As a result of a class on international affairs I took in the 11th grade, I began to develop a political consciousness. Unfortunately it was a reactionary anti-communist consciousness, actually a sort of Goldwater conservatism. This led by some uncertain means to an interest in Ayn Rand, which in its turn led to me discover anarchism at about the age of 16. I examined that briefly and then lost interest.
I sat in on the same class the next year, and by even more uncertain means jumped the fence to a sort of instrumentalist liberalism. This was not necessarily bad, since it more or less marked my switch from right to left. This switch conditioned my life plans and course for the next few years.
In December of 1984, I signed a four-year enlistment in the US Army with the intention of gathering language skills, experience, money, and a security clearance, and afterwards using the GI Bill to study political science at Georgetown University in Washington. I was at the time very interested in Cold War politics, and I reasoned that all these features would serve me well as a sovietologist, Foreign Service Officer, or other form of State Department hack.
In late June of 1985 I shipped out for basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. As of December 1986, I had completed all specialized training, including eleven months of Russian , been granted a security clearance and assigned to the 103rd Military Intelligence Battalion in Wuerzburg, Germany where I did tactical exercises, maintenance, and other forms of military routine for the remaining two and a half years of my hitch.
On the face of it, I more or less liked the profession of arms. Over time, though, I ended up with certain misgivings about its institutional and political realities. The rest of my original plan seemed a further path to compromise, and I decided this sort of politics was not for me after all.
Upon leaving the army in 1989, an emergent interest in environmental affairs led to my declaring for a biology degree at Indiana University at Bloomington. During four years of college I considered and rejected a number of possible specializations including environmental toxicology, wilderness protection, and plant genetic engineering.
The Gulf War marked the end of my flirtation with liberalism, and was instrumental in propelling me to consider what Kropotkin calls the "physiology of society," the resources and means by which human groups maintain themselves. Issues of the supply and distribution of energy and food got my attention. Reading up on George Washington Carver and botanist Peter Raven gave me an idea of fostering regional economic independence by using genetically engineered plant secondary metabolites for organic fuels and starting materials instead of the geopolitically problematic petroleum sources.
By a process which does not bear repeating, I eventually retreated from the idea of producing needed changes merely through molecular biology. My interests came to center around the ecology, economics, and politics of food security.
Bloomington, Indiana is where I first met and worked alongside anarchists. This was fortunate for me since there have never been enough anarchists there to form a true ghetto. For the most part we worked through other organizations on housing, anti-war organizing, Latin American solidarity, etc. We came together for breathing space. Quite honestly, I think I would have been repulsed had I encountered an established anarchist scene anywhere else. Having come into contact with several, I find that I keep my distance and tend be interested in organizing on the basis of issues rather than political nomenclature or subculture. I'm resigned to keeping one foot in the sustainable agriculture/sustainable development worlds, and one in the anarchist world. Some days I fear I will run out of feet.
Probably I am one of the oddest anarchists you may ever meet, inasmuch as I did not come to this point through punk rock or Marxism-Leninism. And though I have not taken the 'anarcho-capitalist' or populist road, believe it or not I still consider myself a conservative in certain respects.
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