About Me

I’d like to take the opportunity here to give you something of my background. Those interested only in my work should go straight to the "Posts," "Books," and "Papers" pages. Those are the reasons for the site, after all. This page is for those who may be curious as to what kind of curious person produced all this work.

Born on 31st August, I was always the youngest in the school year, a problem of chronology that was exacerbated by the fact that I was a slow developer. I didn't learn the same way as others and always seemed to be behind in class. I therefore learned - in time - to take things at my own pace, when organisations and their servants allowed (rarely). Unfortunately, the school timetable paid no attention to my own sense of timing. The experience left me sceptical of, and even downright hostile towards, the formal education system. But I eventually learned how to pass exams and I became good at it. Too good, in fact. By the time I made it to Liverpool JMU, I was studying far too hard, and doing too little thinking (and even less living). I played safe. I had discovered that, if I worked hard, read the books, made the right notes, covered the ground, used my impressive memory, that I could hit marks of mid- to upper-sixties. Not brilliant, but very good. I therefore ground the same level of results out to the bitter end. It was my history tutor, Liverpool’s very own Ron Noon, who gave me the clue to real intellectual achievement and to my future development. Giving me yet another high mark for my final history paper, he commented that there is more to learning than good grades and passing exams. My approach had 'worked,' he conceded, but made it clear that I had much more than 'results' to offer. The implication was that there has to be a meaning, a purpose, and a driving passion to learning, otherwise educational achievement is empty, pointless, and fruitless. He was right. He was reminding me of something I once had but had lost with an obsession with results.

That was 1988. I graduated with a degree in Social Studies, majoring in history but with economics, sociology and politics in the mix too. I was feeling quite proud of myself, with a range of marks in the high sixties and seventies, but that advice that there was more to learning and education than grades stayed with me (I still have that paper with the comments on it). Within the year, I attended the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough, Sheffield, April 15th 1989. I was on the Leppings Lane terrace, in the side pen, and watched a tragedy unfold, as Liverpool football supporters had the life crushed out of them. I was among those who initiated the recovery as the police stood inert. Liverpool fans were both victims and heroes on that day, but were made the villains by the authorities and their servants in the press. 96 Liverpool fans lost their lives as a result of the crush that day, and I started to think deeply on life and the lies and injustices of the existing order. I had myself entered that tunnel of death that afternoon, but had just enough time to find another way into Leppings Lane. Another few minutes and I would have been in the middle of the crush that killed so many that day. My personal account of and reflection upon the events of that day and its aftermath, entitled Hillsborough 25 Years On: A Personal Reflection, is available on the Academia website. I also make some pointed observations on the Hillsborough disaster here Memories of Hillsborough: Thirty Years On and here Truth, Justice, and Love

And so it was that, within a year of graduating, all the qualifications, grades, and results I had gained no longer seemed all that important. I searched for answers and realised that my paper proof of knowledge and reason was wholly inadequate. Feelings of inadequacy from years of being behind at school had led me to overcompensate, to work hard in order to get results, whilst failing to nurture the passion, the concern, and the understanding that made the world live. I had done nothing with the top-quality degree career-wise. I was back to working with my dad in the building business. But I had, at least, acquired skills and tools for learning, and a capacity to search, find, access, evaluate and assimilate knowledge. And now, having stared the Gorgon in the face that afternoon at Hillsborough, I had a voracious appetite for studying life in the depths. I wanted answers, and I went in search of them like an explorer, or Blake's lost traveller, in an unknown continent. I bought books by the rate of a dozen a week from the bookshops around Liverpool, mainly Reid’s but also Atticus and Henry Bohn’s. And News from Nowhere, of course, one of the best independent bookshops you could find. I followed the latter two through their various moves across the city. And I continued to read and make notes. Books opened up worlds through words.

