About Me

Supernatural Rooster addresses our special time in history.  How to preserve the diversity of life on earth?  How to evolve sustainably to create a world with less suffering?  During the next 40 years, we play for all the marbles.

Grandfather George L. Cross

A little about my background:  My mother’s father, George Lynn Cross, was a botanist who, at age 38. became president of the University of Oklahoma.  He served 25 years and his achievements, among other things, include helping to peacefully integrate higher education.  But he also built the school’s football program and my parents met during the heyday of Oklahoma football, when the Sooners won 47 straight contests — still the longest win streak in history.

My father, William G. Paul of Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, hailed from a family of lawyers, judges and politicians. He was known as the “outstanding young man” in Oklahoma and after graduating from OU law school he entered private practice.  Always active in professional associations, he later rose to become President of the American Bar Association, where he emphasized the importance of the rule of law.  But my parents divorced when I was 5 and my sister Alison and I lived for a time with our grandparents in the President’s home in Norman.  Mother Mary-Lynn, Alison and I then moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Mother began teaching classical voice at Louisiana State University.  After a year there she married Victor A. Sachse III, a lawyer and lover of classical music. The Sachses were prominent members of the Baton Rouge Jewish community and our home in Baton Rouge was filled with books, art and intellectuals who often met for soirees and to discuss politics.  Early on, I was immersed in the world of classical music and learned to play the violin.  Never brilliant at it, long hours of daily practice permitted performance as a soloist and in the second violin section of Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, the semi-professional orchestra in our university town.

I began feeling a strong spiritual connection with nature upon visiting the Rocky Mountains in 1970.  Shortly thereafter, I began a “bird list.” I became consumed with identifying birds and was particularly fascinated by bird song.  In 1972 my grandparents introduced me to one of their friends, an ornithologist named George Sutton.

Sutton was one of the first Americans to study the birds of the tropics — traveling to Mexico starting in the 1930s; collecting specimens; painting birds; and then writing about his experiences.    I visited “Doc” Sutton at his home and several times on the OU campus.  Sutton encouraged me and perhaps because of him, I made a birding pilgrimage to Mexico, which I visited just before my senior year in high school. My interest in the neotropical realm has been a big part of my life since I was a teenager.

George M. Sutton in 1973

I gradually extended the range of my birding activities, continuing the passion at Dartmouth College, where I obtained my undergraduate degree in history.  I remained a serious birder at Yale Law School, where I frequented a place called East Rock Park.  In addition,  while at Yale, I obtained my certification to be a scuba diver.

Eventually, I was compelled to choose where to move upon graduation from Yale and how to fit into the legal profession.  My classmates mostly picked the large cities.

My strategy was somewhat different, possibly because both my father and stepfather practiced law in medium-sized cities.  I wanted a sophisticated law practice but in a mid-sized city where I could fully experience a life away from work.  I was hoping for a balanced life.

I interviewed in several cities and fell in love with Arizona and the Southwest where I was thrown into the courtroom early in my career. A courtroom lawyer must teach — but he must also know how to expose falsehood and destroy. Cross examination became my specialty.

Charles Darwin

Commensurate with my plan, I more seriously took up backpacking, hiking, and camping.  By 1983 I was studying not only the birds but also the plants, the stars and the geological formations.  I travelled throughout the West in order to drink in the majesty of creation.  My heroes were the great scientists and natural historians – the thinkers discovering the nature of reality.

Gradually, I tuned into the fact I was Native American – a voting citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.  My father’s mother, Helen, always encouraged the family to maintain and respect its Native American heritage.  This heritage is something I continue to celebrate and study, particularly regarding spiritual matters and my connection to Earth’s System of Life.

Since moving to Arizona I have backpacked, fished, camped, birded, and explored wild places throughout the American West, Canada, Mexico, and Central and South America.  In addition to my birding and photography interests, I make natural sound recordings — contributing my best to an international website called “Xeno-Canto.org.”  What I love, more than anything, is to experience the Creation.  I find I can do that in the Sonoran desert with its clear nights and distant horizons.  It is an added bonus to know that the wonderful Rocky Mountains and Pacific Ocean are just a short drive away — as are the great canyons of our planet.  The mystical Four Corners region is my backyard.

I had taken up scuba diving in 1980, while in law school in New Haven.  After my children died prematurely, my wife Bonnie and I became ever more seriously involved in the activity.  We have travelled to the great diving locations on the planet, and both of us enjoy underwater photography and videography, which you will find on this website.

I have long endeavored to be a natural historian.  I now acknowledge more fully that what I aspire to be is a philosopher — an original thinker who influences the trajectory of society.  This is the impulse behind Supernatural Rooster.

Thanks for visiting my website, Supernatural Rooster!  Allow me to introduce myself.

I graduated from Yale Law School in 1982 and practiced law for 35 years — receiving designations such as Southwestern “Super Lawyer;” “Best Lawyers in America;” and Martindale AV “Preeminent.”   I handled commercial cases and conducted courtroom trials.  As a practicing trial lawyer I frequently worked with the evidence rules, which had fascinated me since law school.  The law of evidence exists so that courts can determine the truth.

In the 1990s I became intrigued that writing, photos and sound recordings were increasingly “digital.”  One of the implications was that, Society-wide, it was suddenly easy to undetectably alter records. The 5500 year-old technology called writing had suddenly transformed.  With the 2001 article “The ‘Authenticity Crisis’ in Real Evidence,” I was perhaps the first to address a court’s need to understand whether electronic records are authentic. 

One of my two books — the 426-page Foundations of Digital Evidence — further addressed such issues.   It discusses the history of the law of evidence and introduces concepts necessary to test digital information.

