Garry Rogers Brief Bio

Dr. Garry Rogers served on the geography faculties of UCLA and Columbia University in New York. He lectured on Biogeography, Climatology, and Environmental Science to thousands of undergraduate and graduate students. After Columbia closed the Geography Department, he left classroom teaching and held positions with the U. S. Forest Service, U. S. Justice Department, and Academic Computing, Inc. In 2007, he was elected President of the nonprofit Agua Fria Open Space Alliance, Inc. (AFOSA) and began writing about plants and animals at Coldwater Farm on the Agua Fria River in central Arizona.

Dr. Rogers is an elected member of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society, and the Phoenix College Hall of Fame. He is active in other scholarly associations. Several of his wildlife books have received awards and his first novel received a Kirkus star and was chosen by Arizona librarians for the OneBookAZ program.

Since becoming President of AFOSA, Dr. Rogers has worked to develop and manage projects that meet the organization’s nature-conservation goals. He has published 23 books, hundreds of articles, and almost 3,000 posts on his blog.

Dr. Rogers and his wife have the privilege of living on the Coldwater Farm Conservation Easement in central Arizona. The Farm has large ponds, a rare perennial stream, and abundant wildlife.

Here is a short explanation of the title. It breaks down the metaphor used in the text to clarify that “Initiation” refers to a rite of passage rather than a beginning.

The title reframes the collapse of industrial civilization not as a meaningless end, but as a necessary rite of passage for humanity. It argues that humans are behaving as adolescents: obsessed with immediate gratification, a false sense of invincibility, and growth, the accumulation of material wealth.

Therefore, the “Initiation” refers to the painful evolutionary bottleneck we have entered. Just as a tribal initiation forces a child to endure an ordeal to become an adult, the climate and biosphere crises are the “initiatory ordeals” required to strip humanity of its illusions.

The goal of our initiation is a shift in consciousness: moving us from the role of planetary conqueror to that of a mature, responsible member of the biosphere. We are not dying; we are being forced to grow up.

In short: The biosphere collapse is the harsh lesson (the Initiation) required to transform humanity from reckless adolescence into mature sapience.

Read the whole text and see how the title fits.