By chance, the first books I saw when I entered Reid of Liverpool were philosophy books. And I returned to that section over and again in the coming weeks. I understood little, but what little I understood promised so much more than I could ever have imagined. I read on. It was hard, tortuous, baffling, and exhausting. But I was indefatigable. And my choice of books depended on what I could find. There was no conscious process of selection involved on my part. I would call it a love of reading, except that I was driven by some force or purpose. I would turn up at Anfield to watch my beloved Liverpool football club armed with a bagful of books. And at home I read every page, underlining the bits I felt were relevant. I had a system, three lines in the margin for essential, two lines for important, and one line for worth another look. Entire books were covered with horizontal and vertical lines. I read a page a minute this way. I have the ability to speed read (and speed write). I was devouring these books, digesting them, taking them in. I was obviously searching for answers, even though I was barely conscious of the questions. Where would this process end? I felt like I had been given a new life (I'm thinking Dante's Vita Nuova here). The only problem was that this new life did not fit any of the old grooves. I was in uncharted territory. I knew that a ‘normal’ life was not for me, that it was akin to a living death. The people I worked with seemed like ghosts clothed in technology to me. I didn't like those jobs. I gained a certificate to teach English as a foreign language, but never used it. I obtained a passport, but never used it. It would be 2014 before I ever left the country (or had another holiday after the last family holiday in 1983). Whatever the answer was that I was searching for, it didn’t lie in a physical place. By 1992 I started to sketch out a plan for a study programme, which developed into a plan for a book, which in turn gave me the idea of submitting a research proposal. It took three years for any university to show interest, and another two years for my proposal to finally be accepted. I had failed to write the proposal properly, and so it was returned time and again. And I kept changing the title according to my new reading! I was no longer playing by the rules and respecting protocol in order to get results. But I was finally accepted, and I remain eternally grateful to my Director of Studies Jules Townshend for seeing the potential and in having the nerve to take the challenge on. I wrote endlessly, papers, progress and transfer reports, and finally I submitted my thesis and was awarded the degree of PhD.

Then what? The obvious next step was to become a lecturer. Unfortunately, I found that I could only study and teach and present subjects on topics and issues in which I had an interest. I no longer cared about results and rewards. Professionally, I had put myself in an impossible situation. It was the issues, principles, and ideas that I had a passion for that mattered most of all to me. I wasn't interested in what courses could do for me in terms of career development. The little I did inside a classroom told me that I really could not teach or tutor in areas I did not care for. I grew accustomed to people telling me that I would be foolish to stop trying to break into the academic world. All along, though, I knew my heart wasn’t in it and I never felt more liberated than on the day I decided to abandon my attempts to gain a position. I have always known that I needed to write, to give expression to all that I read and reflected upon over the years. I was now writing to some definite purpose. My decision to walk away from the academic world opened up a whole new world to me. In abandoning outside pressures and expectations with respect to a career in academia I took control of my own vision and made as much of my own writing available for free on the Academia site as I could. I found that people all over the world were reading my work and contacting me. I had struck a chord with many people. I found that my concern that 'morality matters,' my emphasis on institution building and constructive models, my view that all organisms, human beings included, are 'something essentially' and 'essentially something,' and most of all my concern to bring the natural and the social worlds into integral, harmonious relation made sense to many people. Knowledge, reason, truth, community, ethics, even law, order, authority, all amounted to something more than repressive fictions and abstractions. They could be. We employ critique to ensure they are not. Philosophy retains its critical and emancipatory function. And then we build anew.

This is me on the day the jury gave its verdicts concluding the inquest into the Hillsborough football disaster in which 96 Liverpool fans lost their lives. 27 years fighting to establish the truth and achieve justice in face of a massive establishment cover-up. I am proudly wearing the Liverpool scarf I wore on the terraces of Leppings Lane at the Hillsborough Disaster. We told the truth about that day all along and kept on telling the truth. We refused to lie down and go away; we never gave up hope and we never gave in. Because Truth and Justice matter. Without them, life is nothing, meaningless, void. I learned in this struggle that we live in pursuit of an ideal that transcends the institutions of time and place. The institutions failed us time and again. Yet we carried on. There is a greater love that carries us all.

I became an active member of the Academia site some time in 2011. It took a long time scanning material from hard copy and making it available on the site. But a constant stream of books and papers from me followed. And a new world and a new me emerged in the process. Finally, the view I had been searching for started to take some kind of integral shape. I started to realise this when I received communications from young scholars and PhD candidates. And it struck me that they seemed to understand my work more consciously than I did. They were seeing an overall standpoint whereas I, on the inside, could just feel the purpose pulsing through the whole. But whole it is, and this Being and Place website is my attempt to make its character and direction clear. Here, I attempt to make clear that all this hard study and reading and writing over the years does, indeed, have a point. I care for these ideas and principles, and that, in the end, is what matters on this site. This, in the end, is my being and my knowing, not the many certificates with which I could paper my walls. I build with ideas and values. Ideas and values matter. I am very much in agreement with John Maynard Keynes here, who wrote that 'the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas... soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.' (J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money).

