The outdoors has been part of North Shore conservationist John Green’s life for as long as he can remember. He grew up in New England – his family lived in Connecticut and summered in New Hampshire. In both places, he roamed the woods and hiked the hills. "I used to climb a lot of the mountains around there," he told me in an interview. "My mother and father were both hikers. They were part of a group that liked to go mountain climbing."

Green got his undergraduate degree in geology from Dartmouth College and his doctorate from Harvard. "I was always interested in natural history, everything from wildflowers to birds to rocks. Studying geology let me spend a lot of time outdoors doing field work." After he completed his doctorate, he was "lucky enough" to get a job teaching geology at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. He had only been to Minnesota once.

In the summer of 1949, after graduating from high school, Green and two of his friends had squeezed into a 1934 Ford Phaeton – "a four-door convertible with a rebuilt 100-horsepower engine" – and driven west.

They started in Connecticut. They drove down the Appalachians and across the South to New Mexico, where they had arranged temporary jobs at a ranch near Cimarron.

"We worked for the farm labor department of the ranch. A lot of good heavy work – piling bales of hay, digging holes for fence posts..."

After a month of ranch work, Green and his friends drove up the Pacific coast and across the northern part of the U.S., crossing through southern Minnesota along the way. Little did he know that he would spend much of his life there – that he would, in his words, "put down roots."

Green didn’t just move to Minnesota and settle down, though. He dove into conservation work, protecting the state’s wild places and helping develop new ways to explore them. I asked him to describe a few of his many environmental activities.

"I’ve been on the board for the Superior Hiking Trail since the eighties," he told me. "Almost since the beginning. That’s one of the activities I like to do best – walking around in the woods."

"I’ve been on the board for the Superior Hiking Trail since the eighties," he told me. "Almost since the beginning. That’s one of the activities I like to do best – walking around in the woods. I’ve also been involved with the Sugarloaf Interpretive Center. It’s a group that started in the early nineties to help preserve the area around Sugarloaf Cove in southwest Cook County. Some people had proposed a big marina in this beautiful area that would have destroyed it. We got part of the place preserved as a scientific and natural area. The association owns part of the property and the state owns the rest.

"I’ve been on the commissioner’s advisory board for the Scientific and Natural Areas Program for many years. The program tries to preserve many areas in different parts of the state that are good representatives of different types of ecosystems or natural communities to help preserve the biodiversity of the state."

I asked Green, "What’s the biggest threat to biodiversity in Minnesota today?"

"Invasive species are a big one," he replied. "Overall, though, it’s land development. More and more land is being gobbled up for different types of development. There are so few areas left in their natural state. Here in the northeastern part of the state we’ve been lucky. Logging has been the biggest impact here, but at least that’s not quite as permanent as a subdivision."

What, I asked, is his favorite wild place? It seemed a fitting conclusion to the interview.

Green chuckled.