2008-04-09 18:37:05 - Earlier this week I officially announced my retirement from Cornell University after 28 years of teaching and research, to be effective November 1, 2008. On the home page of this site, I allude to this transition in 'What this portal is about?', so the careful reader will not be too surprised at this decision.

Without a doubt, I will miss my relationship with students more than any other aspect of my academic career. Many of those young people have become life-long friends, and now they are not so young themselves anymore. Because of the nature of the courses I taught, I got to know most of them pretty well, and at one time I

knew all of their names. There have even been a couple of marriages between students who met in my course. I actually thought the day might come when a child of one of my former students would appear at Cornell to take the same course their parent had taken from me, but this never happened.


So now what? For starters, my moonlighting job (this website) becomes my new day job. Hopefully, I will have more time to watch birds, look at ants under a scope, learn how to identify ferns, thin my woodlot, and plant new gardens. All of those activities, and many more, can provide material for this blog and for the forums here. My wife and I want to travel more. I want to be better about cleaning the house. I need to build a bunch of bookcases to house my library that is now in my university office, which I will soon lose. (At a university, space is more valuable than faculty). I intend to have more bonfires in my woodlot with the white pine I cut there as fuel, and to have friends over to enjoy that more often, to sip scotch, to smoke a cigar, to watch the flames ascend to the forest canopy in the dark.


But there is a great deal to do, and I want to be involved. These are exciting times. The world might be going to 'hell in a handbasket', but I intend to fight it every inch of the way. People generally seem to be getting the message that the collective environmental weight of 6.3 billion people is enormous, and they want to help plan a way out of this morass. There are new ways of living, new technologies that might help, new leadership of major developed countries, new ways of thinking by us all, and new attitudes by multi-national corporations. What is exciting about it all, is that none of it would occur unless individuals had spoken up, acted out, demanded healthier and safer products, and became more aware. It is my sincere belief that sites like this one can contribute to that awareness by mobilizing that small army of thoughtful environmentalists (many of whom are former students) to share their ideas, regardless of how 'experimental' they might be.