At the age of 12, I climbed a 12,000-foot high peak at the Philmont Scout Ranch in northern New Mexico. A year later, I spent the first of what would be many weeks canoeing through a virtually road-less Ontario provincial park populated by loons, moose, beaver and wolves. I have been intrigued, ever since, by the complex interplay between flora and fauna and by man’s impact—both good and bad—on our environment.

My environmental writing and editing includes:

Magazines and newspapers: I have written about creatures ranging in size from Allegheny wood rats (Audubon magazine) to black bears (Philadelphia magazine). For a Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine cover story on the still controversial proposal to drill for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I stayed in two native villages; explored the Prudhoe Bay oil fields; and backpacked nearly 50 miles out of the Brooks Range past grizzly bears onto the refuge’s coastal plain at the height of the annual caribou migration.

Another Inquirer Magazine cover story on the efforts of New Jersey biologists to restore that state’s endangered bald eagle population led to a New York Times op-ed essay and a Washington Post Magazine article.

Books: This interest in eagles ultimately resulted in my well-reviewed book, Eagle’s Plume: The Struggle to Preserve the Life and Haunts of America’s Bald Eagle (Scribner, 1996; University of Nebraska Press, 1997). “Beans here spins a captivating story of the eagle’s significance in American culture and its current status in the American wilderness … An inspiring volume for the environmental bookshelf.”—Publisher’s Weekly.

I also co-edited, with Larry Niles, Endangered and Threatened Wildlife of New Jersey (Rutgers University Press, 2003), a book for which I also wrote detailed accounts of the American burying beetle, the Indiana bat, six species of whales and five species of marine turtles.

Other Environmental Work: For a decade I was also the editor and writer for a newsletter and other publications of the New Jersey Endangered and Nongame Species Program and the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of NJ (CWF). That work also involved writing all the copy for a multi-media, museum-like presentation still on display that celebrated the program’s 30th anniversary.

Most recently I copy-edited Life Along the Delaware Bay: Cape May Gateway to a Million Shorebirds by Larry Niles, Joanna Burger and Amanda Dey. Rivergate Books, an imprint of Rutgers University Press, published the book in June 2012.