I want people to be amazed by our environment

November 27, 2018

“I started as a river guide in college. A friend of mine was doing it and I thought she was a total badass, so I wanted to try it out. I loved steering the little craft and did it in Georgia, California, and Montana. I got frustrated because I wanted people to feel amazed by what they were passing through. The waterway was a wild and scenic river, the geology was like nowhere else in the world, or we saw a bighorn sheep or a bald eagle. Some people could care less, it could have been like riding Splash Mountain at Disney World. I realized I needed to work in something that was more proactive as a conservation effort to help people be captivated by what they were seeing. I worked for French Broad Riverkeeper and organized a nine-day paddle trip that was all about conservation. I also worked in farmland access and got young farmers on the land.  It is hard to not care about the land and our environment if you experience it. I use this quote all of the time, ‘People will only care about what they understand, and they only understand what they experience.’  I love watching older folks get outside and see things they have never seen before. People want good lives for their children and the people they care about. When we think of ourselves as separate from each other is when it gets challenging. We are all breathing the same air and drinking the same water, whether it comes from a golden faucet or a pipe in the ground. If we don’t do something about that, we will lose it. There are some topics that we can all agree on, and what we do with our natural resources should be one of them. Eating seafood, breathing our air, watching birds in the sky, watching a sunset. Those are the things we all have in common living on the coast. Working with the Weeks Bay Foundation, I want to help people experience that.”

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