Ciara Bryne and Kim MacQuarrie Create a Nourishing Legacy
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Ciara Bryne and Kim MacQuarrie for an article in Luxury Las Vegas Magazine. For those who haven’t read it, I think you’ll find this daring, adventurous couple’s story inspiring.
Ciara and Kim aren’t the kind of people who just talk about doing things. They’re the kind who roll up their sleeves, see what needs to be done, dive in, reach out, inspire others, pull all the pieces together, find solutions to obstacles, and create something great. That’s what they’ve done in Las Vegas.
Since moving here in 2010, they’ve used their nonprofit, Green Our Planet, to bring teachers, farmers, chefs, and corporate donors together to fund and plant vegetable gardens in 65 schools. Teachers use the gardens as outdoor classrooms to teach math and science. The kids get engaged planting the seeds and seeing them grow. Ciara worked with teachers to develop a curriculum for grades K-5 (more details in the article).
The vegetable gardens also provide an opportunity to create farmers markets where kids learn the components of operating a business. 
Ciara and Kim have also partnered with 40 or so chefs who show the kids how to make smoothies and simple recipes using the produce that they grow.
Thanks to Ciara and Kim, the once barren school landscapes are now thriving endeavors filled with food that the kids, their parents, the teachers, the chefs, the farmers who tend the gardens, the corporations that fund them, and the community in general, are proud of.
Ciara and Kim are world travelers who care deeply about the planet and the people who inhabit it. We are fortunate to have them in Las Vegas, but wherever they may go in the future, they will continue to spread seeds of change that will help make the world a better place.
World Travelers
As you will read in my magazine article, Ciara is from Dublin, Ireland, but she has spent a lot of time in other countries. She lived in Tehran, Iran from the age of four to eight when her father went there to work on oil rigs; she was in Berlin in 1989 right after the wall came down and East and West Germany were reunited. She went to Prague, Czechoslovakia, (now the Czech Republic) when the anti-Communist revolution opened the country up to visitors; and she happened to be in Russia, much to her parents’ dismay, in 1991, when the government instigated a coup and tried to overthrow President Gorbachev.
Kim, who grew up in Las Vegas, is also a world traveler, who has been to some of the most remote places in the world. 
He got his Master’s Degree at the University of Lima in Peru. For six months he lived with the remote Yora tribe in the Upper Amazon.
He directed a TV episode about a tribe of cannibals in Papua New Guinea, who scarified their bodies to look like crocodiles; and he spent a year, on and off, in Eastern Siberia filmed grizzly bears, Steller’s sea eagles, salmon, puffins, and Arctic foxes for a film called Kamchatka; Siberia’s Forbidden Wilderness.
A few months ago, they spent a month in Africa with their friend, Dr. Richard Leakey, who has spent decades trying to save the elephants from extinction. He is so well-known that Angelina Jolie is producing and directing a film about Dr. Leakey’s battle with ivory poachers in Kenya, and it’s rumored that Brad Pitt might play him.
Here’s an article from Reuters about the slaughter of elephants. It is heartbreaking that they are not only killed by ivory poachers for their tusks, which are sold mostly to China; but elephants are also killed by egotistical, arrogant, trophy hunters like Walter Palmer, the dentist from Minnesota, who lured a beloved lion in Africa named Cecil, out of the protected game reserve and shot him with a bow and arrow, before killing him with a gun and beheading him.
LIFE LESSON: Ciara and Kim show by example that we can all make a difference. We don’t have to travel to exotic places as they have. Whether it’s changing our behavior in order to combat climate change, planting school vegetable gardens, standing up for civil rights, or fighting to save animals from going extinct, we can do things in our own backyard to raise peoples’ awareness.
Read the entire article about Ciara and Kim, their exciting adventures, and the contribution they have made to the Las Vegas community.
By the way, Kim has a new book coming out in December 2015 called Life And Death In the Andres: On the Trail of Bandits, Heroes, and Revolutionaries. Visit Kim MacQuarrie’s website.
