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Wallace Vickers Kaufman, 1939--, is a writer, mediator and business consultant living in Lincoln County on the Oregon coast. His books include The Beaches Are Moving (Doubleday/Anchor 1979, co-author with Dr. Orrin Pilkey), Finding Hidden Values In Your Home (McMillan, 1987), No Turning Back: Dismantling the Fantasies of Environmental Thinking (Basic Books, 1994), Coming Out of the Woods: The Solitary Life of a Maverick Naturalist (Perseus Books, 2001), Invasive Plants (Stackpole Books, 2007, 2nd ed. 2013, co-author with Dr. Sylvan Kaufman), and The Hunt for FOXP5: A Genomic Mystery Novel (co-author with David Deamer, Springer 2016). Kaufman also translated two books by Mayan writer Victor Dionisio Montejo--El Kanil (Signal Books,1982 and University of Arizona Press, 2001) and The Bird Who Cleans the World (Curbstone Press, 1991). For ten years he served as media page editor for American Forests magazine and also wrote numerous features for that magazine. He has also written for National Wildlife, Orion, Audubon, Omni and many newspapers.

In 1961 he was one of 24 American selected to receive a Marshall Scholarship to study in the U.K. He earned his M.Litt. at Oxford University as a member of Merton College. While at Oxford he served as president of the Oxford Poetry Society.

Early Life Kaufman was the third son of Emma Pickering Kaufman and Arthur Kaufman. He was born in Maspeth, NY and later lived briefly with his family in Roslyn Heights, NY, then spent most of his school years in Sea Cliff, NY. On scholarships from the Li Foundation and Proctor and Gamble he attended Duke University and received an AB degree, magna cum laude, in 1961. He also wrestled at Duke and in varsity soccer he was selected for the All South team.

After returning to the U.S. in the summer of 1963 he ran a food concession at the Sea Cliff Pavilion before taking a job as a substitute teacher in North Shore Schools of Glen Head, NY where he taught general science and biology as well as coaching wrestling. The following year he taught English in the Harry B. Thompson Middle School in Syosset, NY. The following summer and fall he served as assistant curator of natural history for the Nassau County Museum of Natural History, and he helped plan the new museum under construction at Garvey's Point in Glen Cove. Family In 1965 Kaufman married Sarah Helen Ramsey of Seven Oaks, Virginia whom he had met at Duke University. In 1970 their daughter Sylvan Ramsey Kaufman was born. The couple divorced in 1974. Kaufman married actress and fabric artist Quinn Hawkesworth in 1984 and they were divorced in 1989.

Career

In January of 1965 Kaufman began work as a lecturer in creative writing and literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While at Chapel Hill he also filled in at Duke University for novelist Reynolds Price when Price was on leave. In 1980 and again in 1982 Kaufman was visiting writer-in-residence at Bucknell University.

He left full-time teaching in 1974 after founding a real estate agency to break the de facto commission fixing and racial discrimination prevalent in the real estate industry. He also created Saralyn, Inc. to develop innovative homestead communities with covenants written to protect the natural environment. Communities created by his real estate agency and Saralyn Inc. eventually totaled over 2,500 acres in Orange and Chatham Counties of North Carolina.

While in North Carolina Kaufman also served as president of three statewide environmental groups: Conservation Council of North Carolina, Conservation Foundation of North Carolina, and North Carolina Land Trustees of America.

Kaufman began to work as a freelance journalist in Central and South America in 1976, publishing articles on environmental and political issues in many newspapers and magazines. In 1989 as a journalist and amateur radio operator he was one of five Americans who participated in an expedition to the Soviet arctic island of Ayon. The joint US-USSR expedition was part of President Gorbachev's policy of "glasnost". He subsequently consulted on eco-tourism for a new Russian company and carried out World Bank surveys of new manufacturers in central Europe.

From 1993 to 1995 he served International City/County Management Association (ICMA) as Resident Adviser on Housing and Land Reform in Kazakhstan. In Central Asia he carried out economic research for the World Bank and for the Bank's education division he taught property valuation in Armenia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. He also trained journalists and wrote for newspapers and magazines in Kazakhstan.

In 1988 Kaufman had begun mediating business and property conflicts. When he moved to coastal Oregon in 2001 he began to divide his time between mediating and writing.