I do hope to make a contribution to the gradual encroachment of ideas with respect to right living in an ecological context. And to be 'dangerous' for a good purpose. And I do believe in the good. And I believe that doing good involves something much more profound than tools and techniques. I agree with Gandhi, who spoke disparagingly of those who devised 'systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.' It's just that 'being good' and 'doing good' are much more difficult than assertions of 'oneness' would have us believe. But I do believe that we can indeed 'be as one' all the same. One planet, one world, one life. I think it is a matter of good habit and practice, right relationship, and the ordering of things to their true ends within a scale of values.

I have no idea where this project will go, other than growing in the right direction, as something which unfolds according to its own potentials. And I see myself as unfolding with it. As Oliver Wendell Holmes writes: ‘All life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation on some prophecy based on imperfect knowledge.’ ‘One planet, one experiment’, says Edward O. Wilson. To a large extent, much of what we do is based on faith. I also argue for living and learning in society as an ‘experiment’. But it is an experiment which has the character of exploration on our part as creative, reflexive human agents. And that is the real purpose at the heart of my work, 'exploration' of the inner landscape as much as the outer, that quest for meaning as a personal growth with universal significance. Coming to know ourselves and know our world is part of the same process of attaining self-understanding. So I will let it flow and let it grow, because I trust the innate purpose, potential and direction.

I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.
― John O'Donohue

But, of course, we are not rivers and cannot quite live like a river flows. To wish to flow like a river is something that human beings, as valuing beings, can do, but not a river. Humans have conscious purpose and intentionality. In my work I develop a moral ecology which holds that human beings are neither entirely natural beings whose behaviour is causally determined, like the flowing river, nor rational beings who do the right thing simply because it is the right thing, in abstraction from any emotions, desires, needs, appetites or feelings. Human beings are social beings whose nature emerges in ongoing interaction with other human beings and with the beings and bodies of the more-than-human world. Human beings are more than their biological imperatives and are more than rational calculating machines. Politics in this view is not about the split between the self-interested calculations of optimal outcomes on the part of self-maximising individuals and the altruistic pursuit of the highest good. My approach sees human beings as engaged in the continuous, ceaselessly creative process of transforming the organic unity of nature into the moral unity of a truly human society; of instincts and imperatives into consciously democratic authority; and of particular interests and private concerns into public community. The result is that human beings come to live by ends which they consciously set themselves - with this important condition: these ends are not entirely self-determined but are determined in relation to our social and natural dependency. In this moral ecology, ethics and politics are entwined (the social and the political also) within an authentic public life. This public life functions in the context of environing nature. The 'truly human society' is thus the ecological society in which the claims of nature are acknowledged.

As for the writing ... I shall carry on writing like a river flows. It’s the best approach to adopt. The world is becoming less and less predictable, making the best laid plans of mice and men neatly redundant. My principle concern is to carry on in my work of exploration, reporting back to indicate the moral, social, and institutional contours of the alternative society which is not only necessary if we are to survive and thrive as a species, but is desirable and well within our reach. I remain committed to developing new modes of thought, action, and organisation, not merely criticising the old modes, which are manifestly failing and may well collapse on their own accord, without any help from the rest of us. It is a time for builders. It is a time for new ways of being and knowing, new ways which, as I try to show through my work in ‘rational freedom’, draw upon some very old principles. Yes, we question, revise and even reject inherited beliefs, habits, practices and codes. That is the easy bit. The hard part lies in distinguishing what is vital and alive in our intellectual, social, and cultural inheritance (there is plenty) from what is moribund (there is also plenty), and making our own contributions. When I write on Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and the rest, my concern is to philosophize, apply, adapt, get to the living heart behind the frozen concepts. And then take them further. I do not identify the work of these philosophers with the ossified systems often presented in their name. I see the living thought processes that came before the systematisation, and that is why I see those old philosophers as relevant and new. In the end, whatever future emerges is down to us as creative moral agents. I can see the future as something more than the present enlarged, and as something more than the projection of objective trends and tendencies. I see the world as a field of material immanence teeming with potentialities for all manner of desirable, feasible futures, pointing to a sensible transcendence.

