Wolfger was born at the beginning of World War II into a self-sufficient, nearly late medieval farming village in Germany. Surprisingly, this formed his current view of human settlements nearly seventy years later. Helping to create that view was living in the mid-Atlantic region of the US with its rapid, unplanned growth of car-centric human settlements.

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Wolfger worked for forty years at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University after studying electrical engineering at Drexel University for seven years. He found the most meaning at his job when doing required systems thinking. This view of evaluating and creating solutions for problems started with his reading of Donella Meadow's Limits to Growth (1972) which explains The Club of Rome Report on the possible futures of human life on this finite planet.

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After having practiced human-created engineering, Wolfger now believes that the best engineering on the planet has already been done, and evidence of its products are all around us in nature for us to learn from, appreciate, and respect. We need to learn to live within this marvelous system design and implementation without ruining or destroying it with our unsustainable numbers, our hubris, and our capitalist economic system ever dependent on growth in a limited world.

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Wolfger now lives in a small net-zero energy house in a cohousing community in Charlotte.