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Bankrate: I know you are active with environmental concerns and with animal
concerns. What's the main objective of the William Holden Wildlife Foundation?
Powers: Our focus is animal preservation, but in order to do
that, we have to deal with human beings. Animals are not in danger, except by humans. So the first focus in awareness
is alternatives to destruction of habitat, which we teach at our education center. Our main education center copes
with 10,000 students a year and we have an outreach program that currently copes with another four schools with 600
students in each. It's a very costly focus.
Bankrate: What's the biggest lesson you can teach about animal preservation?
Powers: There isn't one single lesson. It's understanding renewable
resources and providing for it. I know there's a commercial venture afoot in the world suggesting that we should keep
our lives in ozone balance. So if you recycle your waste, you can create your own compost from biodegradable waste; if
you can plant vegetation to produce oxygen to continually circumvent the damage that you are personally doing -- it's
being conscious of that as an individual.
By saying it's too big an issue for any one person to affect, that's false and just being lazy.
Bankrate: Are you conscious of this when shopping in stores and going about
your daily life?
Powers:
Yes. I teach all of that in Africa. Although as
much as possible, it's the use of common sense
in the way in which your household functions,
because we waste so much just in scratch paper.
We reuse every single paper that comes in the
house as much as possible. That's being cost-effective
too: The notion of taking your own bags to the
market so you're not contributing to the loss
of more trees. I boycott the newspaper. I don't
buy them because I believe they should be made
from recycled paper. And until they are, I'm not
going to buy them.
Bankrate: I remember you hosted a PBS series about finance three years ago.
How did that come about?
Powers:
The show was to try to demystify the financial
world, which has been held up as being this private
club of the good ol' boys who were making all
the decisions. And by the way, it still is. It
was very important to realize that before the
crash that happened about seven to eight years
ago, the previous 10 years was an incredibly successful
period. The ground was so fertile, all you had
to do was throw seeds on it and they would grow,
especially with all the tech stocks that were
out there then.
There are still opportunities, but one must have a good hard look at what your priorities and expectations
are -- the priorities of an 18-year-old compared to someone who is just getting married, or someone who is retiring.
Everyone's priorities are very different.
Bankrate: Any other advice?
Powers: We're living in a fabulous time. There's so much to learn. Get
financially savvy -- it increases your independence and boosts your self-confidence more than anything. And read. I'm always
reading about three books simultaneously. I think that we, as a society, don't read enough. All the lessons for the present
are in the past.
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