My 2008 “best seller”

Because of the new technology, the amount of society’s information had skyrocketed.  How to learn the truth in a dispute encompassing millions of records?  In the 2007 article Information Inflation: Can the Legal System Adapt?, my co-author Jason Baron and I predicted that Society would use algorithms to identify relevant information in vast databases.  We gave a framework for how lawyers could do so and today, such technologies are used by the legal profession in the largest of all cases.  The concept is further elaborated by the methodology called “Big Data.”

On the banks of the Seine

But in addition, in Information Inflation, I discussed that there was now an ecological aspect to writing.  It had “come alive” in what I termed a “complex information system.”  Such systems now dominate the planet.  Information Inflation has been cited over a hundred times in court opinions, legal briefs and scholarly articles.  Jason and I are pleased it has received international recognition and was cited, for example, by the Supreme Court of Singapore in two of its cases.

Cloud computing and smart phones came into our lives and in 2012  I was asked by officers of the American Bar Association to examine the ramifications of mobile device technology, editing a magazine dedicated to the transformation of Society.  In the edition, I involved futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamondis, and Daniel Burrus. The edition addressed areas where mobile device technology had become a “game-changer.”  My lead article, “Transformation,” explains how the “non-linear” relationships of complex systems lead to sudden and unpredictable transformations.  The natural laws governing transformations apply not only to ecosystems but also to other complex systems — such as all human economic, cultural and technological activity.  I plan on further writings in this area. 

In 2014, both in my article Systems of Evidence in the Age of Complexity and in an address to the judges updating our federal rules of evidence, I discussed the technological drivers of our economy. Because of their recent, exponential advances, complex information systems were by that time not only sensing reality and storing information, they were making statements — asserting “facts” in courts of law.  And they were making decisions without human intervention.  The algorithms were taking over and the legal system had to adapt. 

Address at John Hopkins Medical School

The centuries-old law of evidence did not account for this new development.  How to test what the machines were telling us?  How to “cross-examine” the end result of untold computers and their operators, linked together so as to function as a giant Mind?  I suggested our concepts of evidence should evolve to address the situation — so the courts, and the larger society both, could continue to discover truth notwithstanding exponentially increasing complexity in our civilization.  

Three years after moving to Arizona I became obsessed with learning about evolution and Earth’s periodic extinction events.  My urge to understand consumed me and the obsession continues to this day.

The fascination was initially turbocharged by the rapidly evolving understanding of the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds. We take such things for granted now, but when I started birding in the early 1970s no one fully understood and few believed birds were dinosaurs. In the late 1970s and early 1980s this field exploded with new discoveries. The evolutionary link was gradually rediscovered and I followed developments closely, reaching out to experts in the field.  Of course, the dinosaur bird connection had long been a big part of understanding the process of evolution.

Recording in the Amazon

But ever hungry for a “big picture,” I studied not only biology and geology but also quantum mechanics and a field called “far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics.” This is the set of natural laws that define the way systems can locally organize their environment. How does order arise out of chaos?   Such self-organizing behaviors are now called “complex systems.” The way such systems evolve is the stuff of extinction and evolution both — not only for the global ecosystem but also for its lesser included systems such as human culture and economic activity and, indeed, for civilization itself.

I combined my thinking about ecology with my passion to be a well-rounded naturalist. I befriended an ornithologist and conservation biologist named Theodore Parker. After I returned from Costa Rica in 1989, and he from South America, we listened to each other’s sound recordings and had wide-ranging conversations about how to save the natural world. It was a special time in the history of environmental thought. I poured out my enthusiasms to Ted.

After such a conversation Ted said to me: “You know there is a word for what you talking about. It is called ‘biodiversity.’” I had never heard the word biodiversity. It was the 1980s and people were just starting to use it as short hand for “biological diversity.” Ted was telling me about a unifying concept and I was electrified. That conversation triggered a study of the concept and all the value biodiversity provides civilization. It helped channel my thinking about extinction, which was becoming ever more urgent. I began giving lectures. I became involved in environmental causes and organizations.

After 2 years of such activity, the UN sponsored an international proceeding named the “United Nation Conference on Environment and Development.” It was the UN’s first great plunge into sustainable development. The process comprised several preparatory meetings (occurring in 1991 and 1992)  and then a grand finale in Rio de Janeiro – the so-called “Earth Summit.”

Because of my ongoing environmental work I was appointed a USA citizen delegate to the United Nations to participate in the Earth Summit process. I attended the final preparatory conference in New York City, where I involved myself in the negotiations on the biodiversity aspects of the UNCED documents.

At the same time an international treaty, the Convention on Biological Diversity, was being negotiated. It was to be the first international instrument on biological diversity and many consider it the bedrock of international sustainable development efforts. I was disappointed the George H. W. Bush administration had at the outset decided not to meaningfully participate.  I couldn’t believe it!  Our great nation turning a blind eye to the first international attempt to conserve earth’s planetary heritage?

I asked my new State Department friends how to become involved and they were supportive. After consulting with the State Department about whom to contact, I briefed 20 of the convention’s most prominent delegates with a comprehensive package –including a comment letter and statements from Nobel Prize Winner Ilya Prigogine and esteemed biologists E.O. Wilson and  Paul Ehrlich. I was pleased to receive a letter from a Charles Liburd of Guyana thanking me and stating tmy comments were informing the last round of negotiations.  I am now proud that my arguments about the value of “ecosystem services” seem to have been influential in the development of this aspect of international law.

I plan to write about the Convention on Biological Diversity, and my international conservation work in 1991 and 1992,  elsewhere on this website.  The points made almost 30 years ago about my new concept of a “precautionary principle” — the necessity of preserving ecosystems to safeguard against climate change — have been proven true.

A few months after all this frenetic activity my first child, Jack was born.  My life changed.

— to be continued–