And I carry on. Because, in the end, the right thing to do is the right thing to do, regardless of calculations and predictions of likely success or failure. As Lewis Mumford wrote: ‘the difficult we do immediately; the impossible will take a little longer’ (Mumford Letters 1972:149). Things will take as long as they need to take, until, one day, the future will arrive in one form or another. We have a role to play in shaping that emergence, to make sure that it is a future worth having. And I have enthusiasm for the life that is sure to come.

The humane and ecological way forward is for us to create together a shared safe space for all of us, a commonwealth of life and virtue in which all life may flourish. At some point, each of us has to face the world and ask the question, ‘if not me, then who?’ If we can manage to answer this question together, we may well have a future worth having. Establishing the common good upon the common ground upon which we stand is the task before us. 'If not us, then who?'

FIGHTING FOR PLACE-BASED MEANING

I am a writer with an eye for art and an ear for music, with a vision that looks back to the ancients and forwards with the (post)moderns. I am a complicated character who lives a life simple in means but rich in ends. I’ve lived a quiet cabin in the forest mountain wilderness of California, I’ve lived just as simply and quietly in the middle of the industrial town of St Helens in Merseyside. I live a simple life – I don’t regard money the same way most people do. I have somehow - not necessarily by conscious design - managed to disentangle myself from many things that are counted as life’s ‘necessities,' and see money more as time for writing, independent study, and rambles in nature. It’s not that I don’t care about money. I just make it part of a new qualitative economics. As against the endless accumulation of material quantities, I affirm a ‘real’ wealth which refers back to the origins of the word ‘wealth’ as ‘well-being’. As against economic growth and the way it is eating up the planet, I affirm a ‘real’ growth based upon the realisation of healthy potentialities. As against the hedonistic treadmill of modern consumerism, fuelled by the endless expenditure of money, I affirm a ‘real’ happiness. All of which begs the question of what ‘real’ actually is. It’s an ontological question, a question which affirms being over having. I look forward to a society which values individuals because they are much, not because they have much.

I am not against money, I am not against ‘things’. I am against their worship. I believe that love, truth and justice are supreme. And that we need all three together. The absence of any of these skews the relations to and character of the other.

I am an environmentalist who loves nature, animals, and simplicity but also towns, cities, and technology: both wilderness and culture. Through writing, I seek to influence the way people see the world, open up new horizons and awaken people to larger possibilities within themselves and within society.

I support and work with a diverse array of people and groups and organisations – academics, researchers, students, professionals, scientists, campaigners for social and environmental justice, ‘ordinary’ citizens to protect the health and respect the integrity of the natural and urban environment. I would describe myself as a ‘civic environmentalist’. I love nature but recognise that we live on a city-planet. Rather than resist urbanisation, we need to green it, make it ecologically sustainable. I seek to critically and practically dismantle our techno-urban industrial paradigm on account of its deleterious impacts on human health, urban sprawl and increasing greenhouse emissions. I argue for better transit and improvements to the urban quality of life to connect homes, jobs, shopping centres, civic centres. These measures not only prevent environmental degradation, they are better for human health (reducing air and water pollution, safer mobility). Urban sprawl spreads human activity across the land, breaking it up into isolated pods. Houses are here, shops, factories and offices are there, and cars are simply everywhere as a result. My concern as an urban ecologist is to make our towns and cities vibrant, bikable, walkable, and transit-connected. I love the idea of mobilising people as citizens by making cities a joy and an inspiration to live in. Green cities, garden cities, whatever they may be called.

The Philosopher-Poet-Artist sees the Big Picture.

‘We should remember that we are part of a great whole ….

All living things are our brothers and sisters.’ (Kenneth Clark Civilisation).

Sitting at my desk, in my ‘study’, surrounded by books and papers, I approach life from an ancient, perennial, worldview concerning the functioning and flourishing of things.

The spirituality at the core of green politics refers to the oneness and connectedness of human beings with nature and with each other. The perennial wisdom, embodied in all the great moral systems, teaches that the ultimate purpose of human life is not the pursuit of material desires and their complete satisfaction but, rather, the experience of self-actualisation in the core of one’s being that comes from becoming one with the metaphysical unity of the universe.

Time out of mind it has been by the way of the ‘final cause,’ by the teleological concept of end, of purpose or of ‘design,’ in one of its many forms .. . that men have been chiefly wont to explain the phenomena of the living world: and it will be so while men have eyes to see and ears to hear withal. With Galen as with Aristotle, it was the physician's way; with John Ray as with Aristotle it was the naturalist's way; with Kant as with Aristotle it was the philosopher's way. ... It is a common way, and a great way; for it brings with it a glimpse of a great vision, and it lies deep as the love of nature in the hearts of men. (D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, 1942).

