Alan Rayner was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1950. He obtained BA and PhD degrees in Natural Sciences at King’s College, Cambridge and is currently a Reader in Biology at the University of Bath, England. An accomplished naturalist and ecological thinker, best known for his scientific studies of fungi, he was President of the British Mycological Society in 1998. He has published over 130 scientific articles and six scientific books, including Degrees of Freedom - Living in Dynamic Boundaries (Imperial College Press, 1997). He also produces and exhibits colourful oil paintings that reflect his scientific knowledge and sense of rapport with the natural world, as well as the abuses to which this world can be subjected by human efforts to master it. A Founder of Bath Bio*Art*, he co-organized an International Science-Art event, The Language of Water, in Bath in Spring 2001. He is a Foundation Member of the Matran School, an International School For Cross-Disciplinary Creativity, and regularly communicates about 'inclusionality' with a small internet 'sharing circle'.