Rick lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where he has lived for three decades though he grew up in North Carolina. Pursuing an eclectic career between economics and computer programming, he holds two masters degrees, one in economics, the other in telecommunications. He moved to Colorado in 1981 for the outdoors: climbing, skiing, biking and hiking. Since the advent of fracking in the Front Range around 2010, he has become increasingly involved in political activism, and raising public awareness of how bad an environmental policy fracking is, and the urgency to take more concerted efforts to address climate change in national and local environmental policy.