I was born and raised in Tilichiki, a small Kamchatka village on the Russian coast of the Bering Sea. After receiving an undergraduate degree from the Far Eastern State University (Vladivostok, Russia) in 1988, I immigrated to the USA. Couple of years of soul-searching in New York City later, I found myself in the MS program in Biology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, which I completed in 1993. Since then, my work took me from Brazilian Amazon to the Canadian Beaufort Sea to the Russian Altai Mountains. I researched fledging synchronicity of sea birds, documented traditional knowledge of indigenous people, collared cougars, and designed conservation programs. I've lived and worked with the Evèn reindeer herders of Kamchatka (Russia), the Aleut fur seal hunters of the Pribiloff Islands (Alaska), the Caboclos pirarucu fishermen of the Brazilian Amazon, and the Gwich’in caribou hunters of Canada’s Northwest Territories. I also studied their neighbors - kittiwakes and pumas, guillemots and grizzly bears, sea otters and reindeer. For my Ph.D., I explored the resilience of social-ecological systems undergoing rapid change, focusing on wildlife use in the Russian northeast after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I joined the Christensen Fund in 2006, after several years with the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) where I ran a couple of conservation projects in Kamchatka, Russia. 

I have co-authored a book in Russian Information for survival. A book for the indigenous peoples of Russian Arctic, Siberia, and Far East (1995). With Gwich’in elders I co-wrote a book laying out their indigenous ecological knowledge: Gwich’in Words about the Land: Nanh' Kak Geenjit Gwich'in Ginjik. Gwich’in Renewable Board. Inuvik, NWT, Canada. 211 pp (1997).  I have also published (and often illustrated with my photographs) more popular articles in Cultural Survival, Wildlife Conservation Magazine, and National Geographic Magazine.

My experiences, combined with a good dose of contemplation and meditation, have taught me that our only hope for addressing contemporary challenges lies in changing our fundamental assumptions about our world and our place in it. Only through recognition and practice of life-sustaining interdependence of culture and nature, humankind has any hope for environmental and cultural sustainability.

“The country knows. If you do the wrong thing to it, the whole country knows. It feels what’s happening to it… Everything is connected…” ― Lavine Williams, Koyukon Elder, quoted by Richard Nelson

“Embracing vulnerability and humility, let us declare our utter dependence on the Earth, and on each other: You are, therefore I am.” ― Satish Kumar