Dennis McCarthy, who has a Ph.D. in ecology as well as a law degree, began his career as a park ranger at Grand Canyon National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway. For the next 20-plus years, he worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority, as a field botanist, an environmental planner, the Assistant to the Director of Environmental Quality, a speechwriter for the TVA Board of Directors, and the head of TVA’s publications.

Between careers at TVA, McCarthy was an executive director of Peters Valley Craft Center, an art school operated in cooperation with the National Park Service, at Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. McCarthy retired from TVA in 1997 to take a position with the University of Tennessee’s Energy, Environment and Resources Center, as editor in chief of Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy, an internationally recognized policy journal focusing on energy, the environment, and economic development. In 2003, McCarthy left UT to go into private practice as a lawyer.

Recognizing that the practice of law is his ninth career, McCarthy notes with no small concern that he cannot afford to retire from his present occupation. "Cats get only nine lives," he says. And although writing has been a constant theme throughout McCarthy’s multifaceted career, he fears that even his training as a litigator won’t help him convince the powers that be that he has led only one life, not nine.