I was born in Washington D.C. to a career U.S. foreign service family in 1955. Both my parents, Janet and Raymond were born in New York City. My mother's heritage is from Peru as well as Scottish-American. In later life she settled on the Cheasapeake near Annapolis, Maryland where she is buried. She grew up in and loved the poetry of Peru and Puerto Rico. My Peruvian family originated in the southern highlands. Arequipa is an old colonial city made of white pumice surrounded by three volcanoes, Misti, Chanchani, and Pichu Pichu. It is a beautiful city with cobalt blue skies and shining white stone buildings. .

My father was of Irish descent and raised in the Big Apple. He was educated as a lawyer at Fordham University but dedicated his professional life to U.S. law enforcement, intelligence, diplomacy as well as defense. He retired in Carlisle, Pennsylvania where he had been on the faculty of the U.S. Army War College. My older brothers, Gregory and John were born in Lima, Peru and Caracas, Venezuela. My older sister, Suzanne Marie, was born in Washington D.C. where I was also born in 1955. In 1956 we moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina where my youngest brother, Paul, was born. So we were already a very U.S.-Latin American family before we moved to Mexico D.F. in 1957. Mexico City was our family home for more than twenty years.

In 1961 my mother re-married and we gained a "new" five year old brother, Michael M. Scott. He is son of Winston M. Scott, an Alabama native and accomplished mathematician as well as a U.S. foreign service and intelligence officer, and Paula Maeve Scott, a native of Ireland. Michael and I are almost the same age. Our family life in Mexico was close to U.S.-Mexico relations and to the vibrant life of that great city. It is perhaps the place of my most formative years. Indeed I came to see things in ways contrary what might be expected in an expatriate family rooted in U.S. government service. One strong influence came from the liberation theology that was accepted in the Catholic Church at the time.

My educational experience began at a small British school in Mexico D.F. Known by its quaint name, Greengates School, the Alianza Anglo-Mexicana was located in a private house in a residential neighborhood for decades. It had green gates!. In the late 1960s, Greengates moved to a much more scholastic campus in the suburbs of the city. It remains one of the outstanding private schools in the city that serves a large expatriate community from throughout the British Commonwealth and U.S. as well as a largely Mexican student body. All my brothers went there. My grade school and upper school teachers did much to encourage independent thought. Some of our teachers at Greengates were also students at the U.N.A.M. and saw the violent repression of the student movement in 1968 first hand. So I was radicalized in 1968 by my Spanish teacher who had me read Gabriel García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude.

My sister was also radicalized by 1968. She attended the Liceo Franco-Mexicano or Lycée Français. Paris was crackling with ferment that same year. She moved to France to continue her studies and remains committed to social justice and progressive causes. In 1970 my brother Michael and I were sent to the Taft School, a preparatory boarding school in Watertown, Connecticut. It was the first time I had seen it snow! I would soon learn what it was to be a fish out of water during my three years there since most students thought I was foreign.

In 1971 my stepfather, Win Scott, died, and my mother moved the family to Rome, Italy. My youngest brother, Paul, attended St. George's School in Rome while Michael and I completed our years at Taft. My brother John was studying at Fairfield University in Connecticut and Gregory attended Schiller College in Paris. Suzanne Marie finished her schooling in Université de Tours in France, and continued in Paris at the Ecole Supérieure d'Interprètes et de Traducteurs. We loved our trips home to Rome and I developed a love for all things Italian, especially their attitude toward food. Michael and I were able to travel "home" on holidays to Italy. We both graduated together in 1973 and moved West to attend universities in California. Michael attended Occidental College in Los Angeles and I went to the University of California at Santa Barbara. The rest of my educational biography appears in my CV on this site.

Despite my family's extensive U.S. foreign service history, my own intellectual leanings and political views are markedly different. My 1968 radicalism matured but never waned. My interests moved from philosophy and politics to environmental problems and the food resources of the poor. Using various approaches commonly seen as political ecology, my studies have taken me from an interest in sustainable agriculture, and food security to broader environmental resource questions, including genetically modified crops, marine fisheries conservation and coastal zone development. I hope I will never lose my special bond with Mexico. This work has always been informed by a radical critique of corporate capitalism and technocratic management of economy and resources. I am particularly interested in interdisciplinary theories that straddle the divide between radical political ecology and social theory on one hand, and ecological science and resource studies on the other. Underlying this scholarly interest is a more personal commitment to work for a more Latin American view of things that is decidedly free of United States dominance, and determined by the needs and aspirations of the millions of people who live in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking continent and culturally diverse Caribbean region.

When I was at Berkeley a friend criticised my emphasis on political change as a way to improve the world. He protested that at least half the world's problems were a consequence of bad design. I rejected the idea as so much bourgeois obfuscation only to find decades later that he had a point. My renewed interest in the L.A. urban milieu and the environmental problems created and solved in urbanism demonstrated to me that political will is important but feeble in the absence of design. The urban project is plan and architect, city and space, people and land use. And so modernism, despite premature declarations about its death, remains the unfinished project of industrial and post industrial society. Indeed the hyperactive culture of simulacrum that we as urban peoples propose to use as a substitute for the modern city is neither sustainable or sane. It is no wonder that we attempt to recapture the optimism of the modern project in our search for the sustainable city. New urbanism is modernism revisited with green eyes. My interest today is in the greening of industry and a planned rejection of the fossil fuel economy.

My life in California since 1973 has been full of experiences that have deepened my love of Nature and pushed me to pursue freedom in thought and practice. While I have benefitted immensely from a rich educational life, I have also learned from an immersion into life's real teachers: love, struggle and exploration. My partner for the last twenty-two years, Scott Imler, has been the best person I could have ever found to make the journey worth every risk and every gain and loss. We were married by the Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, in his offices July 25, 2009. Our marriage remains legal although same sex couples were barred from exercising this right by a voter initiative that has been cynically upheld by the California Supreme Court. We are currently living in West Hollywood with our fabulous dog, Bella, our new dog, Kailani, and tiny cat, Marley. Scott's fight with cancer at the City of Hope Hospital, has restored my faith in a generous, loving and intimate Creator who is owned by no religion and prefers no person or nation or creed over another.