About this  Site:  This website is a project by Harold Wood.  I celebrate the many Planet Patriots from history  who inspire us to likewise try to be patriots for the planet.  Without these early advocates for embracing the beauty and diversity of our Earth, the current advocates of today would not have been possible.

Current Planet Patriots – are you one? – stand on the shoulders of those in the past.  As historical figures, none of them may be perfect by today’s standards which we believe are more enlightened, but “Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” It is currently fashionable to denigrate historical figures for not being as “enlightened” as we are about such issues as race, gender, and multiculturalism.  But let’s not let divisions over petty human squabbles prevent humanity from uniting in a common view of the Planet Earth as our spaceship, our only home, and even our Mother. We live on land that was long populated by native flora and fauna long before human beings arrived on the scene.

About Me:  I am a retired school attorney with undergraduate and graduate degrees in environmental science. Since coming of age in the Sixties, I have explored transcendentalist spirituality – i.e. the interface between understanding the natural world through a poetic/spiritual world view and simultaneously through scientific inquiry.  Especially important, in my view, is cultivating an appreciation for the Epic of Evolution and seeking to form a deep time perspective. I believe combining these perspectives creates a basis for personal spiritual growth and living a life of meaning.  

I also believe there are few obstacles to the goal of world peace and understanding that cannot be solved if everyone would just get a better sense of humor! And that would make collaborating on global problems just so much easier.  Just do it with a smile – – and a song!

Philosophical Development – a Global  Perspective

Perhaps one reason I have had such a global perspective is that at a very young age I got to travel around the world, witnessing first-hand a huge variety of cultures and people.  In 1961, at age 11, I lived in India for a year where my Dad worked on helping to develop a new veterinary hospital on behalf of a U.S. aid agency. I briefly attended fifth grade at the famous Woodstock School [See also my illustration of its  2004 First Day Cover] located in the foothills of the Himalayas of India.  However, at that tender age, I did not like the boarding school aspect of life there. I did much better after moving to live with my parents in  northeast India, where I was home-schooled for a year.  my mother hired a wonderful Indian tutor who rewarded me with fascinating field trips to such interesting places as a silk-worm factory and a village well,  if I applied myself to my schoolwork. This taught me how rewarding growth and education is far superior to criticism and negativity!

In my college years, I was lucky enough to spend a semester traveling around the world as part of Chapman College’s “World Campus Afloat” program (now called “Semester at Sea” and sponsored by other universities). This too instilled a global sensitivity and sense of Planet Patriotism as I studied world cultures.  My special research project for the semester was learning about the world-wide efforts for conservation and protection of natural resources and the importance of wild nature. I was lucky to visit first-hand some of the leaders in these countries doing that work.

As an adult, I became an attorney, and  for 30 years, my legal career with county government included as clients many school districts, plus the County Office of Education and its special environmental/outdoor education program, SCICON, an outdoor school located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.

I was a volunteer wilderness advocate and environmental activist and educator for over 50 years. In the Sixties I devoured the writings of John Muir and Joseph Wood Krutch as a high school student. In the Seventies, after being the student organizer for the first Earth Day in 1970 as a College Freshman, I went on to work on grassroots efforts to pass wilderness legislation in California and Washington State, which included congressional establishment of wilderness areas on BLM lands and in several national parks and wildlife refuges.  While in Washington State, I was part of the citizen activist team that successfully achieved wilderness designation for the Clearwater Wilderness in Washington State. I also worked for passage of the landmark Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act  of 1980. In the Eighties, I worked on everything from local and state issues to international environmental issues like tropical rainforests as a member of the Sierra Club International Committee. Beginning in the Nineties I worked on oak tree preservation, and on environmental education efforts with the Yosemite Conservation Heritage Center (formerly LeConte Memorial Lodge) and the Sierra Club John Muir Education Committee. I served as editor for several environmental newsletters, and for a few years for the national Sierra Club International Action Report. I am the co-founder of Restore Hetch Hetchy, and the California Green Burial Network.  For several decades I was very active locally for the Sierra Club’s Mineral King Group in Visalia, , as well as a long-time webmaster for local Sierra Club chapter and group website.   You can  learn more about my decades of volunteering for the Sierra Club in my Oral History, 2023 – part of “Sierra Club’s Valued Volunteers, 2024;” See: Harold Wood: Longtime Sierra Club Volunteer, Chair of the Le Conte Memorial Lodge
Committee (now the Yosemite Conservation Heritage Center), and Volunteer
Webmaster of the John Muir Exhibit (PDF from Sierra Club).

In 1989, I successfully lobbied for the permanent designation of John Muir Day in California, a year after a federal proclamation recognized John Muir Day at the time of his 150th birthday. See my interview in “Muir may be honored by nation: Supporters call for day commemorating naturalist” (PDF) by Gene Rose in The Fresno Bee, 11 January 1988.  Beginning in 1994 I served as the Content Editor of the award-winning  John Muir Exhibit website – the largest website on the web dedicated to John Muir – and then became its volunteer Webmaster since April, 1997.    

