S.F. green firm president killed skiing at Homewood resort

SF Chronicle ^ | Jan 28, 2008 | John Koopman

[RDTF]

(01-28) 12:52 PST LAKE TAHOE -- The president of a San Francisco green technology company was killed while skiing at the Homewood Ski Resort near Lake Tahoe, authorities said today.

Tyler A. Palmer, 37, was found unresponsive at the base of a tree about 1:52 p.m. Sunday, the Placer County Sheriff's Department said.

Skiers found Palmer on the Hobbit Land ski run, head-first in the well of a tree. Hobbit Land is a black diamond run, signifying it is for advanced skiers, according to the resort's Web site.

Medics tried to revive Palmer, without success, and he was pronounced dead at the scene at 2:28 p.m.

The Sheriff's Department said there was a light wind and snow was falling at the time of the incident. Palmer's death appears to have been an accident, authorities said.

Anyone who saw the accident is asked to contact the Sheriff's Department North Lake Tahoe dispatch center at (530) 581-6330.

Palmer was the founder and president of GreenMountain Engineering. According to the company Web site, the firm was established in 2003 in San Francisco. GreenMountain is a design engineering consultancy serving clean technology companies.

Before founding the firm, Palmer worked at Signature BioScience, a now-defunct biotechnology company in San Francisco, and at NASA, according to an online biography. He earned a master's degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado, the biography said.

-snip-

[HKMk23]

I was making the point that propping the dead guy up on the pillory as a “greenie” over some fairly generic verbiage that could as easily refer to sane, Conservative conservation as to radical envirowhackism seemed a bit of a hasty judgment, at the least. At worst, it’s the kind of thing that gets us all slammed as a gaggle of beer-swilling, educationally deficient rednecks.

Now, by your description of what’s reasonable, I can see that we pretty much see eye-to-eye on how to handle all things out-of-doors. I’m all for poking holes in ANWR and the bottom of the oceans off of our own shores to get to the oil we already know we’ve got, and I take great umbrage to the greenies’ thinking they’re the only ones who give a rip about nature, because they’re willing to inconvenience the entire human population of Earth (and even kill off a few million) so the sap-headed bumphucker can survive. We normal people — people who pack out our trash when we go camping, and who stick to marked trails when we ride off-road, and who take reasonable measures not to waste energy around the house (how many times can you tell a kid “turn out the lights when you leave the room” before they actually do it?) — don’t care at all just because we’re not ready to implement measures that result in genocide, and our opinions can, therefore, be dismissed out-of-hand. Still, I’ve met enough sane, Conservative, conservation-minded naturalist types that I’m just not that ready to slap on the envirowhack label over a bit of suspicious verbiage.

There IS, in fact a sane path between life with roaring 427 V-8’s with dual 800cfm carburetors (sweet music to my ears, BTW), and the ratcheting of bicycle chains that does not require the eradication or government regulation of either, and Conservatives above all others should be bent on pointing it out.

Vinceri is the passive present infinitive of the active vincere.