Find Your Sustain Ability

On this episode of Find Your Sustain Ability, host Laura England sits down with Dr. Ashley Ward, director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University and Brock Long, former FEMA administrator and executive chairman of Hagerty Consulting, for a deep dive into the meaning and practice of community resilience. Drawing from their extensive experience in climate policy, emergency management and public health, the conversation explores how communities can prepare for and adapt to increasingly frequent and complex climate-related challenges—from extreme heat to infrastructure vulnerabilities. The discussion emphasizes the importance of trust, collaboration and policy reform while also highlighting practical strategies that empower individuals, institutions and governments to build stronger, more resilient communities. Set against the backdrop of Appalachian State University’s Climate Resilience Forum and recent local disasters, the episode brings a grounded, urgent and hopeful lens to the future of sustainable development.

Transcript

Laura:

Welcome everyone to the Find Your Sustain Ability podcast. I'm your host, Laura England from the Department of Sustainable Development, and I'm currently working full-time on App State's five-year climate literacy initiative called Pathways to Resilience. Today's episode focuses on climate resilience. I'll introduce our expert guests with an abbreviated version of their bios and then we'll get to know them more, get to know about their work as we go.

Dr. Ashley Ward, welcome to the studio. Dr. Ward is the director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability. And her work focuses on the health impacts of climate extremes as well as community resilience. She works with communities, public agencies, scientists, and decision makers to create effective policy solutions to climate challenges. Ashley's expertise and skill set are in high demand these days. She participated in the White House Extreme Heat Summit last fall, and through Duke's Heat Policy Innovation Hub, she's worked with United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the World Meteorological Organization and the World Health Organization.

Also with us is Brock Long, executive chairman of Hagerty Consulting and former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. While serving as FEMA administrator, Brock coordinated the federal government's response to over 144 presidentially declared disasters and 112 wildfires, including three of the nation's most devastating hurricanes and five of the worst wildfires ever experienced.

While at FEMA, Brock also led major initiatives like Community Lifelines, which will have long-lasting impacts on the emergency management community. This leader in the field of emergency management is also a two-time App State alum. He completed a bachelor's degree here in '97 and a Master's of Public Administration in '99. Brock and Ashley, thank you so much for joining me in the studio today. I'm excited to learn more about your work.

Ashley:

Thanks for having me.

Brock:

Yeah, great to be here.

Laura:

And also want to note and acknowledge for our listeners that Ashley and Brock just spoke to a room full of students, faculty, staff, and community members at our Climate Resilience Forum. And it was just fascinating to learn about your expertise, your area of work, and the work that we all have to do as a town here in Boone, as a broader community, a state nation world. We have a lot of work to do to achieve climate resilience, don't we?

Brock:

Yeah, absolutely. I think it was great to see almost 300 people show up today.

Ashley:

It was packed.

Brock:

It was a packed house. So I think that the Pathways to Resilience program at App got some real influence to make some changes in maybe the way that we go forward in the future to talk about resilience.

Laura:

Thanks. It's great to hear that. And the student participation has been so wonderful so far, and they're learning so much, especially when we bring in experts like the two of you. We have an audience with wide-ranging backgrounds. So I thought we'd start with a foundational question about resilience, climate resilience, community resilience. Can you share a little bit of your thoughts? I know people define it differently, but share a little bit of your thoughts on what do we mean by community resilience and climate resilience?

Ashley:

I think officially the common definition is the ability to bounce back after something happens. That's what resilience is. I think it would be nice if people thought really holistically about the ecosystem in which they live when they think about resilience. So what I've heard Brock talk about a lot is do you know your neighbors? Your neighbors are often the ones that are going to be there for you when something happens. What kind of skill sets do you bring to the table that can help you in the aftermath of some kind of big event?

So it's more than just about storing water, which is important or storing up food, but I think it's also about building a network, a community network directly around you, not that you have to drive 30 minutes to get to, so that when something does happen, that you have the security of working together with the people that are there with you at that moment.

Laura:

That really resonates with my Helene experience. Thanks for that, Ashley.

Brock:

Yeah, I think resilience lies in the eye of the beholder. It's really hard. I mean, to put it in a box, it means so many different things. For me personally, we were joking earlier, but honestly, I mean, I want to be able to have tangible skills within my family to where we reduce our dependence on any outside government when it comes to things like retirement or just our ability to live in Hickory, North Carolina.

Part of my platform at FEMA was financial resilience, helping people understand how to break negative cycles with money, maybe escape poverty, but also being properly insured and making sure that you're insuring the greatest chunk of wealth that you have attached to you and your family, like your homes, those types of things. But then when I think about resilience for a community, I always ask the question of what's got to be working in your community that if it's not working, people are dying or life routine is disrupted? And once you identify that, then how do we shore that up and mitigate those elements or what we call community lifelines?

Laura:

Yeah, talk about those community lifelines. The students in our forum did a nice job of identifying them with you, but for our listeners-

Brock:

They did, yeah.

Laura:

... what are some of those key lifelines?

Brock:

So I can even back up and tell you how we even arrived at lifelines. When I went into office, I had two months to understand where we were with FEMA, to be briefed fully on FEMA's mission, which is much larger than most people or the nation's news media would tell you. And I had two months to come up to speed on where we are versus where I thought we needed to be and understanding the real vulnerabilities in this country. And then Harvey, Irma, Maria, the California wildfires happen.

One of the things that happened during Hurricane Maria into Puerto Rico was when the whole island is wiped out and you've got a reduced capacity at the local level of government, the Commonwealth as a result of rotting infrastructure or just the ability that they've been impacted from the storm, you start to think of things like what's the first thing that needs to go into this island?

And the nation's news media was wrapped around the axle when it came to food and water, food and water. We need food and water. We need food and water. And honestly, it really wasn't that. There was a thirty-day food supply on the island that had never been pre-planned into response plans. And, you know, we don't look at what's already in our community that we could use before the federal government has to come to town.

And I was getting frustrated because I thought that we were just going through our checklist, our response checklist, and we were sending... We ended up getting $2 billion of food and water to Puerto Rico when there was a thirty-day food supply on the island already. That didn't make sense. But I started thinking of who are we keeping off the island because of the bandwidth to get into the ports or the airport. There was only one airport that we got open. The United States Marines opened up the San Juan Airport, and I was told you could fly one cargo jet in every 30 minutes. So what do you put on that plane?

Ask yourself that question, if you're head of FEMA and you hear what the news media is saying and they're not always getting it right. And we started asking the question of who are we kicking off those planes? And honestly, it boiled down to a failure in communications, which is the biggest lesson learned after every disaster. A failure to communicate is the biggest lesson learned after 9/11, after Katrina and Maria. It's hard to communicate in North Carolina what the situational awareness is from a Hurricane Helene. And here we go again. I learned that lesson again and it was on my watch.

So I started asking that question, what's got to be working? Then if it's not working, then life routine is disrupted or people are dying. And we started recalibrating our focus on are we solving the real problems and understanding situational awareness? And that's where the community lifelines came about.

So with Puerto Rico, we were kicking the telecommunications people or holding them back when we should have been sending them first so that they could get the systems up and running so that we could communicate to people where to go get the food rather than getting into these national news arguments over there's not enough food and water on the island, which was totally false.

And so we stepped back, everything's blowing up. There was a day I briefed eight different governors from Tinian and Saipan to the US Virgin Islands at one point. And it was, "Hold on, let's go back to the bare basics of what's got to be working." We never lost safety and security. You have to have safety and security within your community for it to be a viable community that grows. A sustainable community has to be safe and secure. You're not going to be sustainable if you're not safe and secure, right? We never lost safety and security in Puerto Rico or the US Virgin Islands, so we made sure that that didn't happen.

The next thing is bulk water systems, farm to table food systems, the grocery stores. How do you get the grocery stores back up and running, the logistics that's there. What's needed to get them back up and running so that people can go to their neighborhood market rather than being dependent on FEMA? Energy, power and fuel. You fix the energy, you solve problems across the other infrastructure because it's all interdependent and most of it's based on energy and fuel. Hospital systems, transportation systems.

And so when we started to get the governors to rethink in Community Lifelines format to tell us where they were having the greatest difficulty of getting those lifelines turned back on so that we could focus the limited federal support that we had to eight different states at any given time over facing wildfires, hurricanes, or whatever, so that we could really fine tune where we were putting our stuff. So the question is now to build a sustainable community is if we could identify those things, then what are we doing about it to make sure that one, who owns it, are they taking care of it? Two, should we be mitigating those things to make sure that when they go down they're not down for long and that there are response plans in place to help whether it's publicly or privately owned, infrastructure come back up very quickly.

Ashley:

And I think, can I add one thing to that, which is are the policies that we have in place, policies that support those actions? In many cases, we have policies in place that make it difficult to actually implement the things that we need to build resilience.

One good example is we think about people exposed, workers exposed to heat. Well, I mean, there's lots of people who've talked about the ability to alter work schedules, to have people work earlier in the day or later in the day. But many cities have noise ordinances. So even if an organization wanted to do that, they would be breaking the law to do it. So there's many examples of things.

We talked earlier today about the tax in Puerto Rico on inventory. So it's almost impossible in that situation for stores, for example, the retail space to store long-term supplies, critical supplies because they're going to be taxed so heavily on them when they do. And so I think alongside when we think about what are the things that need to function in our community, what are the policy structures that we have in place that also impede that type of resilience and mitigation practice?

Brock:

And the other thing too, Ashley, Laura, is that we're stuck in this response mode. We're constantly responding. I mean, over 200 and some disasters when I was in office in two years, that's one every three days roughly. We're not taking time to digest what happened and make meaningful changes to the way we respond and mitigate.

We've been talking offline about COVID a little bit, but like what you just said, when it comes to storing capability or redundant contracts to service hospitals, nothing's changed as a result of going through this. The impacts on our public health system, yes, there's been some after-action system reports and different things, but no real change from Congress has been coming out on how do we provide hospital systems more capability to store additional supplies, or as a country, how much personal protective equipment should we actually be making domestically versus what we bring in without interrupting foreign capital markets, those types of things.

Or where's the digital warehouse of all the instructions to build anything, any durable medical equipment that goes into a hospital or within our hospital systems, where's the instruction so that when we implement the Defense Production Act and we ask Ford Motor Company to go build ventilators or a textile mill in North Carolina to build N95 masks, where do you go to rapidly get the instruction and the standard to build it? These are the things, but what we want to manually do is, well, we should rethink the strategic national stockpile system. No, we shouldn't. We should rethink the system in its entirety and not be so dependent on China and Malaysia for vaccine ingredients or supplies that go into hospitals. But yet we haven't solved that problem.

And so part of the issue against sustainable communities is that we're not stopping and focusing on the root cause of the problems, and there are many, from climate to bad business models, building in areas we shouldn't be building or lack of insurance. Who knows? There are so many different systemic problems, but we're not methodically sitting there and thinking about what are the root cause problems we can stop or start to mitigate to reduce the impacts in a greater manner going down the road.

Ashley:

And sometimes the barrier, it's not very exciting, but many state agencies, public agencies at every level, not just the state level and private organizations have archaic procurement practices that make it very difficult to move contracts through to what Brock was talking about or even modernize their data systems, things that we rely upon to be able to plan and prepare for the things that Brock was just talking about.

I've worked considerably with the water policy program on a project called The Internet of Water. And the purpose of that was to help public agencies modernize their water data infrastructure so they could better manage water resources. And so many cases, which is not exciting to say, "Oh, I can't wait. I'm going to go study these procurement practices." But I mean that's what we need to do, we need to think about the organizational structures that underlie some of these problems and whether they are contributing to the problem or are they helping us solve the problem?

Laura:

Kind of gets to Brock's point about being very methodical and systematic about all of the systems that have to be functioning and with a proactive approach working towards the resilience. You mentioned heat earlier, and that's your primary focus these days, although you've worked on a lot of community resilience topics in the past. Can you for our audience, talk about why we should be so concerned about heat? It seems to me that we don't worry about heat in the same way that we worry about flooding and hurricanes and these big extreme events. So talk to us a little bit about heat.

Ashley:

Well, I think one of the challenges is that heat doesn't capture our imagination in the same way. I mean, when you look out the window and it's 80 degrees, pretty much looks the same as it would if it was 102 degrees, right? When a tornado comes through or a hurricane comes through, there's no doubt in anybody's mind what just happened. For that reason, I think it's hard to capture people's imagination around heat. And there's a huge misperception of the risk that it poses.

And you've probably heard the statistic, I've said it many times that heat kills more people than any other weather-related disaster. And I think that's likely a pretty significant undercount. But we often only think about heat and human health outcomes. I mean, that's important. People dying, people getting sick, all of that's very important. But research is showing us that heat will have considerable impacts to our economy as well.

And the fact that it damages infrastructure, it buckles railways, it grounds planes, it makes it to draw bridges, the joints swell shut, the locks and they won't close again. It changes our work patterns when we can work, our productivity and labor productivity. So if you're a person whose wages rely upon you working in a high-exposure industry, then how are you going to feed your family when it's not safe for you to work outside anymore? So there are many. It increases our household expenses. It costs money to cool your house, the hotter it gets. It costs money to cool public buildings. I think the government accountability office in 2023 estimated that 33,000 public schools in the US lack adequate HVAC. We know and research shows that learning outcomes decline when indoor temperatures exceed above 75 degrees.

