Using Money to Make Change

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Peregrine falcons were her favorite, and they were on the brink of extinction: The pesticide DDT made their eggs so fragile they would break during incubation. Nell tried to help them the only way a little girl could. "We had five or six apple trees—if the sprayer guy showed up when Mom and Dad weren't home, I sent him away," she says. "I got him to stop spraying the apple trees."

At 16, she'd had enough of just about everything and everybody. She dropped out of high school and distanced herself from her family for a few years. Later, she earned her GED and enrolled in the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, from which she graduated in 1987 with a degree in human ecology. She then went to work for the Environmental Defense Fund in New York City. "I lasted three months, until it got really hot," she recalls. "I had serious culture shock going from Maine to New York."

California beckoned. Nell wound up at the Ventana Wilderness Sanctuary in Big Sur, working to re-establish the bald eagle in central California. A few years later, she switched to the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group. Workers there routinely had their blood analyzed after handling pesticide-laced bird eggs. Even though she didn't work with the eggs, Nell had her blood tested, too, out of curiosity, and learned that her body contained PCBs, DDT and chlordane, a banned termite insecticide. She was stunned.

Then came an even worse blow. After successes in re-establishing the peregrine falcon, U.S. government officials revised the peregrine's status from endangered to threatened, a less-critical category. "When that happened, our funding dried up because the bird wasn't sexy anymore," Nell says. "But that was the most critical time, because we needed the money for monitoring. That was infuriating. Then I had this bare-brained idea, just a knee-jerk reaction. I said, 'Damn it, I am sick of trying to raise money. I am going to do what Pa did—start a food company, but use organic ingredients, and donate the profits to charity!"'

The Organic Generation

About that same time, Meehan, who had helped Nell find summer gardening jobs during her teenage years in Connecticut, sold his business there and moved to Santa Cruz. Call it serendipity, call it fate — Newman and Meehan met up again and it turned out they lived only five minutes from each other. This was a few years before Nell's organic Thanksgiving dinner.

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