I was born in a small town in northern Wisconsin and in 1967 entered the University of Wisconsin in Madison as a freshman, intending to study mechanical engineering. The anti-Vietnam War movement and the futility of figuring out how to calculate the stresses on a truss while the U.S. government was bombing bridges in and around Hanoi made me question my choice of major. In my wandering, I was led into Chinese history, and in my political activism into the anti-war and environmental movements. I did my PhD dissertation (1978) on Chinese Communist revolutionaries, and I took up a post in the history department at Whittier College in Southern California, where I served for 41 years. Since the mid-1990s, I have been interested in the history of environmental change. My prior political and organizational involvement with addressing national and global environmental issues prompted me to ask environmental questions about the area of my academic scholarship at the time, Chinese history. That led to Tigers, Rice, Silk and Silt (1998), one of the first scholarly monographs in Chinese environmental history. The success of that book sent me on a path of encouraging younger China scholars (mostly PhD students) to address questions that environmental history posed for how we understand and write about China, and as they did so in their dissertations and books, the field of Chinese environmental history emerged and matured. So much scholarship on aspects of China’s environmental history was published that I was able to synthesize it in China: An Environmental History (2017). In a tribute to my role in developing the new field, in March 2023, colleagues from around the world gathered at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University to acknowledge and thank me. I’m grateful. About the same time as I was writing Tigers, colleagues in the History Department at Whittier College began rethinking our curriculum, and we realized that we had not taken world history into account. Mostly, history curricula in colleges and universities had conceived of “world” history as “the West and the Rest:” Western history and civilization largely was world history, with the rest of the world following along. A new generation of historians of China began questioning that narrative, and I took the opportunity to synthesize that body of scholarship into a new book now in its 5th revised edition, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century (2002-2024). Origins is unabashedly non-Eurocentric: the first chapter is entitled “Starting with China.” Upon retiring from teaching in 2019 and relocating to June Lake in the Mono Lake Basin, I was determined to continue writing about environmental history, and chose as my topic the place where I now lived. It turns out that, despite being a small place on planet Earth, there was not just much of interest in the environmental history of the Basin, but also large amounts of documentary and archeological evidence were available for me to craft into the narrative that became Deep Time in the Mono Lake Basin: Nature and History over the Last 10,000 Years (2026). Writing that book required not only a deep dive into rich archival sources but also reinventing myself as a historian of the American West. I think I succeeded. A hallmark of my scholarship is that I have placed my studies into a very long-term historical perspective. Most of what passes for published history is short-term—maybe a decade or so, and sometimes a half century or more, but seldom more than that. My 1978 Ph.D. dissertation spanned 300 years of South China history; Tigers closely documented four centuries but reached back 2000 years into China’s dynastic history; Origins constructs a global narrative over six centuries; and Deep Time tells a history that unfolds over 10,000 years—two millennia. Why my interest and expertise in very long-term—“deep time”—history? Being in the doctoral program in Chinese history at the University of Wisconsin, my advisor Maurice Meisner advised me to read English and French social historians, where I discovered Fernand Braudel, once described as the best historian of the twentieth century. Braudel and some other French historians founded what they called the Annales School, which focused on long-term (longue dureé) social and economic history. Braudel explained that historical time is three layers of overlapping histories developing simultaneously. The first is a history whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man in his relationship to the environment [his gendered formulation that we can overlook], a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles.” The second layer concerned “economic systems, states, societies, civilizations and warfare.” The last layer was the traditional history of individuals, “that is, the history of events; surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.” Braudel may have been mistaken about environmental change being slow, but to understand history in all its complexity and depth requires taking the very long-term view, or what I call in my last book, the “deep time” perspective. That is the kind of historian I am.