So I would love to say that all of those public schools are in Vermont and it's going to be fine, but the fact is many of those public schools are south of the Sun Belt. And my link earlier with policy, to give you an idea, is one thing people might say is, "Oh, I have an idea. Let's require universal air conditioning in all of our public school systems." Now, that might feel really good if you're a policymaker to be able to say you did that, but that's a policy that's almost impossible to implement because who pays for those infrastructure upgrades? The local school district does.

And so to Brock's point earlier about sort of community resilience, if those communities had the dollars to upgrade that school infrastructure and provide adequate HVAC, they would've done it, but they don't have it. And most of the communities who don't have that also don't have the credit rating to go to the municipal bond market to get the loans they need to do it. And so how are we thinking about buying down risk, making it possible for these school districts to then have adequate HVACs in their schools? And once those schools are to that point, they become a community asset then too. It's not just air conditioning for students when they're there, but it also becomes a place where emergency management can look to for all kinds of resources.

Laura:

It's a cooling center.

Ashley:

Yeah, I mean, and I think there's a lot of debate about how effective cooling centers are, but I certainly think when we look across the spectrum about what has been effective for that strategy and what hasn't been... A place that people don't normally go as a cooling center does not seem, as far as I'm reading right now, to be the most effective way to do that. Schools are where people go. Churches are where people go. Informal cooling centers like Walmarts or other places, these are where people regularly will go. And so maybe that's the way we think about that practice.

But my point about heat is that it touches almost every aspect of our lives. It is certainly important to think about the health outcomes for people who are the most vulnerable to it on certain prescription drugs, have chronic illnesses, who are pregnant, aged, whatever. But we need to think a little bit more holistically about the impact that heat has on our communities and thinking about well-being and how it affects our lives and how we can afford to live.

Brock:

Problem is it's really hard to quantify the damages with heat, as you were saying so it doesn't fit conveniently into the current Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief Act, disaster declaration framework. So you visibly can't see or quantify the damages from heat like you can a flood or tornado or wildfire. I mean, it's very clear to see what damages are there and what needs to be repaired. And that's not the same with heat.

It's the same with cyber attacks and all of these new emerging threats that we're seeing. It's hard to quantify them and they don't fit neatly into this box that we try to fit it into to get disaster declarations and support from the federal government either.

Ashley:

And I think one thing to remember is that it's often a contributor to other major events, like drought and wildfires. Heat often contributes to those events. I mean, I think it was last year the Mississippi River, trade down the Mississippi River stopped because of a drought that had come after prolonged heat as well. And so we often don't appreciate its contribution to other more visible events. In many cases, they have a heat signal to them as well.

Laura:

Yeah. Earlier in the forum, you both kind of signaled the importance of working with communities. And Ashley, you particularly spoke to, there's not a one size fits all set of policy solutions around heat. And Brock, probably you'd say the same about other kinds of climate hazards. So talk about the importance of engaging community in conversations around what are the resilience strategies and activities and policy solutions that are going to be effective in our community.

Brock:

Disaster response, preparedness response and recovery is a team sport. There's so much focus on FEMA right now. It's not so much FEMA that needs to be reformed as much as it is our approach to preparing and responding and recovering from disasters as a nation. That's a whole nother conversation. But again, I go back to the fact that it's a team sport. It ranges from how well are you the citizen prepared to sustain your life as much as possible based on where you live and the hazards that are associated with your geographical location all the way up to the federal government.

And I always would equate it to a chair model where it looks like a chair of four legs. That seat is your community. That's Boone, North Carolina. That first leg is a culture of preparedness within our citizenry. I mean, unfortunately, I think we need to go back to scouting principles and creating Eagle Scouts and, hey, you know how to produce clean water. You know how to produce heat or cool off or you have the tangible skills to do things when the infrastructure's not working, from CPR to investing a dollar in the stock market towards your retirement and understanding how to be properly insured, break negative cycles with money, those types of things. We need that because you, the citizen are the true first responder. And if I were to fall over and break my ankle, you two right now are the true first responder. You are the ones that I would be counting on to help or call 911 until the official first responder can arrive.

And so we have to instill that into our citizenry that you, the citizen are the true first responder. Second leg is a strong state and local government. Some states like Texas take emergency management. It is highly important, most robust state capability probably in the country. Florida is right there with them. Florida has a very robust capability. California has a very robust state capability in emergency management. The local communities, they'll follow up underneath that model and they'll be strong too. There are plenty of communities where county commissions and local officials don't really get to know their emergency manager until it hits the fan. Everything's broken and then they're upset, right?

And so strong state and local government is the second leg. The third leg is the private sector owns the majority of the infrastructure we depend on, those community lifelines. They own the banking systems, they own the communication systems. Who owns all the bottles of water in Watauga County, it's probably Pepsi. So it's not the government. And who owns the farm to table logistics, those types of things.

And we have to work with them and they need to inform government and communities on how do we help you become more mitigated and resilient to make sure that your businesses and what you provide can be sustained regardless of what we face from a ship losing its steering and knocking out a bridge in Baltimore to Russia attacking the colonial pipeline to whatever.

Fourth leg is the firepower of the federal emergency management agency, federal government working down through a governor ultimately to the local level to service the disaster victim within your communities. And when all four of those legs are attached, things go pretty well. But those legs need to be attached in the blue sky day preparedness and mitigation planning efforts, like as a result of going through Helene, don't waste a good disaster, the opportunity that comes about in a good disaster. And I'm not making light of the situation, but you are now going to come into so much post-disaster mitigation money. Why is Winklers Creek still going to flow through Boone in five years from now? If that's the happening, then shame on all of us if the mall parking lot still does.

Laura:

We have a chance to finally fix that.

Brock:

You've got a chance to fix it. And so you can't just declare victory and move on and my life is good, or whatever, after the disaster. You have to continuously check on the people who lost everything from businesses to homes that were uninsured. But you also have to rethink how do we rebuild these roadway systems? How do we rebuild or reroute Winklers Creek to where it's environmentally friendly, it doesn't interrupt the ecosystem, but it also doesn't flood the mall parking lot?

So there's a great opportunity after disasters. All the bad ideas are blown up or washed out, and all the good ideas are the ones that can come from those four legs of the chair working together to design the way forward. But sadly, what happens is that we go about our lives and people want their power working without burying the power lines, or they want things even temporarily fixed so that their life can go back to normal very quickly. And we don't have the patience to do things right.

Laura:

I kind of wonder what is the moment post-disaster that's most appropriate to really dig in with the community to make those gains? Because for sure, there's post-traumatic stress. I mean, I see it throughout the community, for sure, people who've lost everything or have lost significantly, but just a lot of people. And there must be a point in time where enough processing of what we went through has happened, where we really could be productive together and planning for a more resilient stormwater system and the more resilient... All of the systems, more resilient.

Brock:

I think the time is now. I mean at this point, obviously the life safety, life sustaining mission is incredibly huge and really important. But don't let too much time go before city and county leaders sit down to try to understand what are they entitled to from the federal government as a result of going through this. How to sequence all the money that comes from 30 different federal government agencies to fund 90 different recovery programs. It's overwhelming.

Small communities in North Carolina look like a deer in headlights, and rightfully so because the federal government has made this system so complex that there needs to be a reduce the complexity campaign when we start to reform, quote, "FEMA" or let's just say the disaster system in this country, how do we get it down to simplistic grants that empowers a mayor and counties like Watauga to be able to do the things they know that need to be done. They know their community far better than the federal government, Congress and FEMA, but how does FEMA set up or Congress set up the mechanisms for the counties to have a lot of discretion on how to use that funding to repair the problems that constantly happen and do it in a manner that is sustainable?

Laura:

I think a lot of local governments around here would say yes to that. Ashley, you want to talk about... You've worked a lot directly with communities and particularly in North Carolina. What is the community engagement process like for you?

Ashley:

Well, I mean, one of the things I like to say is rule number one is you move at the speed of trust whenever you're working in communities. And people who are the closest to the problem often have some of the most innovative solutions, what they lack is the capacity to implement those solutions. And I think the imperative is on whether it's experts from outside the community who come in to give guidance or even their local representatives in government, but to listen to them.

And I think that is probably one of the best things initially that you can do is listen to people because they're going to tell you whether they mean to or not. They're going to tell you what their experience was like. You're going to learn from them where the failures in the system happened based on their own narratives. A lot of times, people will then offer up, even they're not seeing it as a solution, but in that communication with them, in that listening, they offer up some pretty innovative solutions that after it gets out into the universe and everybody else is starting to think about it, it can become a really, really great thing.

But this is also how you build trust with the community so that when you come back to the community and say, "It's time for us to rework some things and it means that we're going to have to be patient, and that the rebuilding of this is going to take longer than it normally would, we need to bury the power lines," you have their trust at that point. And so perhaps they're willing to work with you on that.

And I think when it comes to all of this, which is what Brock has already talked about, is there is no one sector that owns the responsibility on any of these issues. It's not fair to think that the public sector can come in and solve every issue, whether it's the federal government or your state and local government, especially because the private sector plays such a critical role. And because of all of that, and because it takes time to build trust and because that's the long game, you don't wait until the disaster happens to start building those relationships.

One of the things, to Brock's point, never let a good disaster go to waste, one thing that should happen out of this disaster in addition to some very concrete changes, is the relationships that are built out of this disaster from people working together who maybe haven't before, maintain those relationships. Because you know what? This is not your last disaster.

You've got another one coming. And so in order to be able to do everything that needs to happen from now until whenever that is, so that you are more resilient when the next one comes, it's important that you maintain those relationships. And I personally think that community engagement, whether... And we can think about what community engagement means.

One thing that I'm really clear about when I work with my colleagues is sometimes individuals that are living in a community that are just trying to put food on the table and pay their bills and take care of their kids, they may not have the time to attend a meeting every month or so on and so forth. So what do you do? My advice is to engage with what I call boundary organizations, nonprofits and NGOs that are closely working with those members in the community. And they will have a great perspective, community-wide perspective on things that doesn't overburden individuals in the community. So if you're a person that's saying, "Oh, I'd love to do some community engagement around this question about how we do X, Y, Z," and then you're frustrated that you can't get people to attend meetings or do things, well, maybe you're asking too much of the people who are just trying to live. Maybe think about who else is in this community who works closely with those same groups of people who could give you that same perspective.

So build those coalitions, feed those coalitions. It takes care and feeding. That's going to be who you rely upon. And that's private sector folks, the public sector, community organizations, civil society, community members themselves, faith-based organizations. If you want to find out what's going on in a community, you ask your clergy. They are very close, especially in rural communities, they are very close to their community. They know what's going on. And faith-based organizations, churches are wonderful assets in a community post-disaster.

Laura:

We definitely saw that here in Helene. And speaking of keeping the relationships going, I just want to shout out to the way that App State served as our campus became the gathering place. We were talking earlier about people won't go places that they're not used to going or don't feel welcome. And gosh, our campus became such a welcoming place for our community. Our campus dining served something like 85,000 meals for free to anyone in the community who showed up for lunch and dinner. And there are lots of other examples.

But I hear your point about keeping the relationships going. And I'm not in those rooms, but hopefully that is happening because I think the relationships are stronger than they've been in a really long time between our university and our town, our community, because of what we went through together and because of what, from the perspective that I had, seemed to be pretty extraordinary cooperation, collaboration.

Brock:

Yeah. One thing that resonates with me with what you said, Ashley, is what are you asking people to do or be a part of? In some cases I think that our public awareness campaigns have been woefully falling short of actually creating a prepared and resilient culture within our societies. I mean, we've been asking people to do the same things for 25, 30 years, and it doesn't seem to be working.

For example, I kind of quip that I asked today all the students, "How many people starved to death after Hurricane Helene?" None. I'm all for tangible skills, but we've been asking people for 25, 30 years to buy supplies for five days or generators, all this stuff. One, that's probably a financial unrealistic ask in most households across America. When you look at the checklist of what people tell you to buy and be ready, it's not being done. People aren't doing it. Like Ashley said, a lot of them are just trying to get through the day and get through.

But I will say, we do need to change our campaigns to ask people to do low to no cost things to be prepared, like checking on your neighbor, but understanding how do we get more access to first aid CPR? If you are the true first responders in this world, how do you increase access to programs to give them tangible skills?

One of the things that I've often, when I start to look at how you measure resiliency of a community, I've often thought that the credit score, the average credit score of a community is a huge indicator of whether or not a community is going to be resilient or not. And sadly, when people register with FEMA, a lot of times they're uninsured. They've lost everything. They're uninsured.

A lot of people, when we started looking at the data, 70% of American households live in what's known as asset poverty, not income poverty, if I don't make enough money to make life work. Poverty is one thing. Trying to help people break cycles of poverty is another thing. But a lot of what goes on in America is that we've had too many generations of kids raised that do not understand how to budget money, just simple budgeting, how to grow a dollar through compound interest in investing, those types of things. And I really think that we've got to get that back because what happens is is that as Americans in some cases may have a negative relationship with money, and 70% of households don't have three months' worth of savings to their name. The question is, is that an inflation? Is that a combination of inflation and I don't know how, or I'm way outspending my budget on a regular basis?

