Harold has always been a source of intellectual inspiration, to what are now at least two if not three generations of students and colleagues living on several continents. Subsequently he was to propose a more grounded perspective on development studies, explore issues of land degradation and make a significant contribution to the debate on environmental change. Perhaps, in the final analysis, it is Harold's fundamental sanity, a sanity which is grounded in the real world that lies beyond academia. This is expressed in his commitment to fieldwork - and the sincere regret that the last time he was able to do any was in Malaysia back in 1986. Fieldwork, he affirms, keeps the scholar in contact with people who derive their daily sustenance from productive activities, in his case rural peasants.
Fieldwork is also rooted in specific places.
It is more personally rewarding and it makes more sense. This is scholarship which is constructed out of the virtues of sanity and common sense. His office is just down the corridor from the Department of Human Geography at the Australian National University where he worked for some 20 years. Harold Brookfield is a magnificent outsider and cultural ecology is much the richer for it. Kate Pearson, an M.A. student in the Department of Geography and Regional Development at the University of Arizona, received an award for Master's thesis fieldwork conducted during the summer of 1997.