He wins friends and influences land deals

Close your eyes.

Sig Hutchinson stands behind the podium, speaking softly to the group before him. Imagine yourself in your favorite place on the planet. Pictures develop inside heads, forming fuzzy shapes and pale colors that sharpen into images of a mountain top, a Caribbean island, a painted desert, a picnic on an electric green lawn.

His voice is barely above a whisper. Raise your hand if you are at work. There is no response. How many are driving to work? Nothing. Or in a shopping mall? How about a parking lot?

By this point, most in the room know what comes next. Hutchinson will give yet another presentation on why we need to conserve open space, build new parks, string together additional miles of greenway and somehow cleanse our air.

Facts and figures will be summoned, mixing with the occasional magic trick. Plans will be detailed, just as they have been dozens of times in the quest to persuade county voters to spend millions on land they'll probably never use, to get homeowners to approve pathways to be cut behind their houses for others to enjoy.

A region will be transformed, but not before Hutchinson -- the man nicknamed Mr. Open Space, Mr. Greenway and, most famously, Mr. Green Jeans -- completes the exercise. He asks people where their minds have just taken them. He knows where they've been.

"Already he's got you in his back pocket," says Harvey Schmitt, president of the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce, who has worked with Hutchinson on some projects, but isn't a complete convert to his vision for the region. It was Schmitt who coined the Mr. Green Jeans nickname, which carries a dose of exasperation to go with its admiration. "He has been a very effective advocate."

Hutchinson led the campaign for last year's $47 million Raleigh greenways and parks bond. He did the same for the $15 million Wake County open space bond that was approved in 2000 by 78 percent of voters. He founded the county's air-quality task force, which last month presented a partial blueprint for how the region can deal with its worsening smog. He is a force behind the effort to purchase 7,500 acres around Mark's Creek on the Wake/Johnston county line and create a preserve some are predicting will dwarf William B. Umstead State Park. The list goes on.

Hutchinson, 51, has become one of the most visible and determined environmental activists in the region since he arrived 20 years ago from Lubbock, Texas, by way of Columbia, S.C., where he earned a master's at the University of South Carolina and served for seven years as student activities director before heading north. But it was here that a drive for some decent mountain biking trails along Falls Lake grew into something much, much larger:

Mr. Green Jeans wants to reshape the way people live here.

Ask Hutchinson about this vision and he launches into excited descriptions of a world in which people hardly need their cars. He sees greenways as pedestrian and cyclist thruways, connecting people to a light rail line that takes them to work. He sees them playing in new parks on weekends, spending time with neighbors they otherwise wouldn't know. He imagines abandoned TV sets and children -- fit children -- running free until dark.

"Right now, we meet our neighbors through the windshield of our cars as we fight for every square inch of asphalt," he says. "I believe we can get back to a place where we knew our neighborhood, where we walked to church and walked to school. How many people think they can't wait to go stand in another parking lot or can't wait for another McDonald's?"