But when that happens, what we see is a negative impact on the levels of insurance in a community. So if you're trying to maintain your lifestyle, you're looking for areas to cut back... And this is tough. This is a tough conversation. It's not a fun one to have, but you do not want to save money on insurance. Go save money on that Tesla or that brand new car that you want to drive and don't save money on the insurance piece. Now, I also, the whole insurance debate on people pulling out, that's a whole nother podcast.

But how do we start to look at the health of a community? I think one thing is maybe we're not looking at the right data sets. So when you go back to the credit score, something's really interesting to me is there was a study done by the Urban Institute called Adding Insult to Injury. And it talked about the people who lose their home that are uninsured or underinsured, they never financially recover. And it just becomes a death spiral from a financial standpoint. How do we help them overcome that? How do we help communities increase sales tax revenue?

Like FEMA knows nothing about rebuilding your economy after a disaster. That's not what they're qualified to do. Who is that in the federal government? How do we get commerce and labor and big business in here to help rebuild an economy around Western North Carolina, once it's been lost... But more importantly if the comprehensive credit score of Watauga County, for example, is declining, then a whole host of issues are popping up.

You have any eroding tax base, more demand for government services with an eroding tax base, most likely. I mean, the statistics would say that. Maybe your school systems are going into the tank. Maybe the roadway systems are starting to go into the tank. Maybe high-end grocery stores are starting to move out, food deserts start to form. There's this cascading impact of that. There's less homeownership and there's more rentership. Renters aren't bad, but a lack of homeownership is not good for sustainability and resilience, in my opinion, because the more ownership there is, then the less crime you're going to have. There's more, "You're not coming into my neighborhood. We're going to take care of these problems," those types of things.

So if the credit score is declining over a five-year period, how does Appalachian State work with community leaders to get it going in the opposite direction? What if you could get the credit scores to a certain point where you're eradicating things like civil disturbances and riots, you're increasing insurance in force, your community is becoming resilient more on its own than outside federal government support and grants and help? Maybe that's a far-fetched idea, but I think that we have to start looking at the financial education as really a foundation to resilience. Insurance is a foundational piece of resilience in the household too. But I know that that's a pie in the sky thing and there's a lot of nuances to what I'm saying.

Ashley:

I mean, I think I want to pick up a little bit on what you said about our messaging around things around how people can be prepared or what they can do. So I have a public health background, and so they teach you in public health that you don't warn people without giving them an action. And it's always interesting to me that when I read what people say about heat, for example, the first thing they say, "Seek out air conditioning." I mean, come on. It's not like people are standing around wondering if air condition is going to cool them off. We pretty much understand that that's one of the solutions, a very effective solution.

And so if someone is not going to air conditioning, that means that either they're in a location where it's not available to them, that they don't have easy access to go inside a building, they're outside whatever, they don't have adequate air conditioning in their house, or they can't afford to run the air conditioner they have. And research has done an awful lot of really great work, science helping us understand what are some things that you can do to lower your core body temperature that doesn't rely on air conditioning.

Laura:

What are some of those things?

Brock:

Yeah, fill me in here.

Ashley:

Oh yeah, you want to know? Okay. So for example, foot immersion was for a long time the thing that people would say, "You put your feet over your ankles in cool water, it actually lowers your core body temperature." So the US military saw that, the US army actually and said, "Okay, well, how are we going to make this work in a context where we have soldiers and we're training them, and how are we going to actually do that? We don't want to them take their boots off."

So they did all this work at the Army Medical Research Center, and the stuff is discovered that if you immerse your arms over your elbows in cool water, it actually has the same effect. So this is very inexpensive. It takes cool water. You can put cool water in a cooler, and if you're got a workforce that works outside, this is not an expensive thing to do. And if you do it every hour, so in other words, your workers circle through, your student athletes circle through. This is what they do in the military, Google arm immersion US Army, and you will see millions of pictures. This is how they do it. And it's so incredibly effective.

But there's a way to translate that to homes, right, too. If you come in and you've been working outside, mowing your grass, think about water outside your body as much as you think about water inside your body. Take a cool shower, immerse your arms in your kitchen sink over your elbows in cool water. It works great for people who are... The foot immersion works great for people who are elderly or disabled because their caregiver can put their feet in it.

So if you can't adequately run your air conditioner, use fans. Oftentimes I hear people in this region, they'll say, "Oh, what about swamp coolers? Or, yeah, that's a terrible idea here because we already have a problem with humidity and you're just about to make it worse." So if you're in Michigan, great do that. But if you're not in Michigan, think about other things, use of fans.

And if you do have access to air conditioning, but it's limited, so you only can afford to have one air window unit, for example, put it in your bedroom. Cool your bedroom first, make that cool space. You're going to spend eight hours sleeping there that night. But it's also a lot smaller and a lot cheaper to cool. A lot of people will try and put their air conditioning in their family room so that everybody's in there, and that's not the right approach to that.

So I think all of that information that I just gave you is what most people I think have never heard, absolutely effective, backed by science. We know the thresholds at which those interventions stop working. Ollie Jay out of University of Sydney who runs the heat health incubator has quantified all of it.

Laura:

Oh, wow.

Ashley:

And it's on my program's website. We made it for a US audience, so we converted to Fahrenheit so people understand and we also have it-

Laura:

That's important.

Ashley:

Yeah. We also have it in Spanish. So the idea is when we know that it's getting hot outside, and if you're working public health or you work in any organization, if you're an occupational health nurse, tell the people when they leave work that day, "Don't go home and drink a beer, go home and take a cool shower, then you can drink a beer," right? That's going to help you lower your core body temperature and probably save your life. These are life-saving things that most people have never heard of, because the only thing we hear about heat is seek out air conditioning. And it is probably one of the most frustrating things every time I see it.

Brock:

It goes back to what we just witnessed in Hurricane Helene. Any house can flood. Stop worrying about a FEMA flood map, but you've got a whole army of realtors who across this country are like, "Oh, this house doesn't require FEMA flood insurance," as if it's a good thing. But yet, as we all know, the FEMA flood maps cannot keep up with the newly built environment, which changes constantly, or storm drainage systems may not be well-maintained, which changes the flood areas. But then what we saw in here in North Carolina was landslides, mudslides that wouldn't have been incorporated into a FEMA flood map either. And so it's the simple change of any house can flood, you ought to consider flood insurance, earthquake insurance, those types of things. Simple changes.

Laura:

There were even small creeks forming on the sides of hills that had not been there prior. Just the drainage from all that 20 something inches of rain in some places. So the point any house can flood, you don't have to be down low to flood when that much rain is falling from the sky.

Ashley:

Well, speaking of messaging, right, and what just happened here, if you were to have asked people in this area, "What does 20 inches of rain look like?" They don't know. And so when we communicate about something like a flood event, when we say things like, "We're forecasting 20 inches of rain," I mean, that's almost meaningless to people because if you then say, "We're expecting rain..." From now on, if you were to say, "We're expecting rainfall about like Helene," everybody here is going to know what that means. And so I think when we start to communicate about these issues, it's the same way we talk about...

Brock:

Recurrence intervals?

Ashley:

Yes, most people do not understand what the heck that is, but if you say, "You have the probability of your house flooding at least once in your thirty-year mortgage, or even often-"

Brock:

A 500-year flood, or 100-year flood.

Ashley:

Yes. No one knows what that means. And so I think we need to stop talking about things in those ways. I mean, I'm a scientist myself, but that's the work of scientists communicating. That's not the work of a communications person communicating. So we need to get together with folks who know how to do good science communication and rethink how we're communicating to the public about these issues.

Brock:

But we can't rebuild an entire system of disaster response or resilience or sustainability around one event.

Ashley:

Right. True. True.

Brock:

So the way that the North Carolina mountains have been attacked has been different. Hurricane Ivan back in 2004 was somewhat of a flood event, but Hugo in '89 was totally different. So Hugo didn't come through the Gulf, it came through the Atlantic where the forward speed of the storm is typically much higher on the Atlantic side than a system coming out of the Gulf. Typically, the Gulf Bay storms are slow moving, large rain dropping storms that expand, and the rain bands and the wind bands far exceed the center of circulation, which is what we saw in Helene. So the impact started well in advance, three days in advance of the worst of it passing through. Hugo was different. Hugo was moving at like 27 miles an hour forward speed, which was purely a wind event. I mean, trees down everywhere and the wind's 110 mile an hour winds in Watauga County or coming up through Hickory, North Carolina. Totally different event.

So when we designed a system, it's got to be designed on something that's sustainable for all hazards or all threats. And now we're moving into this man-made or human-caused technological event world with cyber security, state actors' response, acts of terrorism, eco-terrorism, whatever it may be. We have to design a system of sustainability and disaster resilience that encompasses everything.

And so one of the things that bothers me around here is when you start to look at wildfire potential. Is wildfire potential growing in this area as we continue to populate in the middle of this valley, like here in Boone or in some of these areas, we continue to populate? The next question is, who owns the forest around here? Who actually owns it? Most of it's privately owned. And then, well, sometimes the federal government may own the most amount of forest space in the state of North Carolina or in a state. Then second is the homeowner or the landowner, the farm owners, they own most of the land too. And then the third owner is the state. So how do you get the federal government, the state and the private homeowner to mitigate the forest? The downed timber as a result of Helene, I mean, that's going to become fire starter five years, three, four, five years from now.

Laura:

Yeah. People are definitely thinking and worrying about that around here.

Brock:

So instead of waiting until it happens, what are we doing right now to start discussing that discussion with our congressmen and FEMA? What are the mitigation tactics? But then again, who owns the land?

Laura:

Yeah.

Ashley:

Well, that's where there's big coalitions come in, right? I mean, that's where you have to get the landowners to the table with the private sector to the table, with the public sector to the table, first of all, and try and figure out where the resistance is. I mean, people will tell you why they don't want to clear out the undergrowth, right? Figure out what the problem is.

Brock:

Or they can't afford it.

Ashley:

Or they can't afford it. And if it's-

Laura:

Or they're overwhelmed by how many trees are down. We have at least 100 down.

Brock:

Yeah.

Laura:

We've cleared some, but it's going to be-

Ashley:

So then what are the solutions?

Brock:

Your timber is worthless. You're not going to get any money for it. There's nothing you can do with it after a certain amount of time.

Laura:

Yeah.

Brock:

Yeah.

Laura:

It's a lot. And we could talk all day. The two of you have so many stories and your experience is really immense. I'm grateful that you came to campus and shared it with us in multiple ways. And I want to end with the same question that we ended on in the forum. How do you think about resilience and career paths? Because our students are thinking about this. Our students want to do meaningful work, they want to be contributing to positive actions. So for students out there listening, how can they think about resilience and their future career path?

Brock:

Listen, I think it's an exciting world out there. I mean, there are so many jobs in the resilience space on the public side, private side. Where I am as executive chairman of Hagerty Consulting, I mean, we help both public and private clients prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters, helping them understand what money they're entitled to or what techniques they need to do to reduce their vulnerability to hazards.

And then we're just one entity, one consulting firm. But the federal government's put a lot of money towards energy resilience, towards water resilience and water sustainability, food safety and security, transportation. So those big industries, it's not particularly if you're interested in the disaster arena, it's not so much like, "I want to go work for FEMA. How do I do that?" What is the industry that needs disaster resilience?

The big buckets of infrastructure, like the energy world, the fuel worlds, the water worlds and the food worlds, how do we do these things when there's a whole host of new threats popping up? And so largely, it's like I told my son who's a freshman here, energy, transportation, food safety, security in water are where a lot of jobs are going to be over the next 10, 15 years. Go get a business degree and try to get into one of those sectors or public health degree and try to get a job in one of those sectors. Who knows? There's a lot of opportunity.

Ashley:

And I guess I would say, I think we just finished talking about how no one sector owns a solution, so that there needs to be work across different sectors. And what I usually encourage students to do is think about where your passion is, where your skill set is, and wherever you work, integrate resilience into that space. We need leaders to bring this conversation even to industry and organizations where it isn't currently happening.

And it could be that you're working for a manufacturing firm, and then you want to think about not just sustainability of that firm, but their role in the community in which their locations are the people that work for them. How can you help them contribute? If you want to work in the finance sector, how can you help them think about how we finance resilience? In the insurance sector, that's obvious. To Brock's point, there are going to be many sectors in which that touch this.

Truthfully, we're talking about disasters that touch every part of our lives and every industry. So almost anything you do, what I would encourage young people to do is keep talking about resilience. Find ways to integrate that into the organization in which you work. Make that part of what you do wherever you are, wherever your passion drives you. Because I think if you can do that, then it's going to give you the energy that you need to sustain that work.

It's hard to maintain a career at a certain pace for a long period of time. It can be very exhausting. And if you're doing that in a space in which you don't really care, you're not really passionate about what you're doing, it's going to be a long career for you. So I usually say, keep going. If you want to be a school teacher or you want to be a nurse or those kinds of things, or you want to work in finance or any of those other things, yes, do that and figure out how you can interject resilience into the organization you're working in because we need people to be leaders in that space everywhere.

Laura:

Well said. And that resonates with what folks are saying around climate and jobs. Every job is going to have a climate component. Every job's going to have a resilience component. Appreciate both of you all. You're a inspiration for students around resilience at the individual level, community level and beyond. And we hope to have you back to App State sometime. Thanks so much for joining me in the studio today.

