There’s a certain kind of person who runs toward the emergency instead of away from it, and Jack has been that person since he was a teenager paying his college textbook bills as a forest firefighter for the NC Forest Service, a job that doubles as an apprenticeship in staying calm while things are actively on fire.
That instinct hardened into credentials fast: an ambulance attendant by 1975, a certified NC EMT by 1976, and by 1980 a water safety instructor and lifeguard trainer with the American Red Cross, a role he held for the next twenty years.
It’s the same pattern you’ll recognize from his other work, not a single credential but a stack of them, each one building toward the ability to actually be useful when something goes wrong.
That usefulness has shown up on the ground, repeatedly. Jack has deployed with the American Red Cross across hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, and droughts, trained in mass care.
He’s brought that same disaster-response instinct into longer-term recovery work too, partnering with the Lowlander Institute and Church World Services to build shelter, transportation, aquaculture, and renewable energy systems (wind and solar) for climate refugees and indigenous communities in Louisiana, proof that “disaster recovery” for Jack doesn’t stop at the emergency phase, but extends into rebuilding a place people can actually keep living in. (See, Sky Power for the People.)
In 2021, that trajectory took to the air: Jack joined the Civil Air Patrol, where he’s in the Emergency Services Specialty Track and flies as a mission observer on the air crew.
He’s since added over-the-water safety training, pilot ground school in 2023, and is currently finishing drone pilot training for search and rescue — layering aerial capability on top of decades of ground-level response.
He also holds FEMA training across the board, levels 100 through 800 plus HazMat, the kind of alphabet-soup certification list that, taken together, qualifies someone to walk into an incident command structure and know exactly where they fit.
In June 2026, that depth of experience put him at the podium: he spoke at the 51st Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop in Broomfield, Colorado, sharing, with a room full of researchers, the same hard-won field lessons he’s been collecting since his firefighting days in college.,
