At this juncture of my career, what I’m really focused on is the intersection of agroforestry buffering for climate change, local food, and appropriate technologies.

What I’m saying is that, the perennial food equation, and what we can do in a food forest, is really cutting straight to the heart of climate change issues.

I went to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. My father was a foreign correspondent, so I had lived all over the world as a child. We chased his career to England, to the Soviet Union, back and forth from the United States. I really saw myself as a career diplomat, civil servant, and that’s why I chose Georgetown. But I quickly realized, in my education there, that having spent so much time out of the United States I really was not cut out for a career with the U.S. government. Fundamentally, because I didn’t always agree with U.S. policies.

When I chose to go to plant trees in the wilderness, it was as equally an escape from the end of college and just wanting to do something adventurous, something environmental, and live in the wilderness. It was a complete shift in my thinking about how I wanted to work. From there, I got into the trades, did some carpentry work and got my truck driver’s license.

One of the fun things about having the tree planting experience is that I was introduced to helicopters. One day we had a helicopter contractor taking us from the bush camp way into the far reaches to where there are hardly any roads in the wilderness. I looked over at the very handsome Australian pilot and said to myself, I want his job! And this was my introduction to my great love affair with aviation.

I started to study helicopters, and I obtained several different licenses all the way through to flight instructor and helicopters. I taught classes on aerodynamics and meteorology, and all of those aspects of flying. I also got to fly experimental aircraft and gyro planes. At one point, I was one of about eight certificated gyroplane flight instructors in the world.

The magic of helicopter flying is that you get to see the world from that perspective, very few people get that a helicopter can fly low, or that airplanes fly really high.

Flying generally through very remote access points shows you everything from the lakes and rivers, patterns of nature, those greater patterns of the land, the deltas, forests, the crashes of the mountains, and the watersheds. It shows you how many quarries there are. It shows what development looks like. It shows how roads snake through these wildernesses. And those pathways, of course lead to development. That little window to the world that aviation provided was eye opening.

Up in the far reaches of British Columbia, we once did a contract flying through the Khutzeymateen, which is the only grizzly bear reservation in the world, we flew up over the ocean and then over the forests and then saw the grizzly bears running through the bush and up into the snow-cap mountains. It was a fabulous time in my life.