The Denver Post

Originally published in The Denver Post, July 5, 1999.

COLORADO SPRINGS -- The irony could not have escaped him, but G.L. Scarborough doesn't mention it. Here he is, in a new office on the prettiest side of a drop-dead gorgeous city with a picture window to the south, where a crowd of mountains green from afternoon cloudbursts climb in jagged relief toward Pikes Peak, just visible to the west.

Here he is, a veteran aviator with a durable love for the rugged hills, the reckless rivers, the clarion Colorado sky -- enough love to give up the fat paycheck, the eventual retirement package, the certainty of a commercial pilot's life, to start a tiny environmental nonprofit in a small plane that might make a big difference.

Colorado Springs pilot G.L. Scarborough, seen in his Piper.

Here he is. And G.L.Scarborough's big view out that office picture window is ... a junkyard: rusty metal, orphan auto parts, an errant bedspring glinting in the hot summer sun 40 yards away.

"Aesthetically, it's kind of cool," says Scarborough, who doesn't use the window blinds meant to blot out the dump. "It's there, but I just don't focus on it."

Scarborough's sights are set instead on a fluid and distant horizon: wherever his Piper Cherokee Six can take people who care -- or might learn to care -- about what's happening to the planet.

"Wings of Change uses a small aircraft ... as an aerial platform from which one can see the scope and magnitude of land-use problems on the ground," reads the mission statement for the organization Scarborough founded in Colorado Springs last September.

"I offer a subsidized flying situation to conservation groups," he says. "If they could use an airplane that would benefit their cause ... then I'm there to help them."

One recent outing took him to a conservation conference hosted by Native Americans near Grants, NM. There, Scarborough flew journalists 1,000 feet over former uranium mines under reclamation, including one old mining site -- not visible from the road -- at which low-grade uranium ore was spilling over into a stream bed.

Much of Scarborough's work is centered in the Four Corners region. There, vast stretches of national forest will be affected by the outcome of an 18-month Forest Service moratorium on road construction in potential logging areas, says Sara Scott, Land ad Water Conservation Fund coordinator for The Wilderness Society. Conservationists there are also pushing to win more protection for Bureau of Land Management properties by having them designated wilderness areas.

Colorado Springs pilot G.L. Scarborough, recently took journalists over this old uranium mining site, not visible from the road, where low-grade uranium is spilling over into a stream bed.

Winging over landscape with an uncertain future is "absolutely on of the greatest tools ... for conservation organizations who need to get members of Congress or the press -- who don't have a lot of time to go hiking in the woods -- seeing things from the air," Scott says. "You see environmental degradation -- and regeneration, for that matter -- from just a larger perspective. ..." There's just something about this approach to conservation that's really sexy."

It's the kind of remark that would tease a boyish grin from Guy Lynn Scarborough Jr., a lanky, soft-spoken man devoid of affectation. The Texan has called Colorado home since he was a teen and first took to the skies. He hasn't had much luck keeping his feet on the ground since -- at least not for long.

"It's this mystical sort of thing -- the fascination kids have with airplanes," Scarborough says. After nine years as an Air Force navigator and pilot, Scarborough worked in real estate, the mining industry and, briefly, as a retailer, hawking frozen yogurt at a local mall. In between, he worked as a commercial pilot, flying for several airlines before settling in at Continental in 1987.

Learned about LightHawk

While there, he read about LightHawk, a Santa Fe-based nonprofit that used small airplanes for environmental education. The ideal appealed to Scarborough who describes himself as a "slow waker to the environmental scene."

"As I grew older, I just realized that we only have one planet -- that we know of now, anyway," he says. "It was (about) doing something that was bigger than just myself ... something I wanted to do to be helpful to others."

During a leave of absence from Continental, Scarborough volunteered for LightHawk. In early 1992, the organization hired him as director of flight operations, overseeing four airplanes and more than 125 pilots, most of whom were volunteers. He also served briefly as LightHawk's acting executive director.

"He did just a bangup job of managing people and keeping the staff kind of rallied behind LightHawk while the board tried to find a suitable leader," says Scott, who met Scarborough when she was hire by the organization in 1996.

"I found him to be extremely personable and very dedicated and passionate about his work. ... He had a lot of respect from a lot of the pilots he worked with."

"That was a job which actually was kind of the perfect marriage for him, because it linked up flying and the environment," says friend and Colorado Springs activist Steve Handen.

But when LightHawk moved its operational base to San Francisco, Scarborough and wife, Kelli, decided to come home to Colorado Springs and their community of friends. GL worked as a partner in a construction business for two years before selling his interest to start Wings of Change last fall.

At 56, it was a leap of faith for GL and for Kelli, married 34 years and the parents of two grown children.

"This is so much a mutual risk taking decision on the part of both of them," says friend Jere Martin, a Springs environmentalist. "Not only was he making really good money (as a commercial pilot), but he was positioned ... for moving up the ladder, retirement and the whole thing. He really walked away from a secure future that he had already built up quite a ways."

But the decision was in line with the Scarboroughs' service ethic: Kelli teaches reading and writing to immigrants and high school dropouts at an adult education center.

"They're very compassionate people who make their compassion into positive action," says the Rev. Jim White, their pastor at First Congregational Church in Colorado Springs. "It's not the usual liberal B.S. of sympathy. They really get out there and do it."

Former Catholic priest Handen met G.L. Scarborough at the Colorado Springs soup kitchen Handen helped found almost 30 years ago.

"He used to help out a lot in the soup kitchen, very regularly and very faithfully," Handen says.

"Back when he was a pilot for Continental Airlines, he used to come around a couple times a week -- help wash dishes and mop floors.

"He's very sensitive about the world around him. He's interested in justice and injustice, and he's very bright. He realizes the interconnections -- that it's hard to tell people to stop chopping down forests if they don't have any way to make a living. ... He has a great integrity, too: He does what he says and he says what he does."

Those who know Scarborough have responded to his sense of purpose with enthusiasm and cash. When Scarborough made plans for a humanitarian flight to Honduras in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, his church congregation donated more than $1,000 to help defray costs.

Disaster sites toured

After delivering clothing, medicine and food to a La Ceiba orphanage in February, Scarborough stuck around for weeks to fly Honduran officials and journalists over regions devastated by the storm and subsequent landslides.

"I flew them over their respective watersheds so they could see the extent of damage done by Hurricane Mitch and that done by man because of clear-cutting," Scarborough says. "There were huge landslides below areas that had been cut. Above the demarcation line, though the slopes were sleeper, there were no slides."

Because of the region's poverty, Scarborough didn't pass the hat. But generally, Wings of Changes asks conservationists to contribute the cost of fuel -- about one-third of the total tab to operate the 30-year-old Cherokee. The rest comes from donations -- mostly a few dollars here and there, though Scarborough got a $300 check from one donor after she read a local newspaper article about his organization.

"I've been blown away by people who have thanked me for doing this work and have made donations," Scarborough says. "There are people out there who want give money to causes they believe in."

And people they believe in.

"There's no ego there," Scott says. "He really focuses on the issues at hand. He doesn't let the fact that he's an amazing pilot interfere with the important work that needs to be done."