Born in historic Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the heart of Amish Country, on June 10, 1969, Corbett's roots in service to others run deep. David and Joan, Corbett's parents, worked in public education for their entire career, specializing in music. Both his maternal and paternal grandfathers were men of the cloth, along with several uncles, and Corbett has several members of the military in his extended family.
In search of greener surroundings and mild summers, Corbett's immediate family relocated to northern New England early in the 1980's. There, his public education led him to enjoy his studies of English, Latin and music. Ultimately settling in eastern Maine in 1984, the Kroehler family maintained a close connection with the outdoors, a passion which is easy to embrace in the Pine Tree State.
It was Corbett's love of language and music which brought him to Florida after high school. He entered the University of Miami's Music Engineering Technology program but transferred to Central Florida's Full Sail Center For The Recording Arts (now Full Sail Real World Education) in order to obtain more hands-on exposure to the mechanics of recording music.
The difficult economics of the early 1990's made it quite challenging for Corbett to find work in record and video production so he fell back on his newfound strength, computers. He began his electronic work focused on desktop publishing but as Internet technology came to the forefront, he redirected his skills to web programming, work he continues to this day.
All the while he toiled in the world of integrated circuits, Corbett felt drawn to environmental conservation and the ways in which it overlaps with politics. During the 1990's, he paid closer and closer attention to the aforementioned intertwined issues as the national consciousness surrounding global warming grew.
Early in 2001, when George W. Bush broke his campaign promise to regulate carbon monoxide and compounded his misdeed by withdrawing the United States from the worldwide effort to turn the tide on the climate crisis, to which his father originally committed the nation, Corbett realized that anger was an inadequate response to assaults on the environment. Struggling with how to take more concrete action, he realized that the Sierra Club represented the best which the American environmental movement had to offer and he joined.
As the oldest and largest grassroots environmental advocacy and education non-profit in the United States, the Sierra Club owes part of its success to the tiered approach it takes, working at local, state, regional, national and international levels, often simultaneously. Contacted by the newsletter editor of the Sierra Club of Central Florida in response to his answer to a group survey, Corbett was invited to join the executive committee of the local group in 2003 as chairman of energy issues. In that role, Corbett very quickly focused his work on the climate crisis. Through the encouragement of other members of the executive committee, Corbett began outreach efforts and represented the Club at the Solar World Congress in 2005 and the International Solar Cities Congress.
Between the two landmark global symposia on alternative energy, Corbett was elected chairman of the Sierra Club of Central Florida and served in that role throughout 2006. Early in his tenure, he flew to the United Kingdom with his wife Catrin and attended the International Solar Cities Congress in historic Oxford. As a passionate conservationist, Corbett already knew that global warming constituted a grave threat, so grave that it threatened to outstrip every other the United States and his generation would face, but when he heard from climatologists and other environmental experts just how the extent of rising sea levels could be measured as a function of parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere, Corbett’s sense of urgency grew by leaps and bounds.
Determined to work feverishly to prevent his new home in Florida from becoming beachfront property, Corbett sought the means to do more. He was honored to serve his fellow environmentalists as a leader in the Sierra Club but knew that only sweeping changes could save the Florida he knew. After much reasoning and strategic analysis, Corbett came to the conclusion that the best hope for halting the advance of rising seas lies in the Congress of the United States. Even as he continues to work to raise awareness as to the threats and opportunities which global warming poses to his homeland and the entire world, Corbett is a candidate in Florida’s eighth congressional district.
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