Ashley:

Thanks so much.

Brock:

Take care. Thanks, Laura. Thanks so much.

On this episode of Find Your Sustain Ability, Host Laura England welcomes Dr. Dave McEvoy, professor and chair of the Department of Economics in the Walker College of Business at Appalachian State University, along with students Nicole Tran, a senior majoring in political science with a concentration in international and comparative politics, and Grace Knapp, a senior majoring in global studies with minors in Spanish and political science, as they discuss their experience as observers at COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Dr. McEvoy explains the UNFCCC’s role in global climate negotiations and App State’s involvement. Nicole and Grace share how they found out about the trip as well as their insights on indigenous communities, climate refugees and the financial challenges of climate action, particularly in conflict-affected areas. They highlight issues of accessibility for marginalized voices and the slow progress of international climate finance. The discussion also touches on the emotional impact of climate change and activism, the challenges of large-scale climate action and plans for future student delegations at COP 30 in Brazil.

Show Notes

[email protected] 

[email protected] 

https://www.instagram.com/appstatetocop/ 

https://unfccc.int/ 

Transcript

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Host Laura England welcomes Carla Ramsdell to the studio for a discussion of sustainability and cooking. Carla is a practitioner in residence in Appalachian State’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. With a background in physics, mechanical engineering, and 17 years of experience as a thermodynamic design and test engineer, Carla integrates sustainability and climate content into her teaching and community outreach. A self proclaimed "Cooking Evangelist," Carla has developed innovative programs like the "Sustainable Physics-Inspired Culinary Education lab" (SPICE lab) and the Sustainable Food Cooking Challenge, using food as a creative way to engage individuals and communities in sustainability and climate change awareness. 

Show Notes 

Carla would like to emphasize that she is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences and receives a course release to accomplish many of the  initiatives mentioned on this episode. Their continued support is greatly appreciated.

Email: [email protected]

Carla on Insta

Carla on TikTok

www.knowwattscooking.com

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Community FEaST Tuesday, October 22, 2024 from 4:30pm - 6:00pm

Transcript

Laura England

Carla Ramsdell 

Laura England

Carla Ramsdell 

Laura England

Carla Ramsdell 

Laura England

Carla Ramsdell 

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Carla Ramsdell 

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Carla Ramsdell 

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Carla Ramsdell 

Host Laura England welcomes Dr. Britt Wray, a researcher and storyteller focused on the mental health impacts of climate change. Dr. Wray, the director of the Circle program at Stanford Psychiatry, explores the intersection of climate science, psychology, and communication. Dr. Wray shares her journey navigating interdisciplinary fields, including conservation biology, science communication, and the ethics of synthetic biology. She highlights the importance of storytelling in climate communication, emphasizing the need to connect emotionally with audiences to inspire collective action. Dr. Wray also discusses her work with the Good Energy Project, which seeks to integrate climate narratives into Hollywood storytelling to raise awareness and reflect the pervasive impact of climate change on our lives.

Laura

Dr. Britt Wray is a groundbreaking researcher and storyteller, and a growing voice around the mental health effects of climate change. She's the director of Circle, community minded interventions for resilience, climate leadership, and emotional well-being at Stanford Psychiatry in the Stanford School of Medicine. Dr. Wray’s acclaimed book, Generation Dread, about finding purpose during the climate crisis is an honest, profoundly compelling exploration of our climate related stresses. Dr. Wray brilliantly weaves scientific research and evidence with personal lived experience to make the case for embracing our climate emotions, especially the difficult ones we'd prefer to ignore. She reveals how the very grief that pains us can also mobilize and transform us, and how emphasizing support and community will help us protect our planet and its inhabitants. She's the creator of the weekly climate newsletter, Gen Dread, about staying sane in the climate crisis. A highly in-demand speaker, she's given talks at TED and the World Economic Forum alongside the likes of Jane Goodall and Ban Ki-moon, a prolific science communicator. She has hosted several podcasts, radio and TV programs with the BBC, NPR, and CBC, and is an advisor to the Good Energy Project for Climate Storytelling and the Climate Mental Health Network. She has a PhD in Science communication from the University of Copenhagen, and has been recognized with numerous awards for her work. Britt is an incredible climate thinker and doer, and we're really thrilled to have a conversation with her today. Welcome, Britt.

Britt Wray

Hi Laura, thanks. So good to be with you.

Laura

We're so thrilled to have you here at App State and really enjoyed your conversation. Your talk last night on our campus. So I just shared your professional bio, and we'd love for you to fill in a little bit of the in-between spaces by telling us a little bit more about who you are as a person.

Britt Wray

Oh, sure. Well, thank you so much for having me. And who I am as a person. Well, I would say I am a bit of an interdisciplinary beast. It has always been hard to explain what I do and how I got there, because it was not at all a linear path. And so while my early days were spent in biology, studying conservation biology, learning about the sixth mass extinction in my studies, which is what really I think awoke me to feeling and not only thinking about the planetary health crisis that we’re in. My mind was lit ablaze by David Attenborough and his BBC nature documentaries when I was an undergrad biology student, and I realized that, oh wow, I can actually commit myself to sharing and weaving narratives about science and the natural world and sharing them with others in order to hopefully galvanize some interests from those who don't think of themselves as quote unquote science people. And I don't have to necessarily spend my life in the field or in the lab doing the the scientific exploration primarily. And that led me to get into radio and podcasting. And then I had many years working at public broadcasters like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC and so on. And, my big passion was science, documentary, science, storytelling. Somewhere along the way, I ended up going to art school, studying interdisciplinary collaborations between synthetic biologists and artists and designers, because I thought that it's really in the margins where different fields collide, that we get the most interesting questions that we can ask about how we push fields forward, and how we can silo ourselves in our society and not leave these hugely ethically contentious and societally profound questions that are coming out of science and technology. Don't leave that only to the scientists and technologists. Bring in the philosophers, the artists, the designers, people who can ask critical questions from different perspectives. And that, yeah, that really took over my life for a while. And, the kind of art science space because there was a whole new movement where synthetic biologists are basically biotechnologies using genetic engineering in new ways. I ended up writing a book about this quizzical, kind of troubling movement in synthetic biology called de-extinction, where they're trying to recreate extinct species using gene editing and cloning and back breeding techniques as some kind of fix to the biodiversity crisis, as though we could, resuscitate impoverished ecosystems by creating facsimiles of extinct species that humans had killed off with these flashy technologies, and then get them back into nature and fix those holes and improve ecosystem productivity. And that would be well and fine. And this is as you know, as an ecologist, the biodiversity crisis is marching on in a way that's really threatening human survival. we cannot exist without these intact ecosystems. With the greater web of life of many other species being able to carry out their roles. And yet it's kind of flying under the radar of public consciousness. People are very alarmed about the climate crisis, but hardly the biodiversity crisis in equal measure. And so one thing led to another. After that book, I ended up doing a PhD in science communication focusing on synthetic biology. And then and then I finished my PhD and I had a climate awakening. Which is how we come to, being here today. And and so you can see this meandering path of going in and out of different obsessions and fascinations around science and society and art. But essentially, I got to an age where my partner and I were talking very seriously about trying to get pregnant, and I was working as a science communicator, ingesting all kinds of scary reports and news, a firehose of bad news and scary headlines about, the quote unquote suicidal track that humanity is on, that it's a code red for humanity getting these words from, you know, the UN secretary general and so on because of the lack of effective climate action. And I just thought, wow, I can't rush into parenthood. Given the fact that I'm not seeing responsibility from our power holders on this issue. I'm seeing the scientists being ignored. How many more years can this go on? And it led to an outpouring of grief and an outrage at the situation. And I thought, oh, wow, this is a new form of distress coming from this really intimate question. And I'm sensitive and aware. And if this is happening to me, surely it's happening to other people as well, but in different ways. And we simply lack social norms for talking about this emerging ecological climate distress that's bubbling up. This was in 2017, 2018. And so I decided to do some research, for a book about emerging mental health challenges in the climate crisis and ways that we can cope constructively and help each other and build supportive community. What does mental health innovation look like in this time? And, how can we not only cope on a planet that is burning, but act and help each other, act and get some courage? And what can we learn from communities who have long lived under existential threat and found ways to to push on and widen their horizon of opportunity? So. So that was the Project Generation Dread, which ended up changing everything. Because then again, I find myself in my career following new questions because through the process of writing that book, I met so many people who basically said, yeah, okay, sure. We're psychiatrist psychologists, indigenous wisdom holders, activists, parents, non-parents. All of us recognize that the scope of psychic damage coming from the climate crisis is immense, and none of us are prepared in our institutions aren't prepared. So come join us, even though this isn't your background, and we'll figure it out together. One thing led to another. I ended up doing postdoctoral training at the med school at Stanford and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. And, now I'm in this emerging field with a bunch of others where we're trying to pioneer climate mental health as a new area of inquiry, fill in research gaps. So that we can co-create interventions that will help vulnerable communities who are who are really suffering with trauma from disasters, but also kind of a chronic sense of hopelessness that's rising out there. Climate distress, climate grief for real ecological losses that are baked in and forms of our identity and culture that are being destabilized with climate destabilization. So, my goodness! That was long. And, I hope it just gives a bit of a, a picture of how these are all little beads on a necklace that connect, even though it's it's a long trajectory of following ecological care, essentially, and being inspired by many people who came before, such as David Attenborough, to help tell stories in ways that are hopefully going to be culturally salient and connect to people's everyday lives. By going beyond the science and technology and getting into the heart of it.

Laura

I can really see the through line in the work that you've done, and the beauty and richness in life is in the meanders and I think your work is evidence of that. I can think of a lot of directions to go next. Maybe could you talk about the power of storytelling? You know, for me, the most compelling climate communicators or my favorite ones, and you are one of them, are people who are able to weave an evidence driven rhetorical argument with story and often personal story. you do that in your book and a lot of your public speaking. We've hosted some other climate communicators on this campus who also do that in powerful ways. During pandemic semesters, we had Doctor Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson as a virtual speaker. Our common reading program author who visited with us a couple of years ago was Elizabeth Rush, the fiction author. And, you know, I see some commonalities in that weaving among these leading climate communicators. So can you talk about the power of story? Why is it that we're so attuned to story and need that alongside these other more traditional forms of climate communication, focusing on the science, the policy, the tech?

Britt Wray

Yeah, absolutely. So as absorbers of stories, you know, those of us who consume them, take them in, the audience members, we need to feel connected to the stakes at hand. And we know, you know, there's lots of cognitive psychology. It's just really hard for us to pay attention and be emotionally moved when we're hearing about thousands of people and something happening to them, or millions of people. But if we hear about the one person for whom there was a risky situation and then some consequences from the fallout, we can really get involved with their emotional trajectory and feel their personal experience, something universal that we can tap into. And so we need to help, you know, just frame the complexity of these issues through vulnerable individual experiences that allow us to sink our teeth into it as a story consumer. And I was convinced from my background in public broadcasting and times at art school and so on, that vulnerability is a super connector. This is a magical device to be able to use to open people's hearts and to relate on a deeply human and authentic level, and that we all crave connection. We all crave love. We all crave healing for our pains and our sorrows and our heartbreaks. And, there are, you know, wisdom traditions, Buddhism, for instance, teaches that there are two inseparable truths about life. There is joy. Joy is part of our existence, but there is also suffering, and that is inescapable. And these are parts of our human condition that we are constantly trying to navigate, even though in a kind of toxic positivity culture, we're often in the dominant culture, only focusing on wanting to uphold and celebrate the joy. But we need to also gently embrace and share and help each other move through the suffering. And so we can only do that most productively when we are willing to be open and vulnerable and help people feel more alone and like they belong, and like they're not deviant for going through what they're going through. They're not alone. You know, the isolation is a fiction. And so story is this beautiful…narrative is this incredible space where we can be generous with those details of our own human experience, or that of others who have been so generous to share their story in detail, to a storyteller who can weave it into a book or a podcast or what have you, which helps to, bring us all under the same tent and provide some of that psychosocial support and just heart touching movement that allows us to be transformed and that allows us to see with new eyes. And it's really deadening, honestly, to read these nonfiction works that are super important but only laced with statistics and academic material that doesn't allow for moving beyond intellectualization. And we also know, like we've been trying to fix these massive problems for decades, you know, biodiversity and climate and so on. And we've been leading in our, in our fora for, you know, change making, policy making and so on at the UN and in our governments with these tactics that are just not paying off by leading with science, by leading with facts and policy and tech proposals and so on. And we also are, I think, quite foolish to leave out the fact that these are anthropogenic problems. They're caused by human behavior, and the behaviorists the people who understand why we behave the way that we do based on emotional impulses and so on. The psychologists are often missing from those decision making tables, and we need to bring in their wisdom, but also the wisdom of other kinds of cultural players who just help us feel things and how our feelings and thoughts are connected to our behavior. So we need the ritual performers and the artists and the wisdom holders and the people who help us get it on a gut and heart level. And we can all tell stories. And so that's a that's a device available to all of us to, to start tapping into that power to match with the very important evidence based formats that we need so that we can…we can do this in a way that is, in line with what our best measurements and metrics are telling us about what needs to be done. But it's not enough to just leave it to the science itself because it doesn't have that alchemy. Right? We can't leave it only to the intellect. but when we bring both the thinking and the feeling together, that's when the magic happens. And so, you know, I've never been inspired to join a movement because I felt like everything was going well. You know, distress is a powerful crucible through which we can move to reorient ourselves towards the world in new ways, to get strategic, to get courageous with one another. So we have to bring in that engine of feeling. And I think that we're seeing a renaissance around climate…on storytelling in Hollywood. We're going to start seeing a lot more productions, bringing climate into the backdrop of the frame, or being part of the conflict that's showing up in the characters' relationships in narrative fiction and nonfiction. And, and we're starting to get it right by doing that.

