My greatest inspiration growing up was my grandfather. He is still today. Vladimir Sokolov was an ecologist, zoologist and a pioneer of the USSR’s environmental movement; an early sustainability advocate who did much to advance the global interest in wildlife conservation.
As a child, I would frequently join him on field trips for months at a time, participating in scientific work along the steppes of Mongolia, deep in the Amazon Rainforest or the reefs of Vietnam. My very first trip with him was to Chernobyl, where we went to hunt ducks with a Geiger counter to measure their radioactive levels following the 1986 disaster. I was nine at the time.