…. as with Aristotle … I return to Aristotle throughout my writings, although I attempt to apply rather than restate ‘the Philosopher.' It’s sufficient here to point out that Aristotelian essentialism permeates my work. As against ideal, fixed and static essences, Aristotle emphasised a world alive and unfolding in its concrete particulars. The ideal is not some rationally abstract form to be externally imposed on the community but a form which inheres as potential in the very nature of the species, needing only to be actualised in a progressive unfolding. This sees the world as a field of materialist immanence consisting of necessary, if frustratable, lines of development. The ideal lies within the real as a vision of the immanent society. Plato is present in my writings, too. For there is an objective reality, and objective morality, of timeless truths which transcend particular social and political arrangements and laws in time and place. The natural rights we continue to affirm and defend are based upon the foundation of natural law. Remove that grounding, and they can be taken away within the political realm as quickly and as easily as they are granted within that realm.

My point is that purpose is the way of the living world. We may proceed together, with a value system we create together, our chosen universal planetary ethic which is grounded in lived realities of place, co-creating the sacred with respect to the Earth, for life and for ourselves. A transformation of this scale is not the result of political intervention from above but is the cumulative outcome of the many smaller everyday decisions and actions, arising from a new set of values, a new philosophy which emerges in the process of responding to the problems we face. In the end, these decisions and actions converge in a new way of life, whose contours have already been outlined and confirmed by practical commitment, ‘a new plan of life which a multitude of people have already partly outlined and confirmed by practical experiment.'

Too traditional? Metaphysical? In emphasising the importance of each species in its own right as well as the need to maintain the richness of biodiversity for the good of the biosphere and the human community, biologist E.O. Wilson stresses the need to develop an appropriate morality for respecting and valuing the Earth. And, from an impeccably scientific standpoint, he introduces the word purpose:

"The issue, like all great decisions, is moral. Science and technology are what we can do; morality is what we agree we should or should not do. The ethic from which moral decisions spring is a norm or standard of behavior in support of a value, and value in turn depends on purpose. Purpose, whether personal or global, whether urged by conscience or graven in sacred script, expresses the image we hold of ourselves and our society. In short, ethics evolve through discrete steps, from self-image to purpose to value to ethical precepts to moral reasoning." (Wilson 2002: 130-131).

The goal is to find out ‘who’ we are and ‘where’ we are, to find the truth, establish the justice and know the love that will set us free. Becoming one with the metaphysical unity of the universe is to identify with the Absolute Principle that binds together all of existence; to know that That art Thou.

The truth is that if we don’t respect the Earth and build that respect into our relations, institutions, and practices, then there will be damaging, and potentially fatal, consequences. I protest the forces and practices that harm our forests and water tables, habitats, species of plants and animals, the life-support systems of the planet. Without forest, land, water and air, life on Earth will be irreparably damaged. No soil, no soul.

I often return to the ancient trinity of the good, the true, and the beautiful in my arguments. This notion of an ‘objective’ reality of which we are active members is the bedrock of my thinking. I am concerned with the soul of all natural things - the soul of humanity and the soul of the world. I am calling back the soul in my work.

I lead a simple life, have never driven a car or owned a mobile phone, finally got onto the Internet in 2011 to bring my writing to the world. It’s a life of words, music, sound, vision, ideas, thoughts, reflections, rhymes I lead - a life centred on a consuming passion to play a part in protecting our common Earthly home by actively living up to its inherent goodness and beauty. Man may be the measurer of all things, but he isn’t the measure of all things. We take our place respectfully and reverentially in the more-than-human world.

That's me in the Nevada Desert, USA. The moon and I went walking in those wide open spaces. Large views in the earthly flesh. We need to see ourselves as sensing, feeling, thinking, intuiting beings that come alive within the sensuous world that enfolds and sustains us. We can rise to the challenge. We are equipped by nature to take our part within nature's ceaselessly creative unfolding. Natural enthusiasm, that's what it's all about. We all have it, even if we don't always use it. I'm enthusiastic, keen and life-affirming. A "can-do" person. I trust to the extraordinary capacities of supposedly "ordinary" men and women. We each and all of us have these capacities. They are innate and are our greatest strength. Many a time, our reason tells us we are beaten, and cold hard fact and logic can be counted upon in its support. But there is such a thing as the human factor, what George Orwell called 'the crystal spirit,' and it has the capacity to transcend given fact and turn 'objective' trends and tendencies in favourable directions. I seem to have spent my entire life defying the odds, achieving much more than reason could have thought possible before the fact. Many people are utterly without hope. I hear of the condition of 'depressive realism.' Such despair and depression could be a realistic appraisal of our predicament with respect to the climate crisis, an expression of chronic crisis fatigue, or a defence mechanism, shutting out realities about which we think we can do nothing. I argue for hope. I believe there are always things we can do.

