I have been lurking behind the scenes for a long while, recovering from Hurricane Katrina and building a new house. We were living in Waveland, MS where the eye of the hurricane crossed and a 32 foot wall of water took our 85 year-old cottage to sea.

I was born in Louisiana, lived in Colombia during La Violencia of the sixties, New Orleans French Quarter in the early 80’s, a thatched-roof hut outside of a Maya village in the southern Belize rainforest (BelizeHank.com) during the nineties, and Sumatra, Indonesia in the early 21st century.

For the past 13 years, Dr. Susan Mikota and I have worked throughout Asia and over the Internet to improve the healthcare of elephants through Elephant Care International, the non-profit organization we co-founded.

We now live on two hills in mid-Tennessee on our 16 acre homestead overlooking the Little Buffalo River in a cozy passive-solar, super-insulated house we built using many recycled materials. Aside from the elephant work, I enjoy creating art, our cider-apple orchard (26 varieties), harvesting other fruit (mulberries, blueberries, blackberries, pears, Asian pears, strawberries, raspberries, hardy kiwi, grapes, muscadines, figs) and establishing a small bamboo nursery (12 varieties).

I recently opened an Etsy shop for my jewelry.