About Jack
"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."
Joseph Campbell
Writing is my practice of appreciation, questioning and self-honesty. It changed my horizons, growing up in rural Texas and Tennessee. In reflection I made sense of a wild adolescence working in Tanzania and Zambia. It also led me through a degree in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh to my recent Anthropology studies at the University of Cape Town.
These places, pursuits, were inspired by loves of nature, literature and self-understanding--all cultivated by an adoring relationship with the nonhuman environment. I've been a hunter, a climber, a backpacker as long as I've been able. It's a constant and joyful challenge to transmit and share experiences of growth and wildness in the natural world to readers. I hold this as an essential, lifelong purpose.
More recently, academia has been my outlet for more abstracted ideas. At present, I'm researching how human-animal relationships are navigated through hunting as an immersive multispecies experience in which lives are, naturally, at stake.
Always attempting to collect my communications of experiences and essential beliefs, I've begun working extensively in the conservation world through Bear Trust International and writing on natural immersion practices.
My more practical experience ranges from buffalo tracking to car racing, bushcamp management to supply and logistics. I've worked in motorsports journalism and hunting guiding, as well as video production. At present, I'm proficient in English, French and Swahili.
The journey to broaden horizons and complicate realizations is an ongoing one, and I'm always eager for new expeditions and intrigues. For a conversation or a professional assignment, contact me through the tab above.
