Meet People Like You

Edna Lee Kelly

Edna Lee Kelly spent much of her childhood outdoors-she grew up in Pinole, California near San Francisco on her family's horse ranch, where she helped train Arabian horses. But it was a special camping trip when she was 12 that ignited her passion for nature.
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Dr. Richard Latterell

For Dr. Richard Latterell conservation of wilderness has long been an enduring aspiration. For some seventy-five years, from youth through college, career and retirement, enjoyment and preservation of the natural world has been his major preoccupation.
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David Alsop

The house I grew up in far northern NJ had a mile of woods behind it that extended back to the mainline of the Eire RR. These woods had many revolutionary war-era stonewalls, numerous signs of being more recently cut over, and many had toppled over shallow-rooted trees and various gigantic logs of the American Chestnut that had fallen in the 1930's by an invasive fungus. Every year or so, a ground fire ignited by the stream engines of the Eire Rail Road would go running through these woods.
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Jim Burch

When I was in high school, I was lucky enough to play the role of Henry David Thoreau in a local production of 'The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail'. During my research for the part, I purchased the book 'In Wildness is the Preservation of the World', with quotations from Henry David Thoreau and photographs by Eliot Porter. That book, and the experience of attempting to understand and portray Henry David Thoreau, helped bring my life into focus.
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James Morris

Some days the highest peaks of the Sierra Nevada range were visible while growing up in the San Joaquin Valley of California. My parents said I went "camping" in my first year. A neighbor introduced me to the wonders of backpacking on a September trip into the high Sierras. And later, there were the treks in the western United States and South America.
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Frances Chamberlin Carter

Frances, whose nickname "Freddie" came from her maternal grandfather, attended Mount Holyoke College. She transferred to the University of Arizona, where she earned a degree in fine arts. Carter returned to Chicago to work at the Museum of Science and Industry. "I didn't last very long. When I asked to take the summer off to climb, they fired me," she explains.
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Dr. Roy Holub

For many years, I enjoyed spending time at my grandparents' summer home along the Fox River in Illinois. This is where I first realized how important nature and natural environments were to me. Over time, I also observed the deterioration of river quality and the concurrent change in aquatic life. These experiences set the stage for a career with a major focus on protecting and improving the quality of our water resources and for my support of conservation organizations.
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Edward Hoagland

"I just couldn't wait to get off that school bus and into the woods," author Edward Hoagland recalls of his 1940's childhood in Connecticut. A stutter made it difficult for him to talk to anyone aside from close friends, "but I was able to talk to animals. There was no pressure." His love of them led him to take a summer job with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus after his freshman year at Harvard. "I was in the menagerie, working first with creatures like giraffes and rhinos, but I aspired to take care of the lions and tigers," he says. "Once I proved myself, they let me do it, that summer and the next." Hoagland spent another summer hitchhiking across the country, fighting forest fires, and tending to the MGM lions at the World Jungle Compound in Ventura, California.
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Martin Dodge

For Martin Dodge, nature has always been a haven. Growing up in Connecticut, Dodge said, "I gravitated to the woods as often as I could. There was steep gorge nearby with a perennial stream and big trees. I would build forts and treehouses and just escape into the wilderness." Dodge's love of nature continued when he attended Colby College in Maine, where he founded and coached the school's woodsmen team as he majored in chemistry. "Had it not been for the joy and outlet that I had with the woodsmen team I doubt I could have overcome the academic challenges of my chemistry major," he remarked.
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Alida Struze

At age 94, Cleveland native Alida Struze knows that times have certainly changed. She worries, however, that when it comes to wild places, things have not changed for the better. And she feels children are the ones losing out.
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