In 1976 I co-founded the Universal Pantheist Society,  with the motto: “We seek a renewed reverence for the Earth and a vision of Nature as the ultimate context for human existence…”   From its inception in 1980, I have served as the editor for the Society’s quarterly journal Pantheist Vision, as well as a co-author of a brief introduction to Pantheism, the The Pantheist World View, and am the author of many Pantheist essays. The Universal Pantheist Society is currently digitizing 40+ years of the journal.

 In 2005, USA Today quoted me in an interview as being inspired by noteworthy American naturalist Henry David Thoreau: 

“Harold Wood, is a lawyer in Visalia, Calif., a self-described pantheist who celebrates Thoreau’s birthday with carefully chosen readings every July 12, Wood says he gets “spiritual exercise” by hiking forests or coastlines, but he credits Thoreau for leading him one step further. He chose a house in this neighborhood so he could walk to work and burn fat instead of fossil fuels.
“Thoreau practiced ‘civil disobedience’ by not paying a tax he believed was immoral,” Wood says. “I do the same when I walk to work.”

In 2007 I led the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Visalia to obtain Green Sanctuary certification, and served as its president for several years between 2007 and the late 2000s. The Green Sanctuary program promotes environmental awareness, sustainable practices, and environmental justice. Unitarian Universalists had merged in 1961 with the goal of establishing a universal religion of humanity for liberal religions around the world, but that goal has failed. Today, I am now a UU apostate because organized Unitarian Universalists (UU) have largely strayed from their traditional insistence on universal tolerance firmly grounded in the Enlightenment Ideal of Reason (instead embracing a new form of left-wing dogmatism which goes so far as to stolidly embrace a rejection of reason and logic, calling them expressions of white supremacy), and have seemingly abandoned the basic focus of spirituality aligned with science to instead embrace anthropocentrism and tribalism (what one UU minister calls “identarianism”).  See How Unitarian Universalism Became a Church of Shaming, Bullying and Coercion by David Cycleback (9 Jan 2024).  I find it unfortunate that so many people today embrace “identity politics” where focusing attention on differences based on trivial things like skin color or cultural history create a prevailing antagonism. Sadly, we appear to live in a world where human tribalism runs amok, where fear and competition thrives between human tribes living even on different continents. Worst of all, the traditional universal “Enlightenment” values of freedom, reason, and tolerance are increasingly abandoned in favor of  ideological intolerance, especially manifesting in so-called progressive organizations everywhere.  But  as African American scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson says, we ought to “imagine if race, gender expression, and ethnicity were as irrelevant to our judgement of people as whether they wear glasses, what brand of toothpaste they use, or whether they prefer waffles over pancakes.”  He goes on to point out that from a cosmic perspective (e.g. imagine how aliens would view us), “all humans are indistinguishable from one another, not matter how much we distinguish ourselves.” And Native American author Robin Kimmerer summarizes: “We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things.” 

(On this note, my personal philosophy has always taken the approach that Science is just one of several fundamental ways of understanding the Universe; but it is not and cannot ever be the sole way of understanding it. There must be additional ways of knowing and understanding the world besides just the mind. We also need the organs of the body, heart, and spirit to fully comprehend the world. And as many religious scholars point out, dry facts, geometric reasoning, and the scientific method is only one particular method of understanding. While we must never deny scientific knowledge, reason, evidence, or the scientific method, we must also embrace additional ways of understanding, including art, music poetry, metaphor, story, ceremony and ritual, and even what Joseph Campbell calls myth. As Robin Wall Kimmerer – herself a scientist – observes: “metaphor is a way of telling truth far greater than scientific data.”)

I have authored several publications on environmental and related topics, and regularly give presentations about John Muir, wilderness preservation, transcendentalist philosophy, and related topics.

I have received several awards from local and national environmental organizations, including the year 2000 Friend of the Oak Award from the Visalia Beautification Committee; the year 2000 Sierra Cup Award from the Sierra Club Kern Kaweah Chapter;  the national Sierra Club’s “Special Achievement Award,” the in 2003 the “University of the Wilderness Award” from the Bonnie J. Gisel, the Curator of the LeConte Memorial Lodge (now the Yosemite Conservation Heritage Center).  I think the award I appreciate the most is the “John Muir Conservation Award” which I received in 1996 from the John Muir Memorial Association.

