If bad things come in threes, good thing may come in twos.

Jeannine Honicker only needs to look at her calendar to see that.

Honicker is being honored twice this weekend at awards ceremonies in Nashville, Tenn., and Atlanta.

The Tennessee Alliance for Progress presented Honicker on Friday night with the lifetime achievement award for environmental activism for work she did while living in Tennessee. In Atlanta on Sunday, Georgia WAND: Women’s Action for New Directions, will present Honicker its environmental activism award for work with the LaGrange Sierra Club.

“I thought I was retired,” Honicker said jokingly. “How can I quit? I keep being pulled back in.”

Honicker may be best known in LaGrange, to adults and school children alike, as one of the organizers of the LaGrange Sierra Club, formed in 2007. She was a chairman and co-chairman before eventually stepping down from that group.

But her history with environmental causes goes back more than 30 years, when she and her family, including her late husband, Dolph, news editor of the Tennessean newspaper, were living in Nashville. Their daughter Linda was diagnosed with leukemia. An eventual bone marrow transplant led to a full recovery, but the family was horrified when a nuclear power plant was proposed at Hartsville, Tenn., which was the area’s source of drinking water.

During the years of battling the nuclear company, Dolph Honicker was his wife’s biggest champion.

“The first person I must give credit to is my beloved Dolph,” she said. “He supported me financially and emotionally, which allowed me to devote the last 36 years to being an environmental activist.”

And Honicker surely would be leading the cheers for his wife this weekend, if not for his death Feb. 11. But family and friend of the couple instead will use this as a gathering to mark Jeannine Honicker’s awards and his life, which she has wanted to do for months. There was no funeral service for her husband. He didn’t want one.

“This is the first time we’ve had the family together,” Honicker said.

On Sunday night after the convoy from Atlanta returns to LaGrange, everyone will gather at the Honickers to celebrate.

“We’ll get together and tell stories, which is what he wanted,” she said.

And although she says she’s retired, there’s plenty of environmental activist left in Honicker, who can’t pass up an interview to talk about the need for the elimination of not just nuclear power, but coal and biomass energy, too.

“We’re fighting wars to give money to our adversaries” for those energy sources, she said.

Instead, Honicker says research has found that wind, water and solar energy can provide for the nation’s electricity and transportation fuels by 2020.

“All we lack is the political will,” she said. “There is hope and it’s doable, but the question is, will we do it?”

n For more information on the two organizations or to make a donation to the group’s in Honicker’s name, visit Georgia WAND at www.georgiawand.org and the Tennessee Alliance for Progress at www.taptn.org.