Jeremy Hall

The son of a priest and a nun who left their vocation after they met in grad school, Jeremy Hall grew up on a nursery farm in Sonoma County, California. His father later sold the business and worked as custodian at Oak Grove Elementary in Graton, where he enlisted the kids in recycling and cut the landfill haul by 90 percent. "When he retired, they commissioned a statue of him from recycled materials," reports Hall, who took a year off from studies at Willamette U to intern at Aprovecho, then returned and started a community garden. "We mixed kitchen scraps from Willamette with wood chips and saved 75 tons from the landfill." Made aware of forest issues by the '96 flood in Salem, he "crossed the line" and got arrested at a logging protest, and afterwards worked seven years for the Oregon Natural Resources Council (now Oregon Wild) in Portland and Eugene. After a year away in Phoenix for his wife Erin Chaparro's PhD, he and partner Bruce Kreitzberg opened Back to the Roots Landscaping, an all-organic company. He volunteers as board president of Cascadia Wildlands. "Our next big campaign will be wolves," he says. "We need a viable population here for a healthy relationship between predator and prey."