Laura

And that's so exciting. And you've been involved with Good Energy. Yes, I'm just, you know, on the surface level, aware of. Do you want to talk a little bit about what Good Energy is doing as it relates to amplifying climate in our pop culture stories?

Britt Wray

Absolutely. Yeah. So that's who I was thinking about when I mentioned Hollywood. So Good Energy is a nonprofit that has, been set up to address the problem that when they did a massive systematic analysis of all the scripts from TV and film over the last many years to see how often are they mentioning climate in any way, even renewable energy, windmills, anything related to the issue. And it was unbelievably, disappointingly small. Something like a point. Please don't quote me on this. I forget the exact statistic for something like point 5% of scripts are mentioning it at all.

Laura

Vanishingly small.

Britt Wray

And this is very troubling given that it's the number one threat to human health this century. And, it's a threat multiplier which is deepening all these other injustices that we're trying to work on and so on. And so how much can something matter if we're not talking about it in our cultural factories like Hollywood? These scripts allow people to enter windows of opportunity for thinking and feeling about things that matter. But if they're being ignored and people aren't being directed with their attention, then it just is a huge disservice to our ability to address them collectively. And so Good Energy does things like brings climate scientists and climate psychologists into writers rooms with script writers so that they can figure out how they can actually wrap their arms around this problem, and they can create compelling narrative and story worlds and characters and stakes that are rife and alive with the climate crisis, where it's not about making a topical film about only climate disasters and what it looks like. No, it's actually much more subtle than that. It's helping it breathe through the entire experience of the humans and the animals in these works so that it reflects our reality, because the climate is breathing through all of our lives as well. And we can start to normalize that experience and look for solutions and footholds when we see it reflected back. So it's about permeating our culture and new ways to start tackling it responsibly. But more than just responsibly in an emotionally gripping, entertaining and interesting way.

Laura

That's such important work. I'm excited to see what comes out of Hollywood in the coming years.

Britt Wray

Yeah, yeah, they're doing amazing work. And, you know, it's not just about this way of getting the climate experts into the rooms with Hollywood, but also, expanding the minds and educating, narratives, storytellers writ large because there's there's really a lot of fear that can go into talking about the subjects that people feel like, oh, I don't have the expertise or not, you know, studied up on climate. But this is for all of us. You know, all of us have psychology, right? And we can all embrace it from that perspective, because climate psychology is shared across all of our life worlds today. And it's about just normalizing and welcoming in and embracing this to be something that, you know, you don't need to pass a test in order to get involved in exploring it from your profession, especially not if you're a storyteller. So, yeah, watch out for a Good Energy Project. And they have an amazing website and they throw wonderful events and festivals and all kinds of good stuff.

Laura

Excellent. Thanks for sharing about that work in your book Generation Dread, Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety, and in a lot of your other recent work, you're making the case that we should embrace difficult climate emotions rather than ignoring them or otherwise just turning away from them. Can you talk about what is good, what is beneficial about grief and fear…worry the other emotions that we might call negative, I would call difficult. What is good about embracing them?

Britt Wray

Yeah. Yeah. So we would really help ourselves out if we could step back from this positive psychology framing that tells us that we should give labels like positive and good to some emotions, and negative or bad to others, because hope and optimism are not inherently good. Sometimes, depending on the situation, they can be kind of perverse or embedded in wishful thinking or emotional immaturity to be propping those up only. And fear and worry are not inherently bad and grief, for instance. They can be signs of connection to reality and care for what's in harm's way and a mark of attachment and love for the world, because we can only grieve for what we love and so on. And really markers of compassion. And so rather than thinking positive, negative, we can think in terms of comfortable, uncomfortable in terms of how we feel them, but really give them a neutral value judgment and just recognize that emotions are moving through us at all times of the day, and they simply carry information, and that we can find ways of helping ourselves slow down enough to feel them and observe them within us, even the uncomfortable ones, such that we can eventually open ourselves to the insights that they have to share with us about what we care about most. And they can be guides helping us figure out what we should do next in order to follow up on that deep care. Love and awareness that might come from really a place of pain and heartbreak, right? So, we often will try to suppress the difficult emotions by, yeah, shaming ourselves if we feel them. Getting that inner emotional critic going saying, oh, I'm so weak, if I'm feeling anxiety or fear or depression and this is bad, and I best bottle it up and not express it. But actually when we look at what psychologists in their research and clinical practice teach us, it's that suppression and trying to stave off difficult emotions that paradoxically makes them stay around and haunt us, that then becomes a push pull that makes them grip us. And we fear that if we let them in, they will kind of become a gang of feelings that overrides us and takes over our life and clouds us in unhappiness. But rather, if we can learn to get curious about them and in a value neutral way, welcome them in like guests in our house, and actually name them and identify them. There's a saying, name it to tame it, right? That means that we have some spaciousness between the stimulus and our response, which means that we can then start to have a choice about how we're going to respond to these emotions. Because the emotions are not ever pathological. It's our response to the emotions that can sometimes be pathological and unhelpful. And so by training ourselves with this kind of mindfulness approach, we can then allow them to move through us and when we're welcoming of them, they move through us much faster. And then we can see what they want to teach us and then move on and integrate them in a more healthful way. So, it's important for our climate to stress whatever cadre of difficult emotions to be welcomed so that we can meet them head on, and then metabolize them and use them as that kind of energizing crucible so that we get galvanized by often what is a lot of grief and heartbreak for what we are losing. A lot of what we need to do right now is collective mourning about what we are allowing to be lost because we are not holding our leaders to account on this effectively enough for instance. We are not banding together, banding together in our communities effectively enough. When we are turning away from these difficult emotions and sidestepping them to focus on more comfortable things, it often means that we're also just simply not talking about the issues that are painful and that raise our anxiety sensor and that overwhelm us. When we can turn towards it, when we can build up that courage in the emotional engagement skills, then we can stay laser focused on the project in a long term way. Because, as is always said, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. We need the emotional endurance skills to do it in a marathon like format, but even more so, it's not a marathon. It's a relay race, and we can pass the baton back and forth so that people can be at the front while we take care of ourselves and take a break from the urgency of all this work. And then we get back in the race and cycle through so that it's more emotionally sustainable. The last thought on that, I think it's this quotation that I always share, because I think it just says it all pretty succinctly from researchers writing in The Lancet. And that is that, recognizing that emotions are often what leads people to act, it's possible that feelings of ecological anxiety and grief, although uncomfortable, are actually the crucible through which humanity must pass to harness the energy and conviction that are needed for the life saving changes now required. And that kind of sums it up. It's a channel. Yeah.

Laura

With that in mind, you know, for faculty and staff who are listening, members of our campus community, recognizing that climate distress is pervasive among youth and often disruptive of day to day functioning, including maybe engagement with studies, we care a lot about student learning, of course, being on a university campus. Can you talk about suggestions you may have for the faculty and staff on our campus, and on others who are engaging with youth, talking about climate change in the classroom or otherwise, and how can we, contribute to all of us, but, you know, our students growing those skills of emotional resilience. And I'd love for you to, sort of touch on some of the headline results of that seminal global survey that you were a part of the research team for.

Britt Wray

Sure. So my colleagues and I surveyed 10,016 to 25 year olds in ten countries across the global South and North. So India, Nigeria, the Philippines, France, Brazil, Australia, the US, diverse places. And we found that 45% of young people globally report that their thoughts and feelings about the climate crisis are interfering with daily life tasks. So getting in the way of eating and sleeping and concentrating at times. And 75% of young people globally say that the future is frightening to them because of climate change, 56% said they feel humanity is doomed and 39% expressed hesitancy to have their own children one day because of these climate concerns. So that is an unbelievably heavy existential load connected to how young people are perceiving the climate crisis as this dark cloud over their futures. And who can blame them? Right? And these thoughts and feelings were also significantly associated with the sense of being betrayed by leaders and lied to by governments. So it also suggests that there could be massive relief if they were to see more effective, coordinated action. Right? However, this is something that deserves attention. Of course, if there's functional impairment showing up in your students and your learners because of extreme worry over the climate crisis, and people often will say, how do you know it's only the climate crisis? I mean, we're dealing with so many problems, systemic racism and economic issues and, you know, there's wars going on and so on and so forth. And that's very true with the pandemic. We see in some of the research that these worries do not all come from the same pool. That climate is in itself a salient concern, separate from often connected to these other poly crisis issues, and also that it is not the same as generalized anxiety disorder. So the way that we measure clinical anxiety, we have validated scales for that, and we now have validated scales for climate anxiety. And they do not superimpose and overlap. So you can have significant climate anxiety without having pre existing clinical anxiety. So that's really interesting. How do we how do we then address this. Well, what's coming out of climate aware therapy and the, the mental health workers who are helping people grapple with this? First and foremost, if we are trying to support a young person, we need to work on our own climate anxiety before we go into that room, because this is an existential threat which can really stir up a lot of fears and a kind of apocalyptic anxiety. If we get really deeply into what the science is telling us, right? And we can get overwhelmed by that if we're not equipped with the resilience building skills, if we're not attached to solutions and taking actions that help buoy us up. So we want to make sure that we are not going to go in there and accidentally trigger some unhelpful defenses within us because we are scared. That might make a young person feel unheard, misunderstood, like if we start to write off their thinking as catastrophic or suggest trying to dismiss it with a pill, or because this is not a mental illness, it's not a clinical diagnosis. And researchers and clinicians argue that it's reasonable, appropriate, and even healthy to feel some amount of distress about the climate crisis because we're talking about the destabilization of our life support systems. So, you need to come from a place of knowing how to ground yourself in your own climate awareness and feelings so that it's kind of that cliche about putting on your own oxygen mask before you help the kid next to you in a plane. So that's important because this is a collective trauma and we're in it together. It's not about some individualized problem within the young person themselves. And then on top of that, validating and bringing in that psychoeducation piece about how the experts are saying that this is not a mental disorder and how this is reasonable. Of course, there are times when they might need to be triaged towards other forms of support because it overlaps with pre-existing mental health challenges. And then you need a proper clinician to help you identify that. But most of the time, this is a kind of, you know, often subclinical distress, which can sometimes poke through and then become clinically relevant if it is impairing functioning in some way, showing up and messing up relationships or ability to get through the day. And then, there's a lot that needs to be done about, yes, helping connect young people to opportunities, to action so they can express some agency and feel less helpless in the situation. Like they're handcuffed here, like it's all powerless because that learned helplessness cycle begets more learned helplessness and is very damaging. And it can lead to narrative foreclosure of a sense of what's possible in the future….beliefs that the die is cast and there's nothing we can do. And that is not true. That is not what the science tells us. And when we're all able to enact some agency as tiny droplets, we we force and galvanize movement as a tidal wave of change. There's that node, of course. It's the deep interconnection between personal actions and collective action. So helping to bring that about so that we can really align their values with how they're showing up in the world is key. But that's not all. You can't externalize is distressing. Just get over it by taking action. You also need to bring in the emotional engagement support. So how do we help teach those mindfulness skills to be able to do that? You know, in the book I write a lot about internal activism, which is this term that comes from Caroline Hickman, who's a brilliant, climate aware psychotherapist who's worked with thousands of young people around the world on their climate anxiety. Because we need to grow up in the climate crisis to appreciate and feed ourselves with as much joy as possible to maintain our brightness of mind and our and our hope. But we also need to grow down and increase our tolerance for things like depression and anxiety and fear, so that as we move forward in this crisis, we become deeper human beings who can bear it all because we need to bear witness to suffering. We have more disasters coming right and knock on social strife and all kinds of modes of suffering that we need to be able to stretch our window of tolerance for that so that we don't lash out when we see it happen. And we can remain convicted and courageous to keep making mitigative changes to reduce the harm, even as damages pile up. So yeah, that's therapeutic skills. Maybe it's working with spiritual leaders. Maybe it's meditation and yoga. Maybe it's gratitude practices. You know, practicing good boundaries, in your life between urgent climate work and then taking restorative breaks for self-care. And that's because, and I love that quote from Audre Lorde, that self-care is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation. And that is an act of political warfare. So we need to really notice our own nervous systems and where we're at so that we can fill our cups up enough that we can be with the difficulty of the situation. We need to restore ourselves and maintain our resilience. So it's about helping young people develop those skills and the awareness and the validation and the sense that they're not alone and connect to caring community who feel the same and have opportunities for taking action that's authentic to their interests. All those things at once are kind of swirling and that, that we do it together. But the long and short of it is, aside from, you know, all those things, you can simply create a space for young people to come together and talk frankly and openly about how they're feeling in the climate crisis and why that is, without this immediate impulse to push them to action more just a space to emotionally dwell and explore and know that they'll be validated and there's not going to be some attempt to dismiss or belittle their feelings or try to fix their emotional response. Because when they get that validation, what naturally comes is a lot of relief and then no longer feeling deviant for caring so much.

