Christopher Maxwell (Photo by Jay Paul)
Christopher Maxwell, on the evening of Wednesday, March 18, succumbed to the complications of Stage 4 prostate cancer that doctors told him years ago should already have killed him. He was 60.
Medicine, surgeries and therapy allowed his fragile body to continue functioning, but a tremendous will kept him alive. Max, as friends called him, cared about small things because he knew they could make a big difference. This notion ranged from independent radio stations; mulberries and making pies of them; creating a hostel to provide visitors with inexpensive lodging; and saving the tiny phytoplankton of the oceans, which produce more than 50% of our planet’s oxygen.
Maxwell, by way of Pennsylvania, grew up as a “Florida Man”; with a grin and a chuckle, he conceded that title to this writer during an interview. That characteristic entailed surviving motorcycle accidents, getting shot at and almost burning down the family home. He also developed a sense of entrepreneurship.
Around age 10, he went into the family garage and took apart an ailing lawnmower, intending to repair the machine for mowing neighbors’ yards. The operation proved successful. “My parents didn’t stop me,” he recalled. “They didn’t know how to.”
He began working on other people’s busted motors. Shop class followed. To him, “everything was so obvious. Ever since then, I’ve had this native talent with machines. I can figure things out; I see patterns other people miss.”
Maxwell didn’t claim genius, and his ability to sense patterns didn’t extend to personal interactions. “I miss social cues,” he admitted. “And if I’d made it a point — which I do now — to pay more attention to social cues than I did back then, things might’ve turned out really differently. But they didn’t, so Burning Man became a great opportunity to learn how to be myself with others and experiment how to be with others; how can I perceive social patterns of behavior better.”
What he may have lacked in the social graces, he made up for in persistence — and ebullience. He was a happy warrior. This is how, while still a student, he persuaded Virginia Commonwealth University to start a recycling program. He went on to secure a niche through the Federal Communications Commission for low-power radio stations and brought to life Richmond’s WRIR and Midlothian’s WRWK, TheWorkFM 93.9.
During the 1990s, Maxwell became a fixture at the downtown First Fridays art walk as he campaigned for WRIR. He addressed passersby on corners and in galleries. He tended to speak in his urgent voice, using paragraphs clogged with data, or hold charts to demonstrate his points, and listeners may have relented to his petitions to make him stop. He thought at first the project should be called Radio Free Richmond, and that was fine when streaming from a basement onto the internet. For some, however, the name sounded too radical, and colleagues settled on the more pragmatic Richmond Independent Radio, a true description, and thus WRIR.
He assisted in raising the broadcast mast atop The Camel venue, and WRIR went live in January 2005. The station recently moved to a Shockoe Bottom location, and he got a chance to tour the facility. “Radio for the rest of us,” as its tagline goes, remains broadcasting at FM 97.3.
But among the founding generation of WRIR, some exist now only in group photos. Since December 2024, Camel founder and community activist Farid Alan Schintzius; world music proponent Bill Lupoletti; president of WRIR’s parent, the Virginia Center for Public Press, Melissa Vaughn; and now Maxwell have all signed off.
Maxwell spoke at the memorial services for both Schintzius and Lupoletti. He wore small fans around his neck to cool himself due to the cancer and its treatment reducing his resistance to heat. Maxwell honored the lives of his former colleagues but used the moment to advocate for alternative fuel to prevent the “sixth extinction.”
Following the success with WRIR, Maxwell went to the Pacifica Foundation and made the case for aggressively seeking community foundations to start up radio stations rather than passively waiting for them to request foundation assistance. He traveled into the Deep South to act as a Johnny Appleseed of low-power FM.
“Imagine what you would have if you crossed the Energizer Bunny with MacGyver [sic.]?” described the writer of a GoFundMe page to assist in defraying Maxwell’s medical and living costs. Maxwell never gained financial security from his patchwork of handyman jobs, ranging from carpentry to solar panel installation, or joining a technical crew for Burning Man. But he possessed something else: the knowledge of his capabilities and how he could put them to good use in the world. Throughout his later years, whenever and wherever he could, he sounded the alarm about the phytoplankton dying from the acidification of the waters due to petrochemical pollution. He believed this development could leave us all gasping for air. The solution for which he evangelized concerned creating fuel out of thin air and the harnessing of “Reactor Prime,” as he called the sun.
“Once my doctors told me I got 22 to 62 months left to live, I realized that I got one last project built into this carcass, one last big project, and I love projects,” he emphasized in a 2025 interview. “They are very motivating. Something about a project gives you a reason to get up. ... I don’t do it for me. This body’s no fun. The country’s no fun anymore. ... I get up now for the phytoplankton. And it’s because the phytoplankton are the basis for everything.”
Maxwell also championed solar synthetic fuel.
“We now have the means to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and in doing so ‘make’ diesel and jet fuel using solar power,” Maxwell said. “There is a bonus of closing the carbon loop. We will no longer need to extract any further carbon-based fuel from the ground. ... CO2 is everywhere.”
As with his past endeavors and their proof of concept, Maxwell sought assistance in conducting his research and tests.
“So here I am, heading into my life’s finale,” he wrote online. “I’m flying my failing carcass on a kamikaze mission right into the oil industry gears. May my failing bones jam the gears of their planet-killing machinery, and bring it to a grinding stop.”
He wanted to create a device that could sit in a backyard and manufacture fuel. No drilling required.
Disease overwhelmed his plans. He still could look forward, however; in his last days, Maxwell married his longtime friend, and lately a caregiver, Rain Burroughs. She described his departure on Facebook.
Back in the ’90s, a promotion ran about the “crazy ones,” which conflated a popular computer brand with protean figures such as Einstein, Maria Callas, Buckminster Fuller and Gandhi. The spot ended with a memorable line: “The ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.”
Despite its origin, the sentiment isn’t wrong, whether applied to radio stations, phytoplankton or, perhaps, even getting carbon monoxide out of the air and making diesel and jet fuel out of the stuff.
It’s so crazy, it might work.
And that’s what Chris Maxwell thought to the end. Basically, he wanted to save the world. He left to the rest of us this real “Project Hail Mary.”
That, in part, means following his often-repeated aphorism, “Do what you can, where you can.”
On Saturday, April 4, at 11 a.m., a public memorial service for Maxwell will take place at the Richmond Friends Meeting house at 4500 Kensington Ave. and be streamed via Zoom.
