(Colour photo: GH in the Altay Mountains, Siberia, 1991. Recent photo by Elizabete Rancane, October 2010, Edinburgh)
I was born in 1944 on Bermuda, where my father worked as a meteorologist during the war. Then it was back to UK for the 1947 winter, followed by five years at the Met Observatory on a hill overlooking Lerwick in Shetland. 1953, back to England for the rest of my schooling and university. After several years in teaching, with a break to do an MSc at LSE, I worked on a couple of biology textbooks before completing a PhD (social history) and becoming an entomologist and evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University.
After completing that work, I studied for a languages degree at Heriot-Watt University and from 1992 to retirement worked as a free-lance translator. At this time Russian Nature Press was set up, and I am the translator and/or part-author of the four books on Russia.
From 2002 I have been a research associate at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, studying the reactions of plants to climate change.
So I am a generalist, with a background in biology, philosophy, history, languages, and one or two other interests. A generalist is needed to tackle the problems examined in 'Democracy or Survival', and I hope the book will stimulate debate on much needed changes to governance if we are to preserve civilization for future generations. Late in 2005 I casually remarked to a friend that democracy is incapable of solving the problem of global warming, and I still believe that. But there are non-authoritarian alternatives to democracy, and it is about time that we followed John Stuart Mill's suggestion for a better form of governance than modern liberal democracy can provide.