Laura

Well, Dr. Wray, your work is so important and so timely and so relevant to our campus community. We're so grateful to have you here and for this conversation this morning, and I look forward to following your future work. And it's applications to what we're trying to do here at App State University. Thank you so much for being here.

Britt Wray

Well, thank you so much. And congratulations on this amazing five year Pathways to Resilience project that you are now embarking on. And thank you so much for bringing in the emotional quotient from the get go. I think that's just so helpful and wonderful leadership that a lot of people can turn to.

Laura

Thanks for helping us do it.

Britt Wray

Oh, yeah. Thanks for having me.

“Find Your Sustain Ability” host Laura England, associate director of App State’s Quality Enhancement Plan (“Pathways to Resilience”) and practitioner-in-residence in the Department of Sustainable Development, talks with 2024 Appalachian Energy Summit keynote speaker Katrin Klingenberg, co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Phius (Passive House Institute U.S.). Klingenberg shares her journey from working for a corporate architecture firm to developing a passion for passive building — which led her to build the nation’s first passive house. Passive building uses core building principles to create net-zero structures that utilize clean, renewable energy sources to generate as much or more energy than they consume annually. Phius aims to decarbonize the built environment by making high-performance passive building the mainstream market standard.

Transcript:

Laura England

Welcome back to the Find Your Sustainability podcast. I'm Laura England from the Department of Sustainable Development, and I'm serving as associate director for the Pathways to Resilience Quality Enhancement Plan. And today, I have the pleasure of getting to talk with the keynote speaker for App State's 2024 Appalachian Energy Summit. Architect Katrin Klingberg, or Kat as well call her today is co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit organization Phius, which stands for passive house institute US, and is dedicated to decarbonizing the built environment by making high performance, passive building the mainstream market standard. Over the past 20 years, Kat's visionary leadership in this field has driven the development and adoption of passive building and zero energy standards. Passive building methodology originated in the US and Canada in the 1970s, and was enhanced in Germany in the 1990s. Kat reinvigorated it in 2003, when she designed and completed the first home to meet passive house standards in the United States. The interest that followed ultimately led her to found Phius, the organization she continues to lead today. Kat's work with Phius includes developing and delivering building science based training in how to design and build the energy efficient zero energy buildings. She has collaborated with federal and state government agencies to tailor passive building standards for various climate zones, and has consulted on projects nationally and internationally. She has also contributed to the field of sustainable building through articles, book contributions and presentations in the U.S. and abroad, and has been recognized for her leadership with numerous awards. Kat, we're thrilled to have you visit APS state and I thoroughly enjoyed your keynote talk last night at this year's Energy Summit. So for those who weren't there, can you start by telling us in layperson terms what is passive building and what is zero energy building? And why are these approaches so important in the context of climate change?

Kat Klingenberg

Well, first of all, let me thank you for having me. This is like, super exciting. I'm really glad I can be here and talk to you about my passion and kind of like life's work that I kind of have been dedicating my career to passive building and passive house. So passive house initially started, as you might imagine, as a house, as a single family design where people tried to create a building shell out of materials that would be very well insulating. It's almost like you're putting on a big jacket and then it traditionally came out of the colder climates, and by putting on a jacket and by making the building less drafty, they actually created a home that could be heated just by the internal heat gains in the building that I already present, like you dog or like your water heater or so. Very cool. Right? So that was the ideal in the 70s that you could create this equilibrium in a building where the internal gains are, the same as the losses. And we do that by applying passive building principles. And there again, nothing, no rocket science. It’s pretty intuitive. You put on a big down jacket in a cold climate. You put on a little less thick down jacket in a warmer climate, like, the San Francisco down jacket, you know, so you have the 006 North Face coat, and then you have the lighter one that you take on, like maybe chillier summer travel nights. Same idea. So yeah, that's pretty intuitive, actually. super comfortable. I'm so glad that I got to live an experience that, as you mentioned, I built my own house in 2002. That started off this interest in the whole thing, like proof of concept, really. It was the first passive home in the United States. And I've, I've lived through many winters in Urbana, Illinois. When the blizzard hits, it gets really, really cold in the Midwest and then the temperatures after the blizzard are like -20 F.

Laura England

Oh, wow.

Kat Klingenberg

So super, super cold when I'm in the house. and look out and it's sunny in the morning. Like, I have no idea. I'm walking around in a t- shirt because some solar, passive solar is part of the whole design process. So great, great, great resilient healthy homes.

Laura England

Well, that must have been really satisfying to have, you know, built the home and then to have it really demonstrate to you those passive principles in action.

Kat Klingenberg

You have no idea what kind of a smile I had on my face, like, yeah, this is working. And then you open the door and you poke your nose out and like, nope. Stay inside today.

Laura England

Stay in my toasty home. Yeah. Well. And then what is a zero energy building then?

Kat Klingenberg

So yeah. So what I just talked about is essentially like, the passive elements that, that you can use, like super insulation, like you make the home less drafty, you take windows that are very high performing and that let, based on climate, the right amount of solar. And because like in the warm climates, again, it works too. But at that point you want to keep the solar out, right? Like otherwise you get really hot in your building. So once you do all that and you optimize the envelope to reach this equilibrium where the internal heat gains and the losses of the envelope, or they almost balance out and you can get away with a very, very tiny mechanical system, which makes everything cheaper and easier, then you switch over to renewables and the system that you now need to get to zero energy for operation is super tiny. So, my house is pretty modest, right? Like, it's a 1500 square foot home, not giant. But that doesn't mean that you cannot do the same thing in a bigger home. But what I'm saying is, like so my footprint, it's a two story home, like my footprint is about 600ft². and maybe a little bigger. And, the PV system that covers all the energy that is still left after I did all these efficiency measures, after I put those in place, is about half the size of the roof. It’s really, really small. And it over produces 10,000 electric car miles. So, I'm completely independent. I'm overproducing. My bill is just the connection to the grid because I'm still interconnected. I'm not my own microgrid or anything. I don't have any storage. I stayed away from this 20 years ago because I felt that was too complicated. I'm thinking about it now just as backup. Like, I still haven't made my choice in terms of, like, electric car, but there are some really, really cool, like small home energy management systems now that are inverters that are like home management systems that decide when to keep energy like in the battery, when to send it back to the grid. Unfortunately, in Illinois we don't have that. But like in states like California where they actually pay you based on like peak consumption, the utility actually loves that when you're a micro producer and they get in a into a pinch, and too many people are drawing energy from the grid, at that point, they pay you big bucks to send like another kilowatt hour their way. Yeah. And so we talked about this last night. So once you have these like super energy efficient building shells, then you add a very small now affordable renewable system to it, which easily gets you to now overproduce. And then you can start trading with the utility if the the utility recognizes the value to them to shave off peak demand, then they don't have to build as many peaker plants and the peaker plants only run 2% of the year because like those peak moments don't last very long and they are super expensive to the utility. So once we put all these pieces together, and that was my main point yesterday, that actually buildings are really the cornerstone of this redesign of our energy supply as part of a renewable grid. And back to your second part of the question: Like, why is this all so important, in the context of climate change and resilience? Because, well, hey, 20, 30, 40 years ago, maybe we could have been talking about only mitigation, but now, we are a little late in the game. And we also need to talk about adaptation. And that's the great thing. Like these buildings, even if the grid goes down, they still have a small backup battery. We have a great story from some of you might remember the cold spell in Texas when a lot of people, like, actually died because it was too cold and the grid went down and…

Laura England

They weren't prepared.

Kat Klingenberg

They weren't prepared. They started burning furniture and like, things that you really shouldn't be doing, like, and then endangering themselves.

Laura England

Right… fumes, I imagine.

Kat Klingenberg

Right. So, a home that was retrofitted to our Phius standards in Austin, Texas, had no problem. They stayed in the home the entire week. They could have stayed there. They had not forethought enough. It was a fairly new home. They hadn't installed a small backup system yet, like a small battery. So they had a small baby. And so the limiting factor was the fridge no longer working. And they had to get baby food. So that's when they left the home. But if they had had that backup battery, no problem. Right. Like, so you put enough of a battery in to keep your critical loads going? No problem.

Laura England

So very cool. And this point that you're making last night is becoming even more clear for me now that there are synergies between transformation of the built environment and transformation of our energy systems. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has called for rapid, far reaching transformations across all sectors. Right? And I'm hearing like on the homeowner individual scale, like it's more affordable to put the photovoltaic solar array on your roof. If you've done the passive building work to really, really reduce your energy demand, it makes it then affordable. And that's a big obstacle for a lot of people. The cost of putting a solar array on your roof to meet the current level of energy use is prohibitive, but these two things are really synergistic.

Kat Klingenberg

Totally. So this is so cool, right? Like so if you have a regular standard home, it uses so much energy like you will have to have your roof is not even going to be enough. You will have to have photovoltaic panels in your yard and all of a sudden you pay like 40 K for like a system or 50 or whatever. And that's crazy. Nobody can afford the so with the incentives, the federal incentives. In Illinois, I was able to purchase my little itty bitty like five kW, solar system for I think in the end it cost me like 6k.

Laura England

Oh, wow. Huge difference.

Kat Klingenberg

And for that I pay off. I literally have no energy except the ten bucks that I'm being charged to...

Laura England

To be connected?

Kat Klingenberg

To be connected. And theoretically, once I have my electric car, I'm not paying any gas anymore, you know? So for 6k….

Laura England

Pays for itself.

Kat Klingenberg

…for like the next, I don't know, whatever. So all good.

Laura England

Yeah. Well, so. And last night you talked a lot about the various other benefits of passive building besides the energy reduction and what that means for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the cost savings by reducing energy demand. Can you talk about some of those other benefits?

Kat Klingenberg

Yeah, totally. I mean, it's like a total win win win on all levels, right? So by applying these passive principles, essentially what we're well it’s not accidentally like it's intentional, but we're making the thermal comfort much better in buildings like, most of us are probably used to very drafty, noisy homes that are not very comfortable, that don't have very good indoor air quality if your live in a humid climate. It's probably really humid in the summer. You have to run your air conditioning a lot to get the humidity out. So these passive principles help to improve all this to a level that is almost unbelievable. When people came into my home initially for tours, when I was trying to show it to the city council, they came in and one person came and said like, well, it's springtime and my allergies are killing me. Since I've been in this building, it almost has completely subsided. What is going on with this home? And I was like, well, thank you very much. That's the filtration system. And 24 seven, like fresh air ventilation and filtration. That's what you're feeling. So that's super cool. Surface temperatures like that. There's never a draft. There's never convection. And even the windows are so high performing that there's no draft next to full height windows.

Laura England

The comfort level is higher.

Kat Klingenberg

You can sit like it's it's it's it's really cold outside or warm for that matter. You can sit next to a full glass window, like on the windowsill and you're super comfortable. You don't, you don't, you don't feel it. And then, the quietness a lot of people refer to the quietness. The acoustic quality in these buildings is just unbelievable. And that makes a big difference in big cities. Right? So and then, they are safe too. So because they are so well built, inherently from the building science perspective, we’re preventing any kind of condition for potential mold growth in the wall. So, since the buildings are built so tight and the ventilation happens through intentional ports, there's no moist air that can get into the wall assembly. So there's no condensation inside of the wall assemblies not on the surface or inside and not inside. That's important. So that nothing deteriorates. So your building will last pretty much indefinitely.

Laura England

Oh wow.

Kat Klingenberg

I cut holes into my wall after 20 years and the material was as if I had just brought it back home from Home Depot yesterday.

Laura England

Oh, wow.

Kat Klingenberg

This is really, really cool. And then there's the affordability. Utility costs go down to nothing. If you add your PV, like your fuel cost and the affordability, that is really a big deal for developers, for campuses, affordable housing developers who actually hold their properties and, they can monetize the savings that are built into it. So through the passive measures, we we save so much like initial energy. And now, PV system is so powerful that it over produces and actually starts making us money. So the overall total cost benefit calculation looks fabulous.

Laura England

So what are some of the obstacles then? You know, this isn't yet the market standard. Your organization, Phius, is making a lot of headway. And you talked last night about the ways in which demand for your work is accelerating. I'd love to hear you talk about that. Those trends, what you think is behind them, and what are some of their remaining obstacles for sort of broad adoption and implementation of passive building principles?

Kat Klingenberg

Yeah. and we keep discovering those new obstacles. But that all said, we've come so far along already, like when when I first started in 2002 and three, my house was number one, right? And I was like, this is like slam dunk. This is a win win. It will take no time. And we'll see this exponential growth and it will become standard. So that was my vision for the nonprofit that I founded. Our mission statement was like, we want to make these standards code by 2020. Obviously, we didn't make that.

Laura England

In some places though. Right? 

