The Rider

Kimo Goree (legal name Langston James Goree VI) was born in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi on King Kamehameha Day, 11 June 1953 and was immediately given the Hawaiian nickname, “Kimo” (“James” in Hawaiian) so that “this little redheaded haole kid” would never forget that he was born in Hawaiʻi on King Kamehameha Day. (He hasn’t forgotten and every day wishes he was hanging out somewhere on Kaua’i between Hanalei and Ke’e.)

Raised in the progressive college town of Berkeley, California, he was swept up in the anti-war movement and attended street protests from the Free Speech Movement (1963) through People’s Park (1971). Kimo ran track and cross-country at Berkeley High School and at Ygnacio Valley High School, where he graduated in 1971. He was Vice-President of his high school class and performed in dramas and musicals.

Kimo trained in improvisational theatre with The Committee in San Francisco, performed with the San Francisco New Shakespeare Company, and did street theatre at Ghirardelli Square and the LA County Art Museum in the early 1970s. As an original cast member of the outrageous environmental dinner theatre shows, “1520 AD” and “Razamatzz”, he juggled, told stories, ate fire, performed magic, sang, and joked on stage in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Dallas from 1972-1976. Kimo joined the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) in 1974 and worked in movies, radio, and commercials until 1989, represented by The Joy Wyse Agency. In 1976 he led the parade for Coca-Cola’s Bicentennial television commercials walking on stilts as Uncle Sam. While attending the University of Texas in Arlington (UTA), Dallas (UTD), and in Austin (UT), he performed at events as “Kimo the Clown” and spent several months each year traveling in Central and South America, where he founded “The Guatemalan Sidewalk Circus” in 1981. From 1982-1984 Kimo performed nightly at “Confetti”, Dallas’ hottest nightclub, six nights a week. His stand-up act, “Drinking Adults After 9:00 O’clock” was improv, ribald audience participation mayhem. Burned out from babysitting drunks from onstage, he returned to school full-time in 1984, finishing a Bachelor of Arts in General Studies (Cum Laude) and a Masters of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (Distinction) in 1986, before moving to Austin, Texas to begin an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program at the Institute for Latin American Studies (ILAS). He changed his last name from “Schulze” (his step-fathers' name that he had adopted as a child) back to “Goree” in 1985. He was awarded a SAG Fellowship in 1987. His birth father, Langston James Goree V, with whom he had a spotted and fraught relationship, died in 1993.

A lifelong endurance athlete, Kimo began bicycle touring in 1969 when he and some high school friends rode from Morro Bay to San Francisco along Highway One, where they did not see another cyclist for five days (unheard of fifty years later.) As a member of The Aerobics Center (now Cooper Aerobics) in Dallas during the 1970s and 1980s, he trained for marathons and could be found every morning at 7:11 at the Boathouse on White Rock Lake for a nine-mile run with friends. He learned to tell tales on the run from his running pals, including the late George Sheehan and Tal Morrison, and carries on their tradition of exercising and spinning stories (but now in in digital format.) In 1979 he ran the White Rock Marathon in 2:48, which qualified him for the Boston Marathon, which he ran in 1980 (2:54).  Each year since, he has gotten slower and slower.

During an internship at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in 1988, he was offered a short-term UN contract to assist with the computerization of the UN offices in Brasília, abandoned his academic pursuits, and helped with the implementation of an NGO network in Brazil called Alternex (UNDP Project BRA/88/014). Using the privileges and immunities of the United Nations, he imported and distributed computers to indigenous and environmental groups in the Amazon, connecting them to a new thing called “The Internet” through the Brazilian packet-switching network, RENPAC. Nominated for the UNDP Management Training Program in 1989, but unsuccessful in securing a position at the UN, Kimo moved to Porto Velho, Rondônia in January 1990 as the Director of the Instituto de Pré-História, Antropología e Ecologia (IPHAE), an applied-research institute working to halt slash-and-burn rainforest destruction through the implementation of agroforestry projects, agro-economic zoning, and by reforming the World Bank project “Planafloro”. He participated in the commercialization of a Brazilian fruit called cupuaçu (Theobroma Grandiflora) and the invention of a de-pulping machine while at IPHAE. In 1990, as part of a Canadian-funded project, he began publishing a newsletter in Portuguese with news and policy papers on the upcoming 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) and participated as an NGO in UN preparatory meetings in Nairobi, Geneva, and New York. During this period he and two colleagues founded “The Earth Summit Bulletin”, a daily publication for diplomats and bureaucrats on the environment and sustainable development negotiations within the United Nations.

Kimo left IPHAE in 1993, joining the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) as the Managing Director of the renamed “The Earth Negotiations Bulletin” (ENB), where he retired as Vice-President and was named a Distinguished Fellow in 2019. During the twenty-seven years at IISD, running the New York/UN Office, Kimo supervised the expansion of IISD Reporting Services, providing objective, neutral reports and analyses from hundreds of international negotiations on climate change, biodiversity, desertification, chemical management, trade in endangered species, and the development of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs.)  He created “CLIMATE-L” in 1997, a moderated email list that served as a primary communications tool for the international climate change policy community for twenty years. Building on a decade of work in curating information for international policymakers, in 2015 he envisioned, designed, and supervised the creation of the SDG Knowledge Hub, tracking policy developments in the implementation of the SDGs. With a team of more than one hundred writers, editors, photographers, logistics coordinators, and translators, Kimo managed teams of conference reporters at several dozen international meetings each year from 1992 through 2019, providing transparency and accountability to global policy negotiations at the United Nations. Over three decades, he raised more than fifty million dollars from governments (ministries of environment, sustainable development, and foreign affairs), foundations, and international organizations to sustain the ENB “cyber-tribe of policy geeks” and their various publications. Traveling more than two-hundred days per year for work, Kimo almost always brought his bicycle with him on trips. His blog with stories from 2007-2020 of bicycle travel, “Messages from the Pale Blue Dot” is archived at https://www.kimogoree.com/

In the year after his sudden and unplanned retirement, Kimo got on his bicycle and cycled from San Diego, California to St. Augustine, Florida in fifty-nine days, followed by extended cycling tours in Wyoming/Montana, Pennsylvania (GAP), Taiwan (East Coast), and Louisiana/Mississippi (Natchez Trace.) His active retirement on a bicycle was interrupted by the 2020 Pandemic, which allowed him the time to plan this trip and write this biography in the third person. In retirement, he is a graduate of the Adventure Cycling Association Leadership Training Program, the United Bicycle Institute Bicycle Maintenance Program, and has completed the training through NOLS in Wilderness First Aid. Maybe he’ll lead bicycle tours someday but prefers to cycle slowly while exploring on his own.

Kimo lives in the Bronx with his wife, Pamela Chasek, a professor at Manhattan College. When they got married, the New York Times wrote about it in the Vows section, since in 1994 it was unusual for people to meet online. They have two sons, Kai Raka (née Goree) who works as an associate producer at Showtime, and Sam Goree, a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Indiana Bloomington.