“It’s a Bird ... It’s a Plane ... It’s Al Hanners”

It appears we can’t rely on Superman to save our planet, but luckily real heroes are all around us. Trade in the brightly colored spandex for a comfortable pair of slacks, the flowing red cape for a loaded backpack and muddy hiking boots, the X-ray vision for a microscope and the power to fly for a canoe.

Meet Al Hanners, who at age 91 was presented with the 2008 RE Sources Environmental Heroes Lifetime Achievement Award.

Hanners may not be faster than a speeding bullet and he certainly can’t leap tall buildings in a single bound — he’ll be the first one to tell you that he moves rather slowly these days. But behind his thin, snowy white hair and matching bushy eyebrows is a man who has devoted nearly a century to learning, teaching and sharing about our planet.

“He’s a person that is an inquiring mind — he just constantly wants to learn about new things,” said Vikki Jackson, a close friend and colleague of Hanners since the early 1990s. “He’s 91 now and he can still never be satisfied with the status quo. It’s amazing that he can’t just sit back and put his feet up.” [Al is now 92.]

Hanners is the fifth person to be awarded the lifetime achievement award in the six years since RE Sources created the Environmental Heroes program, said Crina Hoyer, the program director for RE Sources.

Hoyer said the award begins with a nomination from someone in the community. From there, the nomination goes to a panel made up of board members, employees and other community members, generally former winners, who make the decision.

“We’re recognizing [the winners] as being great stewards of our community who show passion for our environment,” said Megan Artz, the outreach and membership coordinator at RE Sources. “It’s just a way for them to be thanked and highlighted for their efforts.”

And what an effort Hanners has made over the years.

Hanners doesn’t like to accept secondhand information, but prefers to figure things out for himself. In fact, Hanners, who has been considered the leading expert on willows in the Northwest, has never even taken a biology class. He taught himself.

“It was a blessing, because I wasn’t brainwashed,” Hanners said of his lack of formal education. “Some of it was so goddamned complicated. So I did it my own way; instead of sticking to what some biologist sitting in an office said, I went into the field.”

Hanners went into more than the field; he explored almost every field he could. Armed with his pick-up truck, canoe, microscope and camera, he trekked through mountains and backcountry, paddled through lakes and oceans, camped, discovered and dug up all sorts of plant species. He didn’t like the way textbooks were written, so he wrote his own. He wanted to make nature easier to understand.

“I felt that if people can’t identify plants, they can’t care about them,” he said. “When you care about it, you don’t want it to get eliminated.”

His main research focuses since he began studying nature have been willows and wetland plants, said Marie Hitchman, who has known and worked with Hanners since he moved to the Northwest from Toronto, Ontario in 1981.

“He has a very curious mind,” Hitchman said. “He’s always wanted to tackle things that other people didn’t want to deal with. At one point he took it upon himself to identify and locate the 21 species of willows in the state of Washington and he managed to locate about 20 of the 21, which is a feat.”

Hanners is very straightforward about his accomplishments and blunt about what he feels he should get credit for, but he’s also quick to say he’s had help. He’s gotten assistance from friends, people like Jackson and Hitchman.

He’s proud that some of his writings have reached the Internet despite the fact he never learned to type. His more than 70 articles for Whatcom Watch were written in long hand and transcribed for publishing, as were his books, such as “Northwest Beginning Birding,” which he wrote for the local Audubon chapter in the 1980s. Jackson and Hitchman have helped him publish some of his works on his various studies, but pictures are his pride and joy.

Hanners took photos for books he’s written and donated his pictures for use on the RE Sources Web site and at Western’s Herbarium. Hanners has photographed 25 species of marine algae, 55 different marine animals and 279 species of native plants.

He became a self-proclaimed naturalist after moving to the Pacific Northwest, but said he’s always been interested in nature.

Hanners grew up on his grandfather’s farm in Wisconsin because his father died from pneumonia a day after he was born. He graduated from high school at 16 and worked as a farm hand for two years before heading to college.

Hanners attended the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and then received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He attended Kansas University to work on his doctorate, but was called away during World War II to work for the government at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in a magnetic station in Pearl Harbor.

He spent most of his career traveling the world as an oil geologist for Texaco and was, at one time, the chief geologist for all of Latin America.

“He used to mesmerize me with amazing stories about going into the jungle exploring for oil,” Hitchman said. “They’d literally go flying in on a little air strip to go tromping around looking for oil in the middle of the jungle.”

Texaco sent him to a variety of places including Latin America, Canada and the Middle East, but Hanners said his work abroad was a product of the times.

“Why did I work foreign? Because I could get a job,” he said. “Have you ever heard of the Great Depression? Well, I grew up in it.”

Hoyer said she didn’t think working as an oil-man affected Hanners’ eligibility for the award.

“You can’t really fault someone for doing something that we really didn’t know was bad at the time,” Hoyer said.

Hanners retired in 1981, and moved from the East Coast of Canada to the Northwest and became more involved with nature. Since then he’s written books, such as his birding guide, which has been almost a bible of sorts for birders, and columns for Whatcom Watch. He was also the president of the local chapter of the Washington Native Plants Society and the vice president of the local Audubon chapter, has campaigned for politicians and sailed throughout the world.

“One thing I always wanted to do was pass on what I’ve learned to other people,” Hanners said. “I learned when I was a child that I should leave the world better than I found it. I think you can’t do that now, because the world’s in a whole hell of a mess. It doesn’t make me feel good, but it makes me feel better because I’m doing what I can.”

These days, Hanners sticks more to his own home than the field. His health isn’t the greatest and he’s a few steps slower than he used to be, but he’s very proud of the fact that at his age he’s still licensed to drive.

He doesn’t have the same passion to write anymore, but said he plans to publish his memoirs if he can overcome a nagging case of writer’s block.

He likes to keep in touch with his four children and loves to watch the chickadees, his favorite birds, come to visit the hand-made birdfeeders he crafted for his backyard.

He loves to read and spends a lot of time in his den where the walls are lined with bookshelves. Novels, magazines and newspapers spill onto his armchair, table and floor and a television sits centered in front of an inviting couch. He’s comfortable, a bit lonely since his wife passed away last November [2007], but always eager to learn. He still has a feisty spirit which leads him to challenge anything and everything that he disagrees with, Jackson said, but that’s just Al.

“He’s definitely an independent individual; he knows what he wants to say and he works very hard to substantiate whatever he’s going to do,” she said. “He’s very opinionated, but in a wonderful way. He makes sure whatever he’s going to say he can back up. He can be stubborn, but if he feels he has good grounds he sticks to it. If you challenge it, you better come back with equally good ammunition. It makes for some good debates.”

Hanners said he’s honored to have received the lifetime achievement award from RE Sources. When he took the stage to accept the honor April 19, dressed in his typical slacks and thick wool sweater, he brought the crowd to its feet — twice. Echoes of applause, shouts and hollers of appreciation echoed across the walls of the Northwood Hall. Two of his four children were able to attend and both watched with pride as their father’s achievements were honored.

Al Hanners may not be a comic book icon like Superman, but to the people who know him, he’s a hero in his own right.

“He lives the way he talks about things. He’s very conscientious in the things he does, whom he votes for, how he lives his life and goes about what he does in his life,” Jackson said. “He is an environmental hero in the sense, not as a public entity and being out there promoting all these different things as an activist, but more privately in educating people." §

This article was first published in The Planet, Spring 2008; it’s reprinted here with permission from the William Dietrich, advisor to The Planet. The Planet Magazine is the student publication of Huxley College.