I’m Martin Buchert, and if you’re visiting this site it’s likely to take a look at some of the work I’ve done as a geographer, a conservation biologist, and as an observer, interrogator, and in some small way beyond that experienced by all city-dwellers, a shaper of urban systems. The common thread binding my experiences over the years has been their preoccupation with a spatial perspective on landscapes across a range of spatial scales and along a spectrum of human design/disturbance.

Like the Lorenz attractor in the image above, my professional life has traced a complex trajectory in disciplinary phase space. It’s been a diverse tour of the region, which suits my wide-ranging interest in the structure and dynamics of the world system well, but my path seems to bend again and again around the two fixed themes of human elements and non-human elements in changing landscapes. Along the way at various points my agency has influenced the land’s dynamics from the built environment industries as a builder, an architectural drafter, a transportation planner, and real estate developer. Throughout I’ve never seen myself other than as the geographer, landscape ecologist, and conservation planner that I’ve also earned my bread as. Regardless of which loop on the Lorenz attractor I’m orbiting at a given time, I’ve been conscious of my participation in communities of the land, including their Leopoldesque members of air, water, soil, and biota, in each of the fragile and beautiful landscapes I’ve lived in.

For all my sincere passion for these other vital and beautiful elements of my resident ecosystems, humans are a social species and one of the singular rewards of the work I’ve done has been the people I’ve worked with and learned from along the way. Please feel free to shout out here on this site or directly to me – I’m not yet so full of conversation or intellectual company that I have any appetite to turn down further.

And thanks for stopping by.