Kat Klingenberg

Well, that's just it. So I look back, I'm like, in 2020. Yeah, it actually has become code in some places, like for example, Mass, Massachusetts, they forged ahead and and they didn't just do this willy nilly. They built like eight projects and they studied the costs and they're like. And they analyzed what does it cost on top of regular construction. And they found it was roughly between 1 and 3%. And at that point, compared to the Massachusetts code, right? Like it's it's always you got to do this on a local basis, that calculation. So yeah. And at that point they just sprinted ahead like, yeah, we're going to do this. Well this is going to be the basis for a zero energy stretch code. And like in Mass a lot of municipalities adopted the stretch code ahead of time. In two years it's going to become law for everybody. And they're basically showing right now that this can be done on a broad level. So now back to your obstacles. Right. Like so, the buildings have grown from single family to multi-family. So that was a big growing period for us because we had to evolve from single family, home building kind of focus to like now to multifamily. And now we're also evolving into the commercial construction realm. So the principles apply across board. And we also are getting into retrofitting buildings using the same principles. The biggest issue that we're facing is really training up the workforce. if a project costs more than these like 1 to 3% and that's for multifamily, right? Like don't try this on a single family home. Single family homes are still more expensive. And we could talk more about this, but this goes beyond this podcast. so the workforce coordination is really key. And if you do this for the first time, even as an architect, it will take you more time training up the designers, the architect, the builders, the trades is so critical. If you right now go to contract and who's not familiar, it's not again, not rocket science. It's just like rethinking certain things and like redesigning your sequence of construction. It's really not that complicated. But people are resistant to change. And when they are faced with new technologies that they're not familiar with, they double the price, you know, so it's really important to train people, educate them across the board, like, create a spirit of integrated design. Ideally, everybody is at the table right from the beginning. Not like we've been doing this in the past. Like somebody designs something puts it out for bid. Somebody bids. It's all like everybody loves in their own little silos. And that just doesn't work because we are trying to tap into the synergies and not just between the technologies, the passive elements and the renewable elements and then the wider grid elements. Well, it's we're trying to tap into the synergies between the trades and everybody, all the players that are involved in making buildings happen.

Laura England

One thing related to that that might be, useful is that here at App State, building sciences and sustainable technology are in the same department. So those sort of trades fields are, you know, they're talking to one another in the academic setting and getting training across those different fields. So perhaps graduates of programs like ours are more prepared to do that talking across what has been siloed.

Kat Klingenberg

Yeah. And we actually have had an intern, from App State and she was awesome. She is at NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) now. And I had a secret mission, like coming here because I believe you guys, as you say, are perfectly positioned to actually spearhead that kind of integration in academia. And I've talked to some of your colleagues last night. I hope we can continue that conversation. We have a whole suite of trainings developed that is out in the market for the executive kind of group of professionals. But we've also been pushing our university version of it, and we're looking for university partners. So I'm very excited to continue that conversation with the respective departments of your school.

Laura England

That's excellent. And the timing is good. Since we have this five year climate literacy initiative that starts in just a few months in August of this year.

Kat Klingenberg

And you know what? The young generation, they're asking for it and the skills are not doing it. It’s crazy, right. Like so when I taught at University of Illinois that's already like what? Like, oh my God, I don't even know. It's like almost 15 years ago. I was teaching passive building and we had just gotten a new head of the department, and he wanted to turn a traditionally also building science based school into a design school. He saw that I made my students build, like, 1 to 1 models of, like, super insulated walls. They were exhibited at the final exhibit, and I got fired. My contract did not get extended. The students staged a sit-in in the dean's office and he kicked them out.

Laura England

Oh my goodness.

Kat Klingenberg

So the students were ready in 2005.  No problem. Like hands down it was totally obvious. We have to do this, right? But the school…Schools move so slowly. It's, And failing. Failing the next generation.

Laura England

We have to do things differently here at App State. It does take time, but we have a lot of people, team of faculty, staff and students across campus who are working together. And, you know, speaking of students and their interest in being a part of solutions, you really are an agent of change in your field. Have been and a lot of our students are interested in being agents of change in their chosen professions and the work of Phius. I don't know if we made this clear earlier, but you're not doing the building of the homes and buildings, you're doing more design certification. You're working in ways that leverage larger change. and I'm sure that was intentional. And someone who has been an agent of change. Can you talk about that a little bit, thinking about ways of having that bigger, broader impact and any advice you may have for our students who see themselves again, going into a profession and really wanting to help implement the transformations that are needed.

Kat Klingenberg

Totally. So first to your point, I think it's really important that someone has this experience of practical experience. So I'm really glad that I was forced out of my corporate architecture career by myself. when I become part of the solution, right? I was working for Helmut Jahn, a really big, one of the best ten architecture firms, but I never had seen a piece of wood in any of my drawings. It was all steel and glass. And I'm like, I have to make a difference. I'm going to quit my job. I'm going to like, go out on my own, because then I have control and I started building my house. So knowing how these things go together in 3D as an architect, like, essentially becoming the design builder, I did all the structural calculations on my building and it’s still standing up really happy about this.

Laura England

It's actually.

Kat Klingenberg

I started designing my own systems, so I really had to think everything through. and with that base knowledge, then I felt like I had a good baseline to then start a business around it. Now, I chose the nonprofit route, but having done this for 20 years now and having built this business and as you say, like I started planning out a strategic change plan, like, what do we need to do to make this code? Like we need to talk to the policymakers. We need to teach people. So we need a curriculum. We need a really good standard that doesn't make people… that allows people to do this safely. And that brings them along. So we kept working, and it has been 20 years now, and this doesn't happen overnight. So to the students who want to be change agents, I would say, this is a firm belief of mine. I believe we've shown that environmental action can actually be profitable and that it is a win win for everybody. And now having been in the nonprofit world for so long, it's so funny. Like my vision for my next chapter is actually going into for profit because, what I want to inspire in like a global entrepreneurial world that that really is the fire we need to light next. I was talking to the chair of your economy department last night. We had this conversation, right? We're talking about the limits to growth. And he was funny enough. He was studying in London when that was a thing. 50 years later, they came out with this sequel, which is called Earth For All. I recommend for everybody to read this. You don't have to agree with everything, but that speaks to now if we think about like systems change, Pick you up your expertise. Start a business that leverages these synergies and then prove to the world that this is an economic driver and makes life better. It makes social communities better. I think we're really at that point where we're understanding these systems designs, even on a global level, and we need immediate action globally like pretty much yesterday. So let's just unlock this entrepreneurial spirit in students. Take it and run with it. And create a business.

Laura England

Great advice there. So hands on experience. You talked about basically strategic thinking strategic planning, thinking ahead to thinking systems thinking. What are the the outcomes we need to get to and then what are the strategies to get there. yeah.

Kat Klingenberg

So one more thing like, this is maybe a little off topic, but so what I'm really excited about in my field is like, I've started working with developers because I'm trying to light that fire under their butts, right? Like, come on, people like this is not just good for affordable housing developers. This is also really good for for profit developers. And here's why. So essentially, in my mind, it's like we have a housing crisis. We need housing. Housing is crazy expensive, no longer sustainable…nuts. So if we could start thinking about housing as infrastructure for decentralized energy production. So again, housing basically becomes the rig for your solar. And now the housing itself is so efficient that you can overproduce on a multifamily scale or like a city block, then you have a microgrid. You add all these efficiencies that we talked about during my presentation last night. So as a developer, you actually become like an energy company and housing is kind of like a side product. I have this vision that housing becomes free somehow.

Laura England

Everyone would love that. 

Kat Klingenberg

So, well, negligible in terms of cost, because it has this other amazing benefit to developers and to society to make money.

Laura England

I love that vision.

Kat Klingenberg

Yeah, that's that's my…

Laura England

I am excited to see that spread.

Kat Klingenberg

That’s my next career, you know? I'm going to be an energy and housing developer.

Laura England

Well and what you just said you're embodying this strategic thinking/systems thinking like you have worked within a particular system. And that's part it's a subsystem of a bigger system. And Now you're probably thinking multiple systems ahead of the one.

Kat Klingenberg

And the next one is global, you know, so like, how can we take that model and take it to places like Africa for example right? Like, well, they haven't done too much like old bad stuff. So it's a clean slate. Like, let's get started right out of the gate on the right foot.

Laura England

Yeah. Well, speaking of different geographies, on like sort of a more practical question you talked about in cold climates, what it looks like for passive building here, the down jacket insulation being really key for the climates, like the Piedmont of the southeastern United States, where it's very hot in the summer and very humid. What are some of…like help us visualize like what are those building practices look like to get to zero energy or passive homes?

Kat Klingenberg

Yeah, it's also super exciting. So we have annual conferences every year to plant flags and different regions of the U.S, and the US is actually super interesting in terms of climate specific design. So this is like what I'm priding myself in having come up with the idea of climate specific passive building standards. We developed those, and wrote the papers and did the research and with NREL in 2015. So this past year we were in Houston, Texas, and we were a little nervous, like, will people take us up on this and think that this is a real thing? And they actually were. I think this was one of our best conferences. So, the principles exactly apply in hot and humid climates as well. It's the same thing. It's essentially best building science practices. It's just a different level of insulation. Like you still need a certain level of insulation. You definitely need the leak free construction because you don't want…you have the humidity. well, not so much in the southwest, but in the humid, hot and humid climates. Damn right. You need to control vapor. Problem number one. That's also a big contributor to your energy consumption if you have to dehumidify. So if you can ventilate right. And not just like crazy ventilate, because then you bring in all the humidity, then you don't have to like, use energy to take the humidity back out. The whole system's thinking again, like optimize for that particular climate. So it's exact same thing.

Laura England

So you have a set of levers and you just pull different ones, different amounts depending on the climate.

Kat Klingenberg

Exactly. That's exactly right. it's like little sliders, you know, you just like, kind of jigger it until it's perfect including cost, by the way. And that's the good news for the South. It's a delicate balance, but once you get it, and because you do not need that much insulation, and actually it's also more affordable. So if you're in a super cold climate, you can imagine you need a bigger down jacket. And if you go and buy a Canada goose jacket, this is like a real investment. If you go to San Francisco, like, all right, like, no problem. I can pull this thing at the airport out of a vending machine. So it's funny but it's a similar kind of relationship.

Laura England

Very cool. So, Kat, you've laid out a big vision and shared with us a lot about passive building. For our listeners who are everyday people, some might include folks working in the building industry, but you know, homeowners, future homeowners, etc. what is a good place to start. Tell us about where we can get information through your organization, Phius. But also like what would be a good starting point for someone who wants to move in this direction?

Kat Klingenberg

Yeah. So our website is great, maybe almost like a little bit too much information. So when I look for something specific, it's www.phius.org. It's sometimes hard to find. So please be patient. But there is a lot of awesome information on our website. It's all free. We've put together a whole bunch of calculators, so if you wanted to try to figure out how to build your own home, you actually could. You just have to do a whole bunch of reading. I do not recommend it because these homes are delicate designs, right? Like so at that point, a professional is a really good investment because if you try to figure it out yourself and you make one small mistake, then you might be ailing from that mistake, like for a long time. If you pay a professional upfront, you're good for the next 100 years. Essentially, that's the idea of the whole system. So but you could if you wanted to. And on our website you will also find information about training. So if you are in any of the fields that are relevant and you might want to like, consider a shift in focus, we have trainings for architects, for builders, for energy writers, anybody along the delivery chain of passive building. We also just recently launched our new trades training, which we were very excited about. So really the hands on stuff, how do I do this? How do I build like insulated slabs? And what's the airtight layer of vapor barrier like all these like technical terms for building science. And how do these things go together? What are the components? So really exciting stuff. We also have information about policies, about incentives on the website. Really good place to start. If you're in a profession and you're interested in, like taking the next step. Definitely. Training would be a good idea. And we have that infernal website and I will say, sign up for our newsletter because our team kicks out new information all the time. And it's a pretty fast moving field. Lots of exciting stuff happening all the time. At the end of this year, we're having three educational events coming up. This year we are together with Green Built, we have a dedicated track at Green Built for the Phius technologies and certifications and buildings. Very excited because the case we're trying to make is like these systems are synergistic. They are not like energy over here and green building over. They work together similarly with the living building challenge. Right. Like any other holistic green building program. Same thing we are the intel inside we are the energy optimization logic that you should plug into these other systems. And then we also have a Phius pro forum for the first time this year, which is especially dedicated to the professionals in Massachusetts who are now challenged on a large scale to basically reconfigure their entire business model to to crank out  like, passive buildings. One after another. So we're trying to help them to come up to speed and feel more secure that they can actually do that. And then one little thing, I forgot to plug  yesterday. and some of you students might, might hear me say it. Now, Joseph Lstiburek, in my opinion, one of the most relevant building scientists in like, North America and maybe globally, and he has a long-standing building science symposium every year. It's called Summer Camp. And they are always looking for young folks and new people to join because the older, more experienced building scientists, they are retiring. So we need to bring new young folks in. If you're interested in going to summer camp, let me know. Send an email to [email protected] and that'll get to me. They are 75% full. It's the first week of August. It would be great to have a few young folks to show up for that conference as well.

Laura England

That sounds like a great opportunity. Well, thank you for the work that you do, Kat. Your organization is phenomenal in creating change, accelerating change. It's really inspirational. The last question that I'd love to ask, in the complexity and enormity of the climate problems that we face, what gives you hope or courage to keep doing this work that you're doing?

