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“Help people get to know the planet, and they’ll help the planet out.”
Bob Newson likes the view from the top – and helping others get there too. The journey he began in the New Hampshire mountains eventually led him to The Nature Conservancy.
It started one August, when he began driving from coastal Massachusetts to the White Mountains he’d hiked with his parents as a child. “I went every weekend, in sunshine, hurricanes, snowstorms. I was hooked,” he says.
Soon he heard about the High Pointers, a group that treks to the highest peak in every state. As a former Green Beret, he liked the challenge and so joined in. He’s traveled to more than 35 states so far: “Each summit is different.”
Take Mt. Rogers, VA: “I saw wild ponies rounded up for inoculation, running through alpine meadows – so beautiful, it was surreal.”
Or farther afield, in Wheeler, NM: “A single species of red flower grows on one side of a blue pond, and a single species of blue on the other. Looks like a red and blue bowl with a sapphire center.”
The prize for the oddest climb goes to Mauna Kea, HI: “Bare, like being on the moon – with a volcano erupting to the south. We went near the lava ... it was shiny and twisted. You felt like an insect in a licorice factory!”
In short: “It’s a phenomenal planet,” he said. “I wanted to give something back.”
A Tip from the Top
It was High Pointers founder Jack Longacre, a veteran hiker and philanthropist, who told Bob about The Nature Conservancy. “He said they held the highest philosophy and operated at the lowest cost,” he says.
Bob liked the Conservancy’s twin approach – protecting globally rare areas and preserving the corridors that connect them. He added the Conservancy to his estate plan in 1995.
He’s especially enthusiastic about the Conservancy’s work to allow people access to natural areas, rather than to keep landscapes off limits. “Help people get to know the planet, and they’ll help the planet out,” he declares.
He puts his philosophy in action: When he’s not working long hours at his business, Egypt Country Store in Scituate, MA, you’ll find him volunteering as supervisor of Mt. Washington’s Southern Franconia Notch trail. Clearing the path is critical, since hikers need a fast way down when the famed mountain’s sudden storms hit.
“Volunteering is great. You do things you’d never do for money,” Bob says. “You do it to help someone else.”
He likes how the Conservancy assists people on a practical, grassroots level – for example, promoting ecotourism around the world. “You can’t tell other countries they can’t attain what we have, that they just have to suffer,” he says. “You have to find a way to help them out.”
Image Credit: © Simon Williams/TNC; Video Credit: © TNC.
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