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Harrison Ford is, by all accounts, busier than ever.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m acting my ass off!\u201d the Hollywood veteran told John Jurgenson of the Wall Street Journal, in a profile published Wednesday<\/a>.<\/p>\n In two recent hit shows and a new Marvel movie, the 82-year-old actor has embraced parts that have surprised fans and critics.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s one role he has kept consistently for more than three decades: as a member of the board of Conservation International, where he is now vice chair.<\/p>\n As Jurgenson writes in the Journal story, the actor \u201creacts \u2014 with a visible cringe \u2014 to anything that might come off as pretentious.\u201d Unsurprisingly, Ford has brought that same ethos to Conservation International, where his painstaking work has largely been behind the scenes, such as his discussions with French President Emmanuel Macron in 2019<\/a> that led France to pledge $100 million to protect the Amazon.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say there haven\u2019t been highly visible moments, such as his acclaimed turn as the surly voice of The Ocean<\/a> in the award-winning \u201cNature Is Speaking<\/a>\u201d series of short films. (More recently, in a nod to his longtime commitment to conservation, he had a species of snake<\/a> named after him.)<\/p>\n His work to help protect nature and the climate took on a new meaning in a recent brush with a disaster that was fueled in part<\/a> by climate change: His Los Angeles home is perilously close to an area that was destroyed in January by wildfires.<\/p>\n Jurgenson writes:<\/p>\n In January, when M. Sanjayan, chief executive of the nonprofit Conservation International, heard that Ford was among L.A.\u2019s wildfire evacuees, he thought of a line the actor delivered at a 2019 United Nations summit amid massive fires in the Amazon rainforest. Comparing the global effects of environmental crisis to an up-close emergency, Ford said in the address, \u201cWhen a room in your house is on fire you don\u2019t say, \u2018There\u2019s a fire in a room in my house,\u2019 you say, \u2018My house is on fire.\u2019 And we only have one house.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis thing has always been deeply personal for him,\u201d Sanjayan said, noting that now, as an L.A. resident swept up in a natural disaster, \u201che walks in a different set of shoes.\u201d<\/p>\n Read the profile of Ford here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bruno Vander Velde is the managing director of storytelling at Conservation International. Want to read more stories like this? Sign up for email updates<\/a>. Also, please consider supporting our critical work<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n