This web site grows out of my interest in applying high technology to the caretaking of the natural environment in all its simplicity and beauty. I am interested in using high technology in wilderness areas (especially in this case, the Colorado Plateau in Northeastern Arizona) to form an unobtrusive lifestyle that respects the ecology and local culture.

My interest in this high tech/low tech approach began back in the late sixties while I was going to school at Ohio University in Athens Ohio. I loved the beautiful hillsides that I hiked through and traditional acoustic music. I also served one spring break in Jackson's Hollow working on the Appalachian Project. Later I was to serve in the Peace Corps in West Africa in a rural development project in Senegal. I also have lived in a log cabin in the Rocky Mountains and a simple beach house on the West Coast.

But I am not a neo-ludite. I have a credential in Communications Electronics from CIE, have studied Microcomputer Management at Cabrillo College in California, and have worked (remotely!)as Director of Technical Support for Surfnet Communications, a bleeding-edge California ISP, for 15 years. I have a tech class ham licence (KC6UPU), use VOIP and cable to work from at home, have a great stereo and love Indian classical music, and have built many computers and computer networks for my personal use and that of my clients. Currently Surfnet Communications runs high speed wireless 802.11 networks for deployment in remote areas above Santa Cruz and San Louis Obispo in California.

I have also been active in the horticulture industry for many years, working in desert reclamation in the Sahel region of West Africa, in the retail garden industry in Santa Cruz, California, in the wholesale industry delivering California native plants, and have done extensive tree planting. It may be that the plant process of photosynthesis is the the most efficient means of solar conversion around. I am enamored of the techniques of Masanobu Fukuoka as described in his book "The One-Straw Revolution..."

Parallel to this, I have taught yoga in Southern Ohio, Hollywood and San Francisco, have a credential in Clinical Hypnotherapy, and am a long time practitioner of meditation in the Zen, Vajrayana Buddhist, and Shambhala traditions as well as several Sufi lineages.

K.I.S.S.: "keep it simple, stupid" is a good principle in both technology and one's personal life. High tech without good psychology is poisonous. I am not interested in forming new hierarchies but rather in dissolving the old central control models of second wave industrial culture and replacing them with the decentralized models based on third wave information age culture... but the external revolution of the third wave information culture should be accompanied by the internal revolution based on meditation practice ... as we resurrect archaic, neo-paleolithic, post-historical civilization.

SOLARSTATION.US is a place for me to begin to bring together these ideas in an effort to develop a more sane lifestyle.