About

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma - a good place to be from, even if playing first base for the Lanier Oilers, with a low batting average but high get-on-base average, was tremendous fun, as was Boy Scouts - I moved with my parents first to Houston then to Fairfield County, Connecticut. After 2 years at Oberlin College and a year at Osmania University in Hyderabad, India, I got my B.A. in philosophy from Connecticut Wesleyan in 1968 just as all hell broke loose. I was a dropout, from 1973 on in Zürich doing self-employed cabinetmaking. In 2005-06 I spent a year in the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge (an overrated institution) getting an MPhil in environmental policy. In 2013 came a PhD from the Universtiy of East Anglia on the topic of sustainability strategies. I'm still working on the history of production functions in classical economics, the environmental relevance of human population size, and indigenous rights.

In 2014 my wife got her PhD from Edinburgh University, in Education, and after 6 years in Scotland and England in summer 2015 we moved to Istanbul - to the Rasimpasa/Kadiköy neighbourhood which we love. It's lively, on the poor side, has everything, is near the ferries, Haydarpasa train station and Moda, where there are 2 free tennis courts, but is being gentrified by the likes of us and a lot of artists and artisans and, I suppose, intellectuals. Oh, well. We're within walking distance of her job, with a Turkish NGO working mainly with Syrian refugees, of which there are well over 2 million in Turkey (3% of the population, and more in Istanbul [pop. 16 million] than in all of the EU). The Turks are being very generous, which is not to say things couldn't be better, e.g. they need the right to work, but without economically hurting the indigenous low-wage workers (liberal people: don't ignore this problem!). There is a danger that Sultan Erdogan will reduce democracy and freedom of expression even further now that his party again has an absolute parliamentary majority. Tough times.

I now work almost full-time for Palestine. That is, for One Democratic State in Palestine. I read and write about it, visied Palestine and Israel twice for altogether 7 weeks in November 2013 and November 2015, and am Director of the small NGO ODS in Palestine (England) Ltd, a Company Limited by Guarantee in England with about 2 dozen members. This seems the only solution for all of historic, un-partitioned Palestine that is consistent with ALL the rights of ALL Palestinians. They are divided into those in Israel with third-class Israeli citizenship, those in the West Bank and Gaza, and those - a bit over half the total of 12 million + living in exile, in the shatat, i.e. outside of Palestine. For each group it is different rights that are systematically violated, and each group has different priorities and urgencies. But ODS provides a unifying vision, rather than a piecemeal defence of rights. It can inspire the way 'One Man, One Vote' inspired for South Africans and universal suffrage for women. As an idea it has a 100-year history: It was what the Palestinians always argued for under the British Mandate, and what they argued for until the idea's betrayal by the PLO in the mid-1970s. Our NGO seeks to support in any way possible those Palestinians and Jewish Israelis - i.e. the citizens of the future state - who support this vision. Part of the work is to describe and argue for the idea in the West.