Sojourner Salutes
photography by Derek Salko
Our 16th annual Sojourner Salutes honorees are people who have given back exceptionally, locally and beyond. What is it about their lives here that helps inspire them? For environmental activist Connie Harvey, her secluded home alongside Castle Creek, in a warren of wetlands, willows and ponds, is “like living in a wildlife sanctuary.” Globetrotting energy guru Amory Lovins loves coming back to Old Snowmass and “watching elk nuzzle against our windows.” Painter and philanthropist Betty Weiss finds solace in her studio at the Red Brick Center: “Once I get there, I don’t think about anything but art.” All three are classic Aspen profiles in how doing the right thing just comes naturally.
Connie Harvey
Like so many others, Connie Harvey first came to Aspen to ski with her parents and ended up returning to live. Her first trip to the valley was in 1941 or ’42, she recalls with a smile. She returned later during the “ski bum” phase of her life, then again in 1958 when she was married, with her first child and living in New Jersey.
“We looked around for some land, in case we didn’t want to stay in New Jersey,” she says, “and ended up buying our Maroon Creek property from Ray and Ruth Maxwell, Joy Caudill’s parents.” The Harveys bought their Old Snowmass ranch in 1962, and Connie taught skiing for 12 years at Highlands.
“I sort of couldn’t help my environmental leanings,” she confesses about what has become her life’s avocation. “I was born in Vienna and grew up in cities. The only time I was in the country was on vacations and when we were in a little place we had in the Vienna woods.” At 6 she got a dachshund puppy that came with her when they moved to New York, “but my rabbit and canary had to stay in Austria.”
Family friends owned a farm in New Jersey that she loved, and her parents eventually bought half of it so they could live there. “It was always animals for me,” she says with a bright-eyed wistfulness that suggests she’s always fighting a headwind. “I turned into this feral creature, living barefoot in the woods, collecting animals in the wild. In summer I slept in a jungle hammock, and in winter I slept in the barn and didn’t talk to people. I just spent all my free time with the animals. My environmental commitment grew out of wanting to protect wildlife habitats.”
By the time she married Dr. Harold Harvey, she had joined the Sierra Club and was later persuaded by a fellow member to help lobby Colorado congressman Wayne Aspinall to quit blocking a bill in Congress to create a Redwoods National Park. That experience made an activist out of Harvey. With passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, she joined other locals to help secure Congressional designation for the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness Area, an effort that finally succeeded 20 years later.
Along with Joy Caudill, Harvey founded the Wilderness Workshop, which put together citizens’ Wilderness proposals for the Hunter Creek/Fryingpan area, as well as Holy Cross, the Collegiates, Elk Mountains and Ragged Mountains. Says WW president Sloan Shoemaker, “It’d be impossible to count Connie’s contributions. Her wilderness advocacy has given the amazing gift of wilderness to past, present and untold future generations. And her wise council and strong leadership have helped the Wilderness Workshop maintain and grow its standing as a model place-based conservation organization known nationwide for its strong, professional wildlands advocacy.”
Today, Harvey still serves on the boards of two foundations, including the Maki, which makes grants to nonprofits working on public lands policies in the West. And she would like to see a national constitutional amendment protecting clean air, clean water and wildlife habitat. About her own efforts and the Wilderness Workshop’s abilities to sometimes be the only environmental group that everyone will talk to, she observes, “It’s important not to ignore politicians who are opposed to you, which many environmentalists do.”
Amory Lovins
How does one of the world’s preeminent thinkers on energy end up in the Roaring Fork Valley and manage to have global impact from such a remote location? “We wanted conditions that help us devise original solutions,” says Amory Lovins, the founder, chairman and chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Old Snowmass. “Living in nature, beauty and relative tranquility helps us create abundance by design. We wanted an exceptional place where people would want to live and work and visit us. And we didn’t want urban distractions—just effective infrastructure.”
Lovins and his first wife, Hunter, began looking for someplace to start a “think and do” tank in 1982. “We had a long list of criteria for where we wanted to be, with the Roaring Fork Valley at the top,” he says. Lovins had been to Aspen several times at the invitation of the Aspen Institute, while Hunter went to school at CRMS in Carbondale, rode rodeo and loved the area.
