Toby Hemenway, who passed away yesterday, was the best mentor I never wanted to admit I had. If bad-boy innovator Bill Mollison was permaculture’s Elvis, Toby was Paul McCartney: affable and studious, consistently weaving low-key brilliance that brought the message to the masses without compromising its integrity.

Thousands know Toby through his books, which are eminently accessible and well-researched, and his essays and videos, which break down concepts as diverse as the ecological role of beavers and the future of civilization. In a classic lecture on human history, Toby would hand the audience a 100-foot ball of yarn, asking each person to grab a piece. As the yarn wove its way through the room, Toby would explain that it represented a timeline of the past million years of human history, in which we developed language, fire, ceremony and other forms of culture. Only when the yarn finally reached its end would he reveal the kicker: that everything we consider “history”, the past ten thousand years of agriculture, writing and urban settlement, all fit into the final twelve inches. At once, listeners vividly understood that so-called civilization was just a short chapter in humanity’s unlikely journey, and that we needn’t see the two terms as synonymous. It was little gestures like these that Toby deployed to skillfully to render the complex visible and simple, gently nudging us into a radically different perspective on our relationship to the planet.

While I join most of the permaculture movement in admiration for Toby’s public work, I was also lucky enough to have gotten to know him in a more personal way. As the main instructor for Denver’s first PDC, Toby flew to Denver every month between October 2011 and March 2012 to blow the minds of forty students. And as the organizer of that course, I was the one that picked him up from the airport on Friday and dropped him back off the following Sunday evening.

It was during these drives, sitting in traffic on I-70 and cruising down Pena Boulevard, that I feel like I truly started to understand Toby. Most of the permaculture rock stars I’d met proudly donned a rebel persona – defiantly, inspiringly against The System. But as we made small talk about his years in biotech and his travels with his wife, Toby revealed himself to be both more cosmopolitan and humble than that. With his sport jackets and love of microbrews, he struck me as someone my parents could have been friends with. Indeed, he was born the same year as my own father, to the same upper-middle-class Boston society. Talking with Toby was like going home.

At a time when I was still aspiring to be a permaculture warrior, Toby showed me that you could be just as effective as a permaculture civil servant, transforming the system from within. From his writing and teaching to his kind personality, I can say without hesitation that Toby Hemenway had a profound impact on my understanding of permaculture – and, by extension, the world itself.

He will be missed.