The Green Ranger
A Former Airborne Officer
Fights a New War

Teacher seeks pupil, must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.
--Opening sentence of Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

Bill Perkins wanted to save the world, but not like this. He is waiting for the projectors to boot up in Hamburg Hall auditorium, where more than 60 of his Heinz College peers wait. As a recently trained member of Al Gore's Climate Project, Perkins is about to give his version of the PowerPoint presentation featured in An Inconvenient Truth. Only 1,000 volunteers in the United States were selected by the non-profit group to spread the global-warming message. It's Perkins' first appearance before an audience. He's admittedly nervous.

Perkins has a new enemy--global warming. His weapon is Al Gore's PowerPoint presentation.

The dual projectors and chalkboards are a long way from the dunes of Iraq and Afghanistan, where Perkins served as an Army ranger after graduating from West Point in 2001. When he returned from duty in 2005, he visited with Ike Wilson, his former American politics professor at West Point. The lieutenant colonel lent Perkins Ishmael, a novel that Perkins says explores human culture and its relationship with our planet. He read it in one sitting.

"The book triggered an intellectual awakening," he says. "I started thinking about what we're doing to our planet." Four months later, Perkins resigned from the military to study environmental policy. He chose the Heinz College.

Now, he must use in the lecture hall the power of motivation that he first learned on the battlefields, where he was second-in-command of 130 soldiers. As he clicks through Gore's 250-slide presentation, Perkins is passionate and energetic. With accentuating hand gestures, he emphasizes troubling facts about rising sea levels and growing species extinction rates.

"We have a moral and ethical responsibility to those in developing nations," he claims. It's the kind of statement he says he could have made years ago in justifying some U.S. military actions abroad. Now he makes the same argument to the crowd in Hamburg Hall. This time it's for protecting the world's poorest nations, which he predicts will be the first ones affected by the economic impacts of global warming.

The hour-long presentation is just the first of many that Perkins will give nationwide. He hopes that being a former Army ranger will give him credibility with some who might be skeptical: "As Al Gore says, 'Nothing should be less political than clean air and clean water.'"

Perkins describes his journey from military officer to environmental activist--or "tree hugger," he jokes--as atypical. "I didn't exactly canvas the walls of West Point with Gore election posters in 2000," says the former conservative.

After he hits the final slide, the lights go on, the crowd stands and applauds Perkins' latest attempt to save the world.
--Sean Patrick Conboy (HS'08)