About the Editor
Philip A Loring is an anthropologist currently pursuing a PhD under Dr. S. Craig Gerlach at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He currently teaches a senior seminar on ‘Sustainability in Small-scale Societies,’ and serves as co-editor of the Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska, New Series. His interests are ethnobotany, nutritional anthropology, intellectual property and technological literacy, with a particular focus on indigenous food systems, natural systems farming, tribalism, and the vulnerabilities imbedded in the global, agro-industrial food system. His current research involves an ethnoecological survey of Athabascan ‘country foods,’ and the compilation of the ‘Alaska Bush Foods Cookbook.’
In a past life he was a computer software engineer with experience in the telecommunications and healthcare industries. The Fireweed represents his second attempt since escaping from that world to create a forum for starting a dialog about social, cultural and economic change.
His work is most influenced by Daniel Quinn, Craig Gerlach, J.D. Salinger, Sinclair Lewis, Cormac MacArthy, and of course his mom, Marjorie Loring.
