Hey yah.  My name is Angie Campbell.  I am an immigrant from the United States living in Te Whanganui a Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. My love affair with landscape, culture, and learning has led to a life filled with travel and academic institutions.  So far I have managed three degrees in civil/environmental engineering, landscape architecture and environmental science at two institutions University of Michigan (Go Blue) and University of Colorado (Go Buffs?, I didn’t really associate with sports there), while exploring all 50 US States and over 30 countries around the world.  I have a lot of the world left to see and who knows, maybe I will pick up another degree along the way.

I wouldn’t describe myself as an intellectual, I just love to learn and formal institutions and travel have been the best means for me to fulfill this desire.  I am a free spirit, a loudly passionate, contemplative person who adores my partner and photos of cats.

Endowed with endless curiosity, I spend a great deal of time philosophizing about anything and everything, but very often this thinking pertains to environmental issues. I should note that I am not formally trained in environmental philosophy (besides a handful of classes) nor do I have the vocabulary competency to pass for someone who has. My writing is somewhat tongue and cheek, unfiltered, and riddled with errors and improper grammar (beware).

Since moving here, I desperately missed conversations and opportunities to explore some of things I plan to write about.  I am using this blog (firstly) as a means to work through some of this thinking and to follow my own pathway of inquiry.  The blog name, haere hinengaro is the Māori (indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand) translation for intellectual journey….intellectual in a psychological sense not a highbrow one.

I am also documenting my travel adventures here and around the world in a very unprofessional way; no fancy cameras (iphone only) and no hours spent getting the perfect shot. These posts are simply overviews of place motivated by our desire to have a digital memory of our journey together.

There is a random hydraulic fracturing tab attached to this blog spot, leading to an old blog Reflections of the Watering Hole. I doubt many would be excited for that read, but the information is there and I didn’t want to let it go. I started this blog (which focuses on water quality) during one of my academic stints studying the social and environmental impacts of oil and natural gas development in the Denver-Julesburg Basin in the United States. While some of the information is a bit ‘dated’ (2013), many of the conundrums remain relevant today.