Jon Walker MacLeod is a Seattle-based writer, photographer and lawyer with a J.D. and B.A. with honors in political science and economics from the University of Wisconsin.

He has traveled in more than 50 countries on six continents - Australia remains on his short list - including Hong Kong, China, Tibet, India, Pakistan, Japan, and Thailand (between 1980 and 2000, he was North America General Counsel for Thai Airways International), Botswana, Morocco, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Turkey, Bosnia, Croatia, Russia, Ukraine, most Western European countries, Cuba, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil.

In April 1986, after six weeks in China and Tibet, he was the first American to cross the Khunjerab Pass on the just completed Karakoram Highway from China into Pakistan. In December 1991, after working on a project to resettle Tibetan refugees in the U.S., he had an hour-long, one-on-one, conversation with the Dalai Lama at his home in Dharamshala, India, which is the subject of his very first Meer Magazine post.

In December 1992, he hitchhiked with his camera into the war in Bosnia, and over the next three years spent many weeks in Sarajevo under siege and spirited three Bosnians out of the war and eventually to Seattle. He has banded birds in the Amazon for the World Wildlife Fund, interviewed the editors of La Prensa in Nicaragua during the Sandinista-Contra conflict, climbed to 19,000' in Bolivia, traveled in Ukraine during the 2014 Russian invasion, and had seven solo exhibitions of his photographs from Antarctica, the Okavango Delta, the Galapagos, Morocco, Cuba and the American Southwest.

In his own words, "I have striven to become a citizen of the world, and my travels are waypoints, bright shining beacons, in my life. Although I am a relentless reader and every year devours two dozen books, along with the Atlantic, Economist, New Yorker, Guardian, Times of London, New York Times and Washington Post, I have gained more insight, more wisdom, on my travels off the beaten path than in all my reading and formal education. The extraneous falls away, exposing kernels of clarity and understanding."

After semi-retirement from the law, he has been writing seriously and with purpose for the past six years, focusing on U.S. politics, China, Russia, Israel/Palestine and the global warming crisis.