Dear Ecolog and friends: I have been retired since 2000, when I "sold" my 21-year consulting business to a newly-minted Ph.D. whom I met through Ecolog. This turned out to be a mistake, and I do not hold myself blameless. The bottom line is that I did not profit from this "sale," and my retirement fund was not big enough to fund a modest lifestyle, especially after the "Crash of 2008." Since then, my wife and I have been "eating our seed corn," causing our "nest egg" to shrink even further. I now find it necessary to find some way to make a little extra income.
I do not wish to "sell" my old consulting business; the five years that it was operated by the new "owner" did not greatly enhance its reputation. I do not want to open another consulting business; however, I would be interested in being a part-time employee of a small existing company or "startup" that is interested in ecosystem restoration and related fields. My knowledge is both limited and unlimited-well, in a way. I have always been interested in working up and out from principles rather than a "cookbook" approach to practice--understanding rather than "knowledge application." Inevitably, however, my work has been referred to as a "method," and that is partly, perhaps largely, my own fault. In my ignorance, I once wrote an article in which I referred to a particular technique used on one project as a "method." The response to this article (many requests for "specifications") and being professionally frustrated in my cushy 11-year government job caused me to hang out my shingle as a consultant that year. Despite my considerable ignorance with respect to running a business, I managed to make a decent living out of doing what I love for 21 years. I have drafted a sampling of projects that have been continuously successful without irrigation, fertilization, or maintenance that are as old as forty years and as recent as ten or more years for which photographs are still available, along with coordinates and links to Google Maps. However, much of my work has been of a purely consulting nature (government agencies, project review, NGO's and the like). I have written several papers, mostly of a general nature. I am not primarily a researcher, but a consumer of research. I have grown a lot, and I continue growing. If anyone is interested in working out some mutually-convenient arrangement by which I might earn a modest income in exchange for my modest, part-time involvement, I would like to hear your ideas and aspirations. I am leaving tomorrow for my usual extended fall tour of the western United States, but plan to return earlier than normal sometime before October 11 for a short period when I will read my email before I leave again . I do not take any form of electronic device other than a low-tech cell phone on these trips, so this gives any interested parties a month to reply by email (unless they do so before we leave tomorrow--or maybe not until Saturday), but to those who do request more information by then, I will provide my cell phone number (realizing that I am most often out of cell-phone range on these trips). Respectfully submitted, Wayne Tyson
