A world-renowned keyboardist known for his roles in the Allman Brothers Band and the Rolling Stones has been using his creativity for a new purpose — leading the environmental conservation movement.
Chuck Leavell, co-founder of the Mother Nature Network, signed copies of his book, “Forever Green: The History and Hope of the American Forest,” at the Inn at Virginia Tech yesterday. Afterward, he gave a presentation on preserving forests.
He also sat down the Collegiate Times to talk about how everyone — from rock stars to college students — is playing a part in the conservation movement.
COLLEGIATE TIMES: How did you come to get involved with the Mother Nature Network?
CHUCK LEAVELL: My friend Joel Babbit, from Atlanta, has had a stellar career in advertising and public relations and he built up two different companies that were sold to larger companies, and he started this up with me.
He is the CEO of GCI, and a lot of big companies such as Dell, Coca-Cola, Miller, were coming to him and saying, ‘Look, the Internet is becoming more and more popular getting messages out about what we are doing and these issues, so where do we need to go on the Internet?’ and Joel did some research and he called me up and asked me if I looked at any environmental sites online, and I told him I did and he told me that he couldn’t really find a place where he was comfortable putting ads on. They were some sites, such as Tree Hugger and Grist, and a lot of mom-and-pop sites, even Al Gore’s environmental site it is just technologically advanced.
Joel was looking for something more comprehensive and I told him that it sounded like a good idea. He was well connected and within 48 hours he had commitments from big names from Pete Carroll, Doug Hertz, Tom Bell, a well as commitments of $10 million to fund the Web site.
Joel started putting a staff together and we hired a webmaster. Our vision was predicated on a number of things: We wanted a very clean site, accurate and comprehensive. We have a very unique sponsorship model — instead of selling those ads we came up with these categories, so each category has a sole sponsor. That is Joel’s vision of engaging the sponsors — when you go to the categories you get these video boxes, and we helped produce these videos, but one might be their CEO’s talking about green initiatives, one might be employee recognition, so it is a more personal relationship with the company that is sponsoring and the visitor of the Web site.
It has been a little slow to catch on and the economy went to hell in a hand basket at the time we started this thing, but, when we visited these companies and they saw what it was all about, we got to sign some top tier companies — we just signed Best Buy, and I helped bring them to the table. They have a really great recycling program for electronics in the country, and if you think about that it is a really big program and they know how to deal with it and they are better at it than anybody else so we are proud to have them on board.
Aflac is also on board with us. They have a new slogan that is “You don’t know a quack about Aflac,” and we are going to use that and say, “You don’t know quack about the environment” and try to engage young people.It has been a heck of a journey so far, only 15 months, and after that time we have had a meteoric rise and we are now the No. 1 most visited independent environmental Web site in the world.
A version of this article appeared in the Apr 7 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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