Maria Baird: Recycling Appeal for the Kid in Us

When Bill Oliver was a boy growing up in Texas, he couldn't decide between being a forest ranger or a musician - or, as he puts it, between Smokey the Bear and Chuck Berry.

In love with the outdoors, Oliver was also a budding guitarist, mostly self-taught, with "just enough chords to learn songs." As a kid he would take his guitar to a muddy ditch and pretend he was sitting by a Louisiana swamp, or along the Mississippi River, and imagine himself an entertainer, like one of his idols, Texas rockabilly star Johnny Horton. He never considered putting his passions for music and the outdoors together, until a friend suggested a trip down the Mississippi.

"When I was 19, I spent the summer of 1968 rafting down the river with a songwriter friend of mine," Oliver said. "It was literally a passage for both us into writing and singing folk music about environmental issues." Inspired by protest singers of the era like Pete Seeger, and earlier folk pioneers like Woody Guthrie, he started writing his own songs.

Since then, Oliver has performed his tunes to audiences of kids and adults from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico. From a song urging folks not to release balloons, to a ditty succinctly titled "Bring Your Own Bag," Oliver packs a direct environmental message into a catchy package.

Hundreds of miles away, and a couple of decades after Bill Oliver's Mississippi River trip, young Doug Nolan faced a similar dilemma. Born in Queens, New York, Nolan's love of the outdoors took him to the University of Vermont to pursue environmental studies. But almost by accident he developed a talent that changed his life.

The lanky redhead learned to juggle in high school from the 1970s bestseller, "Juggling for the Complete Klutz." Nolan says he became obsessed with juggling, spending two or three hours a day practicing in college. After graduation in 1988, as an instructor with Outward Bound, his fellow campers thought Nolan was nuts for carrying around all his juggling equipment - including clubs, balls and devil sticks - on grueling wilderness expeditions. He taught juggling to anyone who showed the slightest interest, but it never occurred to Nolan that juggling was anything but a sideline to his real calling, environmental issues.

"It was funny for me," Nolan said. "I saw them as two different things. I could never combine the two different groups and two different sides of my personality."

Like Oliver, Nolan got a crucial nudge from a friend - a fellow juggling fanatic from college. Why not move to the Bay Area, the friend suggested, and use their skills to convey an environmental message to children?

Nolan was all for the adventure, but never considered it a career. But as he began performing for kids, Nolan found his two passions were falling into place.

"Juggling is a great way to capture and hold students' attention, and I use comedy and physicality to bring a message that otherwise could be very dry and technical and makes it really fun," Nolan said. That is why, 10 years later, Nolan is still performing for delighted students at school assemblies from Pacifica to Concord, who get a giggle from his antics, along with information they can carry home about protecting the environment.

A comical game show gets kids thinking about ways to save water. A trio of high flying rings illustrates how to reduce, reuse and recycle. Balanced on a six-foot unicycle, Nolan brings a down-to-earth message with his routines.

Now, Doug Nolan of Pacifica, and Austin, Texas resident Bill Oliver are getting together for a series of performances under the auspices of San Francisco's Solid Waste Management Program and the Public Utilities Commission's Water Pollution Prevention Program. They say, the timing could not be better.

These agencies have created an environmental tent called "The Most Important Show on Earth," full of ideas for San Franciscans young and old, to protect this special place. This spring, alongside the environmental "Big Top," you will find Doug and Bill performing at street fairs and schools across San Francisco.

As Nolan puts it, "Three quarters of a million people live here, generating roughly five pounds of trash each a day. It's a powerful image for kids to realize they create five million pounds of trash every day. That kind of thing, that's the kind of message we can put into the show."

"California is the source of so many fabulous places - shorelines, mountain tops, watersheds," Oliver said. "California leads in environmental protection in a lot of ways - but it has to because the pressure is on."

Oliver and Nolan will perform at the Academy of Sciences on April 21 and 22, Cinco de Mayo on May 5 and Carnaval on May 26 and 27.

Maria T. Baird is the public outreach coordinator for the SF Solid Waste Management Program.