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?"
This sentiment might seem a little harsh, but a moment earlier he was emphasizing the positive, as people who know him have come to expect.
Hutchinson is a devotee of Dale Carnegie, the man who ignited the 20th-century motivational craze with the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People." Soon after arriving in Raleigh, Hutchinson enrolled at a Carnegie center. He was so impressed, he stayed on as an instructor for six years, before going off on his own. Hutchinson now is now host of successtoday.com, an Internet talk show, and is a professional speaker, specializing in sales training and presentation skills. And gushing about the Triangle.
"I just love this place," he says. "We've got hardwoods and pines. The coast is two hours away; the mountains are two hours away. There's such diverse animal life."
Hutchinson, usually impeccably dressed in a suit and tie, tends to operate within the establishment. He has forged partnerships not just with environmental groups such as the Triangle Land Conservancy, but also with politicians of both parties. He has courted the Chamber of Commerce, emphasizing that a healthy environment can be powerful lure for businesses.
In all of this, his training has served him well. Carnegie emphasized showmanship as a way to engage an audience. Hutchinson is an eager pupil. When he goes before Wake County commissioners, he will sometimes bring along his Open Space Machine. It was with him last month as he urged the board to approve the county's first Mark's Creek purchase.
The machine is really a trick, a staple of the amateur magician, a silver container with a lid and a false bottom that conceals a hidden chamber. Hutchinson shows the empty vessel to the crowd and then cuts up a dollar bill and drops it into the dish. This, he says while swirling the now-closed machine, is how the public's money gets mixed with state and federal grants and private donations to create something beautiful. He removes the lid to reveal a handful of jewels. Last month he pulled out an enormous plastic diamond, which he said represents Mark's Creek.
The show never fails to get a huge response.
"I thought he had lost his mind," says Commissioner Herb Council.
Council, a Republican, and Hutchinson, a registered Democrat, formed an alliance to preserve open space as a way to protect the county's water supply as its population booms. Council is convinced that future generations will look upon this as remarkably farsighted. He gives much of the credit to Hutchinson.
"Ten years ago, doing this would've been bizarre," he says. "It's not something people in politics thought about. Sig has been there the whole time."
Hutchinson enjoys the recognition he has received for the open space purchases and the 19 extra miles of greenway and eight new parks to be built by Raleigh. It's one of the reasons, he admits, that he spends so much time volunteering. "I love it and I'm good at it and I love being known for doing it," he says.
But when asked to connect what he was doing a decade ago to his grand plan for the future, he's at a loss. Ten years ago there was no overarching scheme to get people out of their cars, to save communities through green spaces. He was just looking for somewhere to ride his bike.
The vision came later.