"Without food man can survive for barely thirty days; without water for little more than three days; without air hardly for more than three minutes: but without hope he might destroy himself in an even shorter time." (Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man 1952: 30). We are not the first generation to be confronted with an apparently hopeless situation, and we won’t be the last. The subjective factor is the factor that changes the direction of objective trends and tendencies. Only the acceptance of a mystery beyond the compass of reason keeps human life from becoming devalued and the spirit from becoming discouraged over the reports of reason. The solution is to live forwards into the future, to live into mystery, and create some new facts of life as we go. I come from Merseyside. The highest peak in this region is Billinge Hill, some 587 feet high. I visited California in November/December 2015. In the second week, I climbed Mt Baldy, which is over 10,000 feet at altitude. That's not bad! Seeing as my guide was not altogether forthcoming as to where I was going. Gee, I thought it was just going to be a pleasant hike! But I kept going. Reason - had any been offered! - would have told me to turn back at every point. From somewhere, I found the inner strength and will to keep going. Until I reached the top, cold and exhausted. Things can be done, we have much more potential within ourselves than the systems which tie us down ever let us know or allow us to explore.

This is me having just walked the narrow ridge called the Devil's Backbone on my way to the top of Mt Baldy, California.

Open Up to the World! Now!

We are sensing bodies living in a sensuous world. The more open you are to the world, the more you come alive in yourself.

"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves." ~John Muir

A sweet satisfied smile. Earned the hard way. This is me at the top of Mt Baldy, 10,000 feet.

I surprised myself by making it up there, frozen shoulders and all.

It's all worth the effort.

Today we come as pilgrims to this continent

To beg a blessing from its mountains and valleys

and from all their inhabitants. We beg a blessing

that will heal us of our responsibility

for what we have done, a blessing

that will give us the guidance

and the healing that we need.

For we can never bring a healing

to this continent unless we are first

blessed and first healed by this continent.

To make ourselves worthy of this blessing

is the task to which we dedicate ourselves

in these opening years of the 21st century

that all the children of Earth

might walk serenely into the future

as a single sacred community.

― Thomas Berry

"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life."

- John Muir, Our National Parks, (1901), chapter 1, page 1

EDUCATION

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Industrial Strategy, Globalisation and Political Economy

Policy uncertainties, markets and democratic planning

1985-1988

Liverpool John Moores University

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Studies in Rational Freedom

Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Weber, Habermas

Reason, Social Justice and Sustainable Urban Living

Economic, Social and Ecological aspects of the city; the urban public realm; citizenship; the city as a moral and social sphere; the physical, socio-relational and anthropological infrastructure; the liveable city.

Being and Place

Environmental ethics; The global commons; Political economy; Green Politics; The ecological society; Technics; Eco-cities, eco-towns and eco-communities; Well-being and flourishing; Global politics and ethics.

1995 - 2001

Manchester Metropolitan University

PhD Philosophy

2001

Liverpool Hope University

2001 - 2004

My brief participation on the masters in Urban Renaissance led to a period of independent self-financing post-doctoral research on the city.

2010-2015

Academia and e-Akademeia

Being and Place

1995

The University of Keele

European Industrial Relations and Human Resource Management.

Social, Economic and Political History

"The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains - mountain dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops."

- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) pages 315-316.

“The mountains are intimations of transcendence, which he is now free to pursue, and the walking writes messages in every cell of his body, telling him that he is not locked inside a cement box, nor in a water drum, but is moving forward.”

― Michael D. O'Brien, Island of the World

Here are a couple of links to my photography sites, From St Helens and Liverpool to California, with France, Switzerland and Germany in between.

http://petercritchleyphotos.simplesite.com/

http://xprs.imcreator.com/free/pjpc/photoslag

My Favourite Quotations: