I grew up in the snowy mountains of Japan in northern Honshu, where the Tsugaru Straits join the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean.  I was six years old, and Japan seemed like the far edge of the world. Sometimes I would walk beneath the steep coastal cliffs, clutching my mother's hand and jumping away from the icy waves. The ocean frightened me, the way the water crashed down on the dark volcanic sands and retreated back into itself like a giant tongue. The undertow could be deadly. Yet I loved looking out across that vast expanse of blue, which merged with the sky and was swallowed by infinity.

Winter in northern Honshu could be harsh and unforgiving. Sometimes it snowed so much that we had to dig our way out of the house. That’s when, dressed like tiny babushkas, we’d pull our sleds down the hill and haul back canisters of propane to keep the furnace going. But in summer, when the world turned green and dandelions sprouted from the once-frozen earth and the butterflies returned to the land, we rejoiced.

One day my father brought home a gigantic box kite. It was made of paper and nearly as tall as my brother, sister and me. Off we ran through the fields of clover, Billy in the lead, Bonnie and I following, our faces skyward. The kite rose high on the wind until it seemed to reach the clouds. Then with a dip, a jerk, and a snap, it sailed away over the chain-link fence into what we called “the Japanese land.” For American children, this area was taboo. We scrambled over anyway, dropping into a golden field of mustard.

In a clearing, Japanese farmers sat cross-legged, unwrapping rice cakes and fish. Women in loose-fitting yukatas had fastened their babies to their chests with long pieces of cloth. Seeing us, the workers pointed across the field. The mustard was tall and thick with pollen, licking our cheeks as we ran and turning our hair golden. Soon we came upon a clearing where our big brown kite lay on its side. When we returned to the fence, the farmers rose, smiled, and bowed to us from the waist. We bowed back and climbed the fence back into “the American land.” In that moment, in that silent exchange between cultures, I realized that crossing barriers into unknown lands, no matter how difficult, symbolized a kind of freedom I had never known before.

For a great portion of my life I had been happiest in unfamiliar places:  The lure of the unknown was an aphrodisiac of the senses. I wanted to travel ever deeper into foreign terrain, to understand the connections between culture and place, to learn how landscape shapes our traditions and psyches. I wanted to put the whole of my experience into my writing and in doing so, to understand myself. Above all, I wanted to keep the stories I heard alive for others.

For the next decade I traveled the world—to the Andes, the Amazon, the Galápagos, the Arctic, the Sierra Madre, the Kalahari and the foothills of the Himalayas—to write about traditional peoples as their way of life and the land they depended on changed or vanished altogether. Often, the places I visited were difficult to get to. I spent long hours waiting for trains, ships, rafts, canoes, bush planes—whatever would take me there. But uncertainty and discomfort have always been part of my work, and in most cases I camped out alone in a tent or in a sleeping bag under the stars in the middle of nowhere.

My writing career began when I was a graduate student and was hired as a regular contributor to The New York Times and Time-Life, Incorporated. I also worked as a full-time freelance writer for numerous national publications, including The Nation, Conde Nast Traveler, and the Los Angeles Times. I was an independent producer for National Public Radio and wrote video scripts on alternative energy.

While I also covered politics, immigration, and science, my work always came back to the land and traditional cultures: the Mapuche Indians of southern Chile who are being displaced from their ancient homeland along the Bio-Bio River by hydroelectric dams; mestizo colonists in Ecuador who have settled by the thousands in oil boom towns in the Amazon Basin and in the Galápagos—the fragile islands that inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

At times, my very presence in these places seemed a double-edged sword. In documenting a dying way of life, I was calling attention to the problems. But I was also exposing remote cultures to other tourists, maybe even helping accelerate the process of destruction.  The paradox was that I needed only to look at the consumptive habits of my own country to see the parallels: mining and oil exploration in the Arctic; logging in the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest; the damming of free-flowing rivers for agriculture and energy; the destruction of salmon, wolf and grizzly habitat; the forced relocation of Native Americans for the timber, minerals and other wealth on their lands.

forced into a government resettlement camp in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana, and was now teetering on the edge of extinction. They survived primarily on government handouts, missionary clothing, and tourist dollars. Gone were their ancient hunting grounds, earmarked for cattle ranchers, miners and bush camps that served gin and tonic to wealthy hunters.

As a writer my task has always been to observe, to listen, and to document by immersing myself in the field. The work is sometimes lonely, but the gift of freedom I learned as a child in Japan has stayed with me like a bright and shining mirror in which anything is possible.