As a 25-year vegetarian, Julie Sullivan, changed her life when she fell in love with a third-generation cattle rancher, George Whitten. Born into the 1960s counterculture movement in California. Raised in a “crazy hippie household,” she protested the Vietnam War, marched in the first Earth Day and stood in solidarity with the victims of the Cambodian genocide.
In 1990, she began teaching with an expedition program for Lesley University in Massachusetts in which students traveled in a school bus across North America to understand environmental issues from the people who lived and breathed them. Ten years into her professorship, Sullivan and her class visited Whitten’s ranch to learn about raising cattle.