My Story
(Left) Donna and I with our granddaughter’s penpal in Townsville, QLD, Australia. (Upper Right) Maun, Botswana. (Lower Right) Sydney tourists.
Thanks to dedicated public school teachers and professors, I found my home in the life of the mind. From Jonathan Maynard Elementary to the University of Wisconsin, a progression of sterling mentors made this happen: Ms. Cook, for example, who taught me to read; Ms. Ducas, my high school English teacher who encouraged me to write; and Drs. Perry and Macewicz, the geographers in college who set me on a career path of discovery that continues to this day. These and many others tweaked a tiny inkling at first and then a relentless desire to dedicate myself, as they had, to teach and to encourage timorous learners like me.
In Madison, I became enthralled with Africa and especially with the rapid transformations of the sixties and seventies: political independence, the spread of formal education, the imposition of western-style economic development, rapid population growth, the devastation of forests and savannas. I took classes in soil science, botany and plant geography, geomorphology, and wildlife ecology and began to come to grips with the terrifying role humans were playing in changing the face of the earth. Working on a PhD, I landed on the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya trying to discern how such changes were impacting indigenous agriculture, diets, childhood nutrition, and people’s lifeways. A book followed: East of Mount Kenya: Meru Agricultural in Transition.
After Wisconsin, Ohio University offered me the grandest of opportunities to chase that dream of teaching and learning with undergraduates and grad students in a storied public institution that had been on the ground since 1804. I never looked back. Athens became my home base, the quintessential college town where two sons grew to be fine young men and I coached little leaguers in baseball and peewees in hockey and ran hundreds of miles across the ridges and into the valleys of Appalachian Ohio.
Ohio University encouraged and sustained my research in eastern and southern Africa. My writing, published mainly in academic journals, continued to focus on village-level adaptations to change. During a three-year stint at a research station at the edge of the Okavango Delta in Botswana, I worked with Motswana colleagues trying to understand the impact of international tourism on the environment and the well-being of local communities. We aimed to design ways indigenous people could benefit from the flow of tourists and the revenues they generate—still a lodestar in that globally renown wetland.
Back home, I helped lead a long-term project on community-based conservation in North America. Among the communities we studied, two were Native American. They opened my eyes to profoundly enduring indigenous resource management systems that survive today as microcosms of possibility. Two books came out of this project: The Ecology of Hope (co-authored with Jora Young) and Hope and Hard Times. Published by New Society Publishers in British Columbia, these books were named sustainability classics among their hundreds of titles.
As a retirement project, I decided to try my hand at fiction. At first, it felt like a wrong turn. The cutthroat world of fiction publishing was something less than pretty to behold. After many rejections, Petra Books in Ottawa restored my confidence. In 2018, they published Late-K Lunacy and followed with the sequel—a short story cycle (Beyond Late-K)–five years later. Sandwiched around the hours of writing about post-apocalyptic futures, my beloved partner, Donna Lofgren, and I have managed to tend our 80-acre farm in Athens County and to grow nowhere near enough vegetables for the survival of two older adults, even as my stories tell of a future when people had to do just that.
(Left) Baby prodigy, a grandniece, in Oakland, California. (Upper Right) Book signing with Emily Apgar, cover illustrator of Late-K Lunacy at Little Professor Books, Athens, Ohio. (Lower Right) With Jonathan and Ariana Bernard in Athens, Ohio.
Author Ted Bernard 