Well, they could be anyone. They could be you! Actually, the greatest reward for this summer’s coming episode would be if you and tons of others took up the GREEN RIDER mantle in the future.
But for right now, they are Kenny and Jamie…
Who is KENNY PEAVY?
Kenny grew up in rural Georgia, USA running around in the woods flipping over logs looking for creepy crawlies and catching crawdads and minnows in the creeks in his back yard. He always wondered what those things were and how Nature connected them all together to do their work.
Kenny strikes a pose.
A few years later he found himself at the University of Georgia studying Biology and working at the Institute of Ecology. Since then he’s worked in fields, forests and labs conducting fish and aquatic insect surveys, studying kudzu, watershed and water quality studies and learned a bit about stream and forest ecology while earning his Masters degree in Science Education from Montana State in Bozeman, Montana.
After 10 years in Malaysia and Indonesia he suddenly finds himself getting ready to jump on a bicycle with fellow adventurer Jamie and traipse around South East Asia in a quest to find beauty, biodiversity and cool people doing groovy stuff for environmental conservation and sustainable living.
‘Til this day he is still trying to unravel Nature’s mysteries and find answers to the questions he asked back in rural Georgia nearly three decades ago!
Check out Kenny’s ongoing environmental education work at: As If The Earth Matters
Who is JAMIE RASKIN?
Considered in Toronto, but conceived in Marrakech, Jamie found himself getting messy in remote corners of the world very early on.
After almost ten years in filmmaking and media arts, he felt the need to get off the phone, kiss the office goodbye and get way out of town. He pedaled through that summer as an environmental educator on long-distance bicycle treks for teens, then moved to Taiwan with a hunch he’d like teaching and a six-month plan. Those six months turned to thirty-six. A year back in Toronto served to improve his teaching skills, but the international experience is addictive. So, with an education degree in tow, he found himself working in Istanbul and two years on in Japan, at Yokohama International School.
Jamie in the Pakistani Karakoram. By Michele Falzone
With a long interest in outdoor education, Jamie attended a series of related workshops at the International School of Kuala Lumpur. The first was led by Kenny. The second wasn’t, which meant they had time to go for beers.
As with so many great ideas this one was conceived at a pub. It was there that the whole bike-filmakingly-across-spectacular-and-ridiculous-places idea was floated. Then Kenny popped the question: “Why don’t you come?” It was one of those proposals that seem preposterous at first, but the longer you look at it, the more you think… well… yeah… why not? Had Jamie been asked a few years earlier what his dream job would be, he would have instantly answered “environmental advocacy filmmaking” (seriously, he would have). And here, was an option staring him in the face.
