Geoffrey Harper

(Photos: GH in Hereford, 2017, and in the Altay Mountains, Siberia, 1991.)

I was born in 1944 on Bermuda, where my father worked as a meteorologist during the war. Then it was back to UK for the 1947 winter, followed by five years at the Met Observatory on a hill overlooking Lerwick in Shetland. 1953, back to England for the rest of my schooling and university. After several years in teaching, with a break to do an MSc at LSE, I worked on a couple of biology textbooks before completing a PhD (social history) and becoming an entomologist and evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University.

Later I studied for a languages degree at Heriot-Watt University and from 1992 to retirement worked as a free-lance translator. At this time Russian Nature Press was set up, and I am the translator and/or part-author of the four books on Russia.

From 2002 to 2014 I was a research associate at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, studying the reactions of plants to climate change using phenological data collected daily in the garden. In 2015 I moved to Hereford.

So I am a generalist, with a background in biology, philosophy, history, languages, and one or two other interests. A generalist is needed to tackle the problems examined in 'Democracy or Survival', and I hope the book will stimulate debate on much needed changes to governance if we are to preserve civilization for future generations. Late in 2005 I casually remarked to a friend that democracy is incapable of solving the problem of global warming, and I still believe that. But there are non-authoritarian alternatives to democracy, and we should take seriously John Stuart Mill's suggestion for a better form of representative governance than modern liberal democracy can provide. A companion volume was published in 2017 ('Must People Suffer?' ISBN 978-0-9532990-7-2), revised and published 30th April 2019 as 'Democracy & the Biosphere Crisis: the Rational Voter's Guide' (ISBN 978-0-9532990-6-5). The latest version is 'Biosphere Crisis: the Condorcet-Mill-Vernadsky solution', published in September 2024 (ISBN 9798339673859).