Steve and Kate
Kate’s husband and Steve’s wife died just 17 days apart from one another. A mutual friend introduced Kate and Steve to each other some months later. Sharing such an enormous life event brought them together; and those bonds deepened into friendship and love as they helped each other heal through kayaking, snowshoeing, hiking, and traveling.
Today their shared values around intentional community, life-long learning, and a passion for the intensity of an authentic life has brought them to the West Wind Harbour Cohousing community.
Steve is a geologist/geochemist, recently retired from a career in teaching and the environmental business. Raised and educated in the United States, his training led him to projects in Asia, Southeast Asian, South and Central America, Africa, and Europe before moving to Canada in 2006 (which may fulfill his mother’s prediction, based on the confusion between geology and geography, that he could maybe have a career as a travel agent).
In Canada, Steve taught at UBC and continued working on environmental projects locally and abroad. Since retiring, he has continued to volunteer with non-profit organizations on environmental projects. Steve continues to pursue his life-long interest in indigenous peoples by taking classes in anthropology and archaeology, with emphasis on First Nations studies of the Pacific Northwest, as well as by volunteering at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. Steve includes as hobbies: spinning, kayaking/canoeing, hiking and cycling, depending upon the season and the weather.
Kate always loved school, and in fact, never really managed to completely escape from it as today she is a member of the faculty cross appointed to the departments of Botany and Zoology at the University of British Columbia. Having begun her undergraduate studies majoring in art, she is still sometimes a bit shocked at having completed a bachelor’s degree in botany, and a doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology (studying algal biochemistry at a medical school)! She is still not quite sure how that happened.
Kate spent a decade as a research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado prior to the resumption of her career in academe. She loves reading, thinking, boating, bicycling, the outdoors, plants, and lichens – also rocks, people, mammals other than humans, other living beings (microbes too), cosmology, etc. – pretty much everything J (such a nerd).
Despite the handicap of severe over education, Steve and Kate very much look forward to sharing and learning from all the other amazing and wonderful people that are a part of this community.