Last year, 2021, was the year when people suddenly started writing nice things about me. I had been working quietly in Princeton, doing what would widely be considered good things--working to restore a public nature preserve and house, blogging about nature, and writing and performing jazz and climate theater--but it hadn't garnered much attention in the news media. Since attention wasn't the point, I didn't think much of it. I assumed that people weren't writing about me because I was already writing so much on my own, on myriad blogs.
Then, out of the blue, some editors of a new publication, Princeton Living Magazine, contacted me, wanting to have me on the cover of their first issue. Well, that was nice. They wrote up a whole profile entitled "The Hiltner Family: On a Mission to Beautify Princeton," and had me posing with my younger daughter and our dog, Leo.
Then Pam Hersh, the indefatigable Princetonian columnist, interviewed me for a column for the online TAPintoPrinceton entitled "Steve Hiltner, a Natural Wonder on the Princeton Landscape." Well, that was nice, too. A month after that, a writer named Patricia Taylor contacted me about writing a piece for ECHO about our nonprofit's rehabilitation of Herrontown Woods. She called it "History and helpful hands in Herrontown Woods." Being a Hiltner, I felt very at home among all the H's in the title, what with "history" and "helpful" and "Herrontown", and all the while living on Harrison Street just up from Hamilton and Hawthorn, and Horner.
For many years, advocating for nature and sustainability, I had come to the conclusion that my mind works differently from other people's. Conclusions that were obvious to me, about our place in the world and what we must do to save it, didn't seem to be registering with many others. It occurred to me that I was sharing conclusions, but not the underlying forces and principals that led to them. If I could convey to people something more about what drives my thoughts, about process, that might put them on the road to seeing how our individual lives add up to a giant collective impact on the world, and thereby feeling the motivations I feel to collaborate with nature rather than abuse it.
That's the grander motivation for writing this blog.
