Entering Vietnam airspace, I felt the same angst/excitement that I knew on that midnight crossing into the Red World. Our approach mirrored the same flight path used by...Read More

I have never been the type of person to spend my free time at my place I work. This changed my first week at the Wellington Botanical Gardens. On my first full day in New Zealand, I decided to visit the gardens that I would be intern at for the next three months. I found myself...Read More

As Donald Trump prepares to defund climate research in America, now is the time to revisit the risks facing New Zealand and her people. Dr. James Renwick, a professor in the school of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Victoria University is a resident expert on the subject. He had some sobering advice when asked about...Read More