Today, the curving stone and glass, solar-powered, fossil-fuel-free enclave that is Lovins’ home and office (and where RMI still maintains office space) has become a touchstone and pilgrimage site for some of the most creative minds in their many fields. “We’ve had over a 100,000 visitors in this building and a lot more via video conferencing and dozens of TV crews,” notes the puckish and often bemused-looking Lovins. Filled with beautiful photos by him and his second wife, longtime local photographer Judy Hill Lovins, the building wraps around a glass atrium with a stream and a jungle currently ripening its 29th and 30th banana crops at 7,100 feet in the Rocky Mountains (without a furnace). Two handsome turtles keep a close eye on the proceedings.
It’s all a testimony to the RMI philosophy that focuses on “reinventing fire,” driving the profitable transition from oil and coal to efficiency and renewables. Finding new solutions to old problems led Lovins in 1976 to famously redefine our energy needs from requiring more of it to “using just the amount, quality and scale of energy that will do each task in the cheapest way.” By “applied hope, not theoretical hope or mere glandular optimism,” Lovins has successfully established that his “elegant frugality of means” is also financially rewarding enough that even Wal-Mart and the pentagon have had RMI help them save energy (and money) in their buildings and vehicles. “It’s very powerful to be able to make a business case that also yields a better environment and greater security,” says Lovins.
Former Pitkin County Commissioner and local political activist Michael Kinsley joined RMI in 1983 and is now a senior consultant there. “We are fortunate that someone with Amory’s remarkable intellect has devoted his life to solving human kind’s most profound challenge—the climate crisis—and discovering ways to make those solutions more advantageous for the economy,” says Kinsley.
While RMI, with 90 on staff in Old Snowmass and Boulder, is known as a global force (Lovins has worked in more than 50 countries and briefed 20 heads of state), local and state governments have also looked to them for help and updates. “Of course we like to support local activities,” says Lovins. “And lots of local valley programs are run by people who came out of our shop.”
Betty Weiss
Add Betty Weiss to the long list of those who originally came to Aspen for the winters to ski, which she did in the 1960s, and stayed because they discovered the summers. “I got my first place here in 1970, once I saw the Aspen Institute and the Music Festival,” she explains, “and then moved here full time about 20 years ago.” That was from Chicago, making her part of another sizable list of prominent local emigrants from there, including the Paepckes and the Crowns.
Once again Aspen, like the world, is fortunate that Chicago shares the wealth. From Aspen Santa Fe Ballet (ASFB) to the Aspen Valley Medical Foundation (AVMF) to Anderson Ranch and the Aspen Music Festival, Weiss has given unstintingly both financially and with hands-on help. This includes once combining her passions for philanthropy and art by creating and painting a 12-foot by 9-foot set for the ASFB in January of 1999 entitled Purple Bend I.
“I’ve enjoyed meeting all the people involved and finding worthwhile things to do,” she modestly notes of her efforts. “I just take it for granted that people here see what there is to be offered and do what they can to help.”
Says former Salutee and current president and CEO of the AVMF Kris Marsh, “Betty is an extraordinary member of our community. In her quiet and humble way, she gives so much of herself to the people and causes that she loves. She gives and expects nothing in return. Betty is a true philanthropist and humanitarian…and her contributions to the Aspen Valley Medical Foundation are immeasurable!”
If Weiss has a favorite cause it might be the Ballet, where she has been on the board almost since its inception and considers co-director Jean Phillipe Malaty a good friend. “I actually danced a lot as an avocation in musicals and recitals in the 1960s,” she says. “It’s a wonderful way to stay fit. In fact, I met Tom Mossbrucker at the Red Brick Center and started taking tap classes there when I first got my studio.”
Petite and delicate appearing but sternly made, she used to do a lot of cross-country skiing and hiking. “I took a wonderful trek in Nepal a few years ago, but now I just take moderate walks up Difficult Creek and around the Maroon Bells area here.”
“Aspen has everything you need,” observes Weiss, who was born in Alabama and moved to Chicago with her parents during the Depression. “It’s changed here, of course, and there will always be a conflict between what makes money and what’s good for the sensibilities. But there are still the same basic good things here if you look. The people have all been around the block once or twice so they’re very interesting. My four children are also still in the vicinity, which makes it nice. And I saw the other day where there are 120 restaurants in town. That’s amazing,” she chuckles. “My brother in Chicago always wondered why I was here, so far from everything. Then he came out for my 80th birthday and saw everything and the sky and the mountains and said, ‘Now I see why.’”
Weiss is especially fond of the Red Brick Center where she has had a studio since 1995 and paints in acrylics and creates collages. “Once I’m there and working I wonder why I haven’t been there more. I think we all have a need to be creative.”
