Kevin Adair entertains youngsters as a juggling purple pirate on stilts. Adair, who will be performing at the Butler Farm Show next week, also runs a company that turns waste into fuel.

CONNOQUENESSING TWP — A globe-trotting corporate CEO will pay a special visit next week to the Butler Farm Show. You'll recognize him instantly — he'll be the juggling, purple pirate on stilts. Or the lasso-looping cowpoke, or bowling pin-juggling, unicycle-riding stuntman.

Kevin Adair leads the ultimate double life — and he's not about to give up either of them.

By day, Adair, 52, of Chicago, is an old-school entertainer — “I do things” is his trademark claim — with a varied act that includes magic and illusion, motivational speaking and fire dancing. He's worked theme parks, cruise ships, vacation resorts and summer carnivals for many years.

That's one life. The other? He's helping people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic turn trash into cooking fuel and saving precious trees in the process.

“My parents were a big influence,” Adair said in a recent interview. “Dad was a handyman. Mom was always helping others. Both were teachers. They taught me the value of doing well by doing good.”

At Illinois Wesleyan University, he pursued two majors, experimental psychology and theater. He earned special departmental honors on the way to both bachelor's degrees.

Another influence was Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, who epitomized the “less is more” movement. Fuller taught at neighboring Southern Illinois University and was gone before Adair went to school, but he left his mark on some of the Wesleyan faculty, Adair said.

“So I had the concept of what I wanted to do, but I was looking for the right location and project,” he said.

Adair was working at a resort in the Dominican Republic in 2005 when the idea occurred to him to start up an enterprise using the best elements the Caribbean climate had to offer: labor, sunshine and scrap metal. With startup funds from the United Nations World Food Program and the International Organization for Migration, in 2007 he founded a company called El Fuego del Sol (“fire of the sun”) and turned a 2-acre Dominican ranch into a corporate headquarters and factory, employing local people to make and sell solar-powered stoves — “sun ovens” — capable of generating 350 degrees Fahrenheit from the sun's rays.

Five years later, the World Food Program asked Adair to move the company to neighboring Haiti, which shares the same island with the Dominican Republic.

Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, had suffered a devastating magnitude 7.0 earthquake in 2010 that killed more than 300,000 people and left 1.6 million homeless. Haiti's official jobless rate hovers around 14 percent, but the actual figure is elusive, with any job at any wage being considered employment.

With the move to Haiti, the company changed the design of its stoves. With more than a half-million tons of charcoal being burned every year by Haitians — charcoal made from millions of trees mostly smuggled in from the Dominican Republic — Adair saw a pressing need for change.

FdS Haiti began making briquettes out of a slurry of paper, cardboard and sawdust waste.Eleven years later, FdS Haiti is one of the largest sustained recycling efforts on the island. The briquettes have been declared 30 percent more efficient than charcoal and unquestionably more eco-friendly.As the first large-scale paper-products recycler in Haiti, FdS has recycled more than 130 tons of paper, cardboard and sawdust into briquettes, according to the company's website, www.fdshaiti.com. It also reprocesses waste motor oil into efficient diesel fuel and is on target to become Haiti's highest-volume reprocessed eco-fuel producer.Adair said the best thing about his double life is that he can sustain both without doing damage to either, or to himself.“They work quite comfortably together,” he said. “They sustain themselves without my constant presence. I can come and go, and I greatly enjoy my involvement in both.”Adair says he abides by this leadership principle: “Listen. Lead. Listen again.” That's probably good advice, whether you're running a company or commanding the farm show midway, juggling a set of bowling pins from the seat of a unicycle.

Kevin Adair, right, has a company in Haiti that turns trash into a briquette that's used for cooking fuel and also provides jobs.