EXPLORING the SCIENCE and BEAUTY of NATURE

This book is an autobiographical, photographic work that features my multiple careers as marine biologist, entrepreneur and photographer that begins with stories about my days spent underwater as a 'fish counter.'

As a boy born in a one room farm house lacking plumbing and electricity on a farm in Western Kansas, I was ecstatic to be one of the few our of many applicants accepted for a doctoral degree at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and to have the great fortune to acquire the financial and academic support thatwllowed me to conduct underwater studies of the fish populations inhabiting the tropical lagoon of a remote coral reef atoll in Micronesia.

The highlights of several of my journeys are captured in over 200 photos that feature the plant and animal life of the Hawaiian and Marshall Islands as well as rescuing a giant whale shark beached in the Phoenix Islands and floating on a catamaran on a calm night with John Denver playing his guitar and singing the songs that he loved the most.

The book also reveals highlights of the underwater research that I conducted over five decades which amounted to 3,000 hours expended beneath the sea surface--and a host of close calls including diving in two craters in the shallow reef of Enewetak Atoll that were formed by the detonation of nuclear explosions in 1958 which formed craters in the reef. Years after my surveys, Cactus Crater was buried under a thick layer of concrete, which is now leaking, and one of the most radioactive sites on the planet that reporedly is as much of a threat as Chernobyl in the Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan.

As a central feature of my doctoral research, I constructed artificial reefs in Enewetak Atoll lagoon, while surrounded by sharks that we and my dive buddies eventually learned to ignore. I have also included a descripation of one of my journeys that involved a world record setting high altitude SCUBA dive in Lake Waiau at 13,200 feet on Mauna Kea mountain on the Island of Hawaii where I spent years studying the local reef fish populations.

I hope you share my passion for flowers, streams and forests. I have been lucky to have been in the right place when the aspens changed color and bioluminescent fish lit up the deep sea while the world's best engineers built the first OTEC plants that have opened a new path to clean energy and healing the climate crisis. I also hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I have had in sorting through several thousand images of days gone by- but not yet forgotten.