Alas, the Sierra Club has now rejected such long years of grassroots commitment (which I had naively thought were worthy of appreciation not deprecation).   In its 2019 national “Structural Assessment” the Club formally decries such commitment and service as mere “privilege of time” which improperly “rewards deep and long involvement with the organization” – as if that somehow prevented new people from participating or volunteering. My head swirls with such a conclusion:  every Sierra Club chapter and group I ever served in always welcomed new volunteers and even offered to make them an officer “just for showing up!” I actually believe that the touted belief in “diversity, equity, and inclusion” does not include the category of Age.  When I was a teenager, I found a bias against young people in the Sierra Club, too. Yet, that was a time that I had more “priviilege of time” than people who had full-time jobs!  And now older people who are typically retired and so have more free time, are rejected as well. Despite their attempt to embrace many kinds of political identities, “ageism” is still practiced, whether against youth or seniors.

My documentation for how the Sierra Club has gone astray is posted on the John Muir Global Network website.

My hobbies include developing this and various other websites, birding,  hiking, swimming, photography, reading, writing, postcrossing, first-day cover collecting, world geography & travel (53 countries so far), space science, and watching and discussing movies. As an adjunct to my interest in evolutionary biology, and being inspired as editor for his father’s memoir I Love Them All, the pursuit of genealogy has become a major interest. As a wildlife enthusiast, I pursue studies of botanical and zoological interest, especially as related to biological diversity and conservation biology.

Many of my favorite authors are featured on this website. I consider as required reading for environmental literacy the works of Aldo Leopold, John Burroughs, John Muir, and Joseph Wood Krutch.

As a fan of life-long learning, I recommend your local OLLI Institute, The Great Courses, Udemy, and Coursera.org.

I advocate journal writing as a regular personal practice. To get started, try my resource on Journal Writing with John Muir.

My musical interests were formed by the great folk and folk-rock music of the Sixties and Seventies, inclu ding Simon & Garfunkel, Kingston Trio, The Limeliters (see also my Tribute to the Limeliters website), The Byrds, The Moody Blues, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and John Denver, which collectively advanced a world-view of peace and love among all people and the planet.  I accordingly  enjoy Eco-music, Celtic Music (Golden Bough, Celtic Woman, etc.), and especially Songs for World Peace.

My favorite beer is currently Barrio Rojo –  a Scottish ale brewed in Tucson, Arizona, winner of the 2015 GABF Bronze Medal and a 2016 American Beer Festival Silver Medal.   I also enjoy trying new IPA’s whenever I can find them; after first tasting Lagunitas Super Cluster Ale – a Citra-hopped Mega Ale of Intergalactic Proportions. (Similar, but not quite the same as a Super Cluster in Astronomy!)  Interestingly, I have founded that Boulder, Colorado brewmasters “Hoplark” have created a masterpiece with their  “0.0 Really Really Hoppy” brew – No malt, no calories, no alcohol, no sugar, no caffeine —  but double-hopped with an extra kick of hop-tastic goodness and flavor!

In 2020, I moved from California’s heavily polluted and multiply-toxic (soil, water, air, and politics!) San Joaquin Valley to the clean air in the western shadow of Arizona’s 9,000 ft. tall  Santa Catalina Mountains. I delight in the beautiful Sonoran Desert, its thorny forests and spectacular mountains. I relish living near where two of my favorite Planet Patriots had lived – Ed Abbey and Joseph Wood Krutch.  I volunteer as a Wildlife Camera monitor for the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection, rejoicing in the many species of wildlife caught on film every month. 

I hope we all will work to make room for wild flora and fauna around our homes, by using programs similar to Tucson Audubon’s “Habitat at Home” program  and the  “Home Grown National Park” idea advanced by Doug Tallamy and others.

On the “News”:  I believe he had it right when Henry David Thoreau wrote, that what we call “the news” is futile anthropocentrism. He wrote in Walden: “I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter—we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip…”

John Muir expressed a similar sentiment, when he wrote “I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”  

This view was recently confirmed by a statement made in Matt Haig’s 2013 novel, The Humans:

“The term “news” on Earth generally meant ‘news that directly affects humans.’ There was, quite literally, nothing about the antelope or the sea horse or the red-eared slider turtle or the other nine million species on the planet.”

Like Muir and Haig’s alien protaganist, I instead focus on “the eternal verities” of Nature  to get the real news: our kin the fellow creatures on Earth, and our geological and cosmic realities. I follow the galactic news, courtesy of the Sun City Oro Valley Astronomy Club, part of  NASA’s Night Sky Network,  and the space exploration advocacy group, the  Planetary Society (co-founded by Carl Sagan). But the real news is found outside –  in the canyons, the peaks, the river-breads, and the flowers and avian habitats of the natural world.

My Religious Affiliations: Transcendentalist Spirituality,  Religious Naturalist, Universal Pantheist; Apple, and the The Church of Fundamental Quantum Thingies, founded by TV Producer Chuck Lorre (in which the only ritual is giving a nice pledge to PBS.)  

My politics? My rule of thumb is simply to vote against bullies.

“We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This requires us to not only acknowledge our shared humanity,, but also to recognize a larger, more inclusive “we” that embraces not merely the diverse identities and communities  of humans, but  – in many ways more importantly – all the other species with whom we share this planet.