Zencey's Ph.D. dissertation, "Entropy as Root Metaphor," published at Claremont Graduate University in 1985, included a chapter calling for the development of a thermodynamically enlightened economics.
[2] Zencey had a story in April 2009 in The New York Times about chemist-turned-economist Frederick Soddy, whose ideas were largely ignored when he was writing in the 1920s and 1930s but are now a foundation of ecological economics.
Zencey lived in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife, the novelist Kathryn Davis, his cat, Finny, and his Alaskan malamute, Lucy.
The novel was published in a dozen foreign editions, including versions in German, French, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, and Danish.
Zencey's effort to use the form of the personal essay to deal with substantial intellectual content drew praise from Bill McKibben ("infinitely wise and unflinching"), and places the book within the tradition of environmental wisdom literature – works like A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold and Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
In recent work, Zencey has abandoned the personal essay in favor of a more didactic approach to similar material; see "Is Industrial Civilization a Pyramid Scheme?"