Vance Martin’s first childhood memory was the sight of a woodpecker on a tree in front of his house when he was a year and a half old. “The next year, I looked out there and there was the woodpecker again. And I wondered if it was the same woodpecker,” says the 74-year-old, an expert in international nature conservation and wilderness protection.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Martin, who was in the city to speak at the Nature inFocus Festival, an annual festival to celebrate nature, conservation, and wildlife, always knew that he wanted to work with nature. “I turned down a full scholarship in sports to go to forestry school,” he says, adding, however, that he quit in a year and a half “because in the 60s if you were a forester, you were a tree farmer. That didn’t work for me,” says Mr. Martin. “I wanted something more holistic, but it didn’t exist back then.”
Instead, he studied English Victorian and Romantic Poetry. “I am so qualified to be in this field,” he says, with a guffaw, admitting that he was the poster child of the 60s back then with his long hair, regular use of marijuana, and strong belief in love and hope. “I draw on these (love and hope) every day of my life, even today,” says Mr. Martin, who left the U.S. at 21, a week after he got his degree because he didn’t like what was happening in the country back then. “This was Nixon, the Vietnam War,” he remembers. “I went away for six weeks and stayed away for 15 years,” he recalls.
