Mark D. Whitaker works toward patrification of the arts and the sciences, and is curious what sustainability would look like, politically speaking, instead of simply technologically speaking (i.e., ruminating only whether your toaster would be solar powered.) His aesthetic interests have typically been in the spirit of dada/surrealism--though always with a political commentary edge. His friends are mostly in the arts, his professions and jobs are mostly in the sciences: he straddles both in web consulting and web design, which funds his present dissertation work in environmental sociology on the way environmental degradation is institutionalized in the formal state, in the arrangement of the sciences (and their applied policies), in the organization of finance, and in day-to-day consumption--and how this changes as environmental degradation ensues.

Artistically, he has been interviewed by Perspektive Magazine, a print based multi-city German avant-garde magazine, for his part played as the proselytizing l'éminence grise of the RongWrong Confederated Empire of Puppet States, which has voluntary puppet state terror-tories in the United States, England, and Germany. Social scientifically, he has a paper under review for Agriculture and Human Values comparing the politics coming to a head in rural Iowa and urban Connecticut that is leading them to create food policy councils to localize consumption--the first states in the United States to address economic, health, and environmental issues together instead of separately. Is is an inkling of sustainability?

He runs several listserves and websites: one on comparative urban history and urban planning theory and critique, one on empirical interconnections across the biological, physical, and social sciences, and one on The Bioregional State (that strategizes green politics in formally ungreen states, as an ecological response to the Federalist Papers), and yes, he does and has been typing 60 words a minute in making this biography for the web. He is very approachable, francophilic though á la japonais, rather tall, without a home phone, and has three email addresses. He recently wrote an ecological version of the U.S. Constitution, or rather a Constitution of Sustainability, which is a petition at ipetitions.com, which he hopes you will peruse and sign. He is going to Australia this summer to attend the International Sociological Association, where he will present two papers on evaluating the first two state-level food policy councils in the U.S. (Iowa and Connecticut) and to discuss the state of social theory and the social theory of the state in relation to the environment and consumption. He rarely sleeps, though when he does, it's very interesting dreaming, I can tell you.

That is a picture of a photographic stunt double whom I use on important social occasions when a disguise of mildness is required. All images lie: only print has at least the potential for honesty.