Shane Mulligan

Nature

Dogs

Books

Buddhism

Renewable energy & clean tech

Existentialism

In roughly that order. I was the undergrad whose essays generally came back with “and very well written!” I published my research but was rarely happy at the front of a classroom, so after five years teaching environment and international development and political philosophy — and with a dozen academic articles on my CV — I moved from studying energy futures to developing solar and wind energy projects. Here I wrote things like policy briefs and bat mortality reports, edited legal texts, and created educational materials on electrical systems, green hydrogen, and project financing in developing countries. Courses I’ve taken with the CIEP.uk and work with the academic editing chapter of Editors Canada have helped me build a set of skills I hardly knew I needed as an academic.

My reading tends toward philosophy, history, and the natural world (botany, biology, water in all its forms)… and editing and writing. A recent sample suggests the sort of books I’d love to work with:

Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity (Little, Brown and Co.)

Erin Brenner, The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors (U. of Chicago)

Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher and the Wolf (Pegasus)

Jacques Barzun, Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers (Quill)

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Oregon State U.)

Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (Princeton)

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (Knopf)

Peter Ward, Under a Green Sky (Smithsonian)

Sean Carroll, The Serengeti rules : the quest to discover how life works and why it matters (Princeton)

It seems there’s a theme of late…