A stumping speech.

Friend and collaborator John Huie asked me if I could help him stump for the environment in his role as director of the Environmental Leadership Center at Warren Wilson College.

In his case, and given the topic, I gladly dove in.

An excerpt from Encounters with Extraordinary People:

So my world view started to get deeper and roomier. I started to realize that you could approach our environmental issues from a lot of different angles. And that they were all good.

And I realized, too, that Warren Wilson could become an ongoing conversation about the environment and that each of these people and, many, many others could come to the school and become real people, real role models, in the lives of our students.

So I went after them. Jane Goodall has been to Asheville and we started a branch of her institute's Roots and Shoots program here. And Ray Anderson has been here--I pretty much stalked him for three years to get him to Swannanoa. And E.O. Wilson has lectured here to a full house and Thomas Berry has read our student's essays on the environment and visited often. And I've interviewed Paul Hawken for our environmental journal called Heartstone.

All these people, and others, have had an impact on me, and on our students at Warren Wilson, who, in a kind of full circle response, have in their own works and words--inspired the school and our staff and our guests and me. So it is a circle of learnings.

Writing: Jay Fields