Kat Klingenberg

Well, about 20 years ago, when I first started, I was kind of bummed and I'm like, man, nobody's doing anything. Like I felt like I was on my soapbox all the time, like bugging people, like, I don't care if I bug people. I was like, we have to bug people. In the younger years, I was probably, maybe sometimes a little too forceful sometimes . I started yesterday, I, I learned my lesson, you know, like, you don't want to inflame this politicization of the climate debate. It has unfortunately been hijacked. So let's steer clear of that. What we're proposing here is something we all want. Right, Left. Doesn't matter. Like we can all agree we want safe, comfortable homes that are resilient. They keep our families safe.

Laura England

Absolutely.

Kat Klingenberg

And we want, like, affordability. We don't want to spend a fortune on energy. So, that solution, when it all clicked and when it all fell into place, and I saw the potential for this black swan event, like, really this exponential growth, like, wow, something that seemed so daunting 20 years ago and all of a sudden it's taken off in entire industries were struggling to make this change happen. So since then, really, I created a newsletter on LinkedIn and it's called, In the Catbird Seat on climate. And, that was my effort of kind of like switching my thinking from doom and gloom to like, no, we can actually do this. This is totally awesome. And it will make everything better. Now we just need to win the hearts and minds of the people and communicate like this is the win win. We all can agree on it, no matter left or right or whatever. What the disagreements are. This is actually our commonality. So the more people we can convince of that and inspire to follow in the footsteps of the better. So yes, I believe this is a really great idea and we can make it happen…and we can make it happen in time.

Laura England

Well said in that point that with climate mitigation strategies or climate solutions, there are so many co-benefits as they're called, these other benefits. If we focus on that instead of the controversial pieces…the parts that are uncontroversial, we have the possibility of making a whole lot of headway. So once again, thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for coming to App State and sharing with us about your work and for talking with me today.

Kat Klingenberg

Thank you so much.

Two App State Team Sunergy members join Chief Sustainability Officer Lee Ball in the podcast studio to share their experiences with solar vehicle racing. Zach Howard and Logan Richardson explain how they got involved with the team, as well as the impact it has had on their personal growth and their job prospects post-graduation.

Show Notes

https://sunergy.appstate.edu/

Transcript:

Lee Ball

Logan Richardson

Two App State Team Sunergy members join Chief Sustainability Officer Lee Ball in the podcast studio to share their experiences with solar vehicle racing. Nicole Sommerdorf and Patrick Laney explain how they got involved with the team, as well as the impact it has had on their personal growth and their job prospects post-graduation.

Show Notes:

https://sunergy.appstate.edu/

Lee Ball:

Hello everybody. Welcome to another Find Your Sustainability Podcast. My name is Lee Ball. I'm the Chief Sustainability Officer here at Appalachian State University. Today, this is the first of three parts with Team Sunergy Appalachian State's solar vehicle team. Appalachian State University's internationally recognized Team Sunergy is an interdisciplinary team with a passion for sustainable transportation and the ingenuity, innovation, and drive to create it. It's premier solar car, Apperion, gained national attention with top three finishes in the 2016 and '17 Formula Sun Grand Prix, an international collegiate endurance competition that sets the standard for and tests the limits of solar vehicle technology. In 2018, the team's second cruiser class car rose, racing on solar energy, placed third in the FSGP competition and tied for second place in the American Solar Challenge, an international solar vehicle distance race held every other year by the Innovators Educational Foundation.

In FSGP 2021, Team Sunergy captured second place in its class advancing to the ASC and winning first place for multiple occupant vehicles. In 2022, team Sunergy finished second place in the American Solar Challenge, and that race took place from Independence Missouri to Twin Falls, Idaho. So, joining me today are two team Sunergy members that I've had the great pleasure of getting to know for several years now. Nicole Sommerdorf and Patrick Laney. So, welcome to the podcast to both of you.

Nicole Sommerdorf:

Thank you.

Lee Ball:

Nicole Sommerdorf is the electric director and majors in sustainable technology and environmental science. Very ambitious double major, Nicole. And Patrick Laney, who's the lead mechanical engineer, is a sustainable technology major. So, welcome to the podcast. I'm real excited to talk about Team Sunergy and talking about kind of your connection to Team Sunergy and really what got you involved and why you're excited to continue to be involved with such an interesting and sometimes grueling and exhausting program. So, I'll first start with you Nicole. What first attracted you to get involved with Team Sunergy?

Nicole Sommerdorf:

I actually heard about Team Sunergy when I was in high school and I was looking for a place to go for college, and it actually led me to Appalachian State in the first place. I got initially into the team my first year of college during COVID, fall 2020. And at first the electrical meetings were on Zoom, but then I just kept being on the team and I finally got to go to the warehouse in spring 2021.

Lee Ball:

Patrick, what about you?

Patrick Laney:

I also discovered the team when I was in high school. I was actually here on a visit to see my sister who was a student here and when I saw it in the newspaper, I applied early admission to App State on the drive home. So, I joined my freshman year and never looked back.

Lee Ball:

Yeah, that's awesome. We need to make sure enrollment management listens to this podcast. Nicole, can you share a memory from your first race?

Nicole Sommerdorf:

My first race was in 2021 and the best memory from that race was when Jessica and Stephanie finally made it over the big hill during the ASC route. And no other teams at that point had made it over the hill, and one team even broke down trying to get their solar car over the hill. So, I think it was a really great feat when they finally made it over on top of the hill, they all jumped out and we all hugged them. So, it was a really nice memory.

Lee Ball:

I think I share that memory. Just seeing the smiles in their faces was priceless.

Nicole Sommerdorf:

Yeah.

Lee Ball:

Patrick, what about you? What do you remember from your first race?

Patrick Laney:

Probably from the track race when we decided that I would try to drive all day and barely make the cutoff to qualify for ASC. When me and Austin were in the car and we drove the whole day, I don't remember how long it was, but we ended up one lap short because of a penalty. And the last lap we had to power cycle the car like 20 times just to try to get it around the track and we finally made it over, which was a cool feeling.

Lee Ball:

So Patrick, could you describe what the scrutineering process is and what it takes to qualify to even begin the competition?

Patrick Laney:

Yeah. So, scrutineering is basically technical inspection, where you roll your car into their building and completely deconstruct it basically and get grilled for hours and hours by their engineers to make sure that it is safe and also passes all the regulations and all that kind of good stuff.

Lee Ball:

And then the track race, can you describe what that's like?

Patrick Laney:

So, the Formula Sun Grand Prix is the qualifier for American Solar Challenge, and you have three days of track racing. Both of my FSGPs have been at Heartland Motorsport Park and you drive all day making laps on the track, and see how it goes.

Lee Ball:

And then the road race usually consists of what? How many days and what's that like?

Patrick Laney:

Well, the race in '21 was shortened because of COVID requirements, so that race was only a thousand miles and we did that over three or four days. This past summer was a longer race, 1,500 miles, and I think that one was five or six days.

Lee Ball:

Yeah. Did you get that audience? Only a thousand miles. It's pretty grueling. Nicole, what's it like competing against and getting to know students from schools located all over North America?

Nicole Sommerdorf:

I think it's fun. It's really cool to meet a lot of different types of people and just see the different teams coming from all across the world. You get to meet people from Canada, you get to see big engineering schools like MIT and just see how they interact with each other, and also just how they interact with other teams. It's like, I don't know. It's very interesting.

Lee Ball:

And Patrick, can you talk a little bit about the camaraderie between the teams?

Patrick Laney:

Yeah, I mean during scrutineering especially, it's basically all the teams band together against the scrutineers is essentially how it works. If you need parts, you can pretty much ask any team there and they'll give it to you or if they need something you can give it to them. We're one of the only teams that ever brings a drill press, and I think there's always a line at our trailer to use that. But yeah.

Lee Ball:

I know there's a lot of creative tension between the teams and the scrutineers, but I do like to think that they have our safety and our best interests.

Patrick Laney:

They do. Maybe us versus the scrutineers isn't the best way to word that, but we all team up together-

Lee Ball:

It feels that way.

Patrick Laney:

That way through scrutinizing.

Lee Ball:

It certainly feels that way sometimes.

Patrick Laney:

It does. It does.

Lee Ball:

Because it's so challenging, these are engineering problems that many of the teams have been spending months to solve, and then we get to the race and the scrutineer year will say, yeah, we want you to do it this way. And sometimes it's literally back to the drawing board.

Patrick Laney:

Yeah, completely back to the drawing board sometimes. And all the other teams come up with different solutions too, so I'm sure it's hard for the scrutineers to decide what's okay and what's not.

Lee Ball:

Right. Nicole, what are your thoughts about how collegiate solar racing is contributing to the future of sustainable transportation innovations?

Nicole Sommerdorf:

I think it really promotes students to think about the future and what they can do for the future and also how to work together.

Lee Ball:

Patrick, what are your thoughts on how solar racing in this collegiate space is contributing to the future of sustainable transportation?

Patrick Laney:

Well, not only, like Nicole said, everybody's thinking about the future, but the technologies that come out of solar car don't always necessarily have to be a solar car. Regenerative braking is something you see in most standard EVs, and that got its start primarily in solar car racing. So, advancements in solar cell technology, MPPTs aerodynamics, all coming from solar car.

Lee Ball:

Nicole, you're the electrical director. And I'm just curious, what is it like leading a team at a school like App State that does not have an electrical engineering team? What is it like trying to transfer the information that you've gained in the last few years to the next kind of crop of students that are also interested in the electrical part of Team Sunergy?

Nicole Sommerdorf:

It's been difficult, but in terms of just trying to find students that have the passion and drive to learn themselves. But it's been also good to just learn how to interact with other people and figure out what their needs are. So, some people might need different types of resources, some people might need hands-on training. It gives me good opportunities to learn and them, but yeah.

Lee Ball:

Well, I really appreciate your interest and passion in helping the next group of students learn from you and from others that preceded you. Because solar racing really relies on a strong electrical team and a strong mechanical team. And some of these challenges are extremely difficult and a lot of faculty members don't even know how to solve them. So, my experience witnessing you all as student competitors, I think of you more as colleagues because the knowledge that you have gained is far surpassed definitely myself and many other of your own faculty members that you know work with. Patrick, what's it like working with such a collaborative multidisciplinary team?

Patrick Laney:

It's interesting to say the least. I think a lot of times if you work with a group of people that all have the same mindset, you're going to have the same solutions each time. But when you work in a more multidisciplinary environment, you start to see more solutions to problems that maybe I didn't see at first.

Lee Ball:

And Nicole, how has your experience with Team Sunergy influenced your career path?

Nicole Sommerdorf:

I think Team Sunergy has given me a lot of skill sets for my further career path. I'm kind of completely going a 180 and doing soil science, so it's not that much with solar tech. But I did learn a lot from my years on the team and not just in terms of leadership skills, but also just working through various problems that seem impossible and having very high stress environments all the time. So, I think that has really prepared me for future careers.

Lee Ball:

Yeah, I mean, we've all experienced multiple times over when we think that it's impossible to find a solution. We'll keep trying and a solution emerges. I think that you really touched on the tenacity that it takes and the commitment that it takes to be able to be involved with this type of this competition where you have challenge after challenge after challenge, and sometimes they're just like, this mountain is like Everest. We're never going to get over this, but the team comes together and they huddle up and they just keep trying and keep trying. And eventually a solution presents itself and you get to the other side and you get to the next mountain. Patrick, how has your experience with Team Sunergy influenced your career path?

Patrick Laney:

I would say Team Sunergy pretty much single-handedly created my career path. I just today discovered that I'll be working with one of our sponsors after graduation, VX Aerospace, so I'm super stoked about that. And yeah, without Team Sunergy, I wouldn't have that opportunity, so.

Lee Ball:

Well, that's great news. Congratulations.

Patrick Laney:

Thank you.

Lee Ball:

Well, I want to thank both of you for spending time with us in the podcast studio. Remember, this is part one of a three part series about Appalachian State University's Team Sunergy.

Dr. Jill Tiefenthaler, the first female CEO of the National Geographic Society, joins App State Chief Sustainability Officer Lee Ball in the podcast studio to discuss the journey that led her to her current position. She shares her thoughts on the importance of higher education and the history of the Society’s National Geographic magazine, as well as a few of her favorite National Geographic Explorers.

Show Notes

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/society/our-leadership/

sustain.appstate.edu

Transcript

Lee Ball:

Welcome back to another episode of Find Your Sustainability, where we talk to many of the world's experts about sustainability and what the heck that means. On today's episode, we spoke with Dr. Jill Tiefenthaler, who is the CEO of National Geographic. Jill was on App State's campus for the 11th annual Appalachian Energy Summit, and it was my pleasure to have a chance to interview her on the podcast. As Chief Executive Officer at the National Geographic Society, Dr. Tiefenthaler oversees the development and implementation of the society's mission driven work and programmatic agenda. She leads our global community of explorers, scientists, innovators, educators, and storytellers in our mission to illuminate and protect the wonder of our world. Jill sits on the Society's board of trustees and the Board of National Geographic Partners. To read more about Jill, you can find a link to her bio on our show notes. Dr. Jill Tiefenthaler, welcome back to North Carolina.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Thanks. It's great to be back, Lee. It's fun to be with you today.

Lee Ball:

You did your graduate work at Duke, you were the provost at Wake Forest and more recently you were the president of Colorado College for nine years. How's it feel being back on a college campus and especially back in North Carolina?

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Well, it's wonderful to be back on a campus. It's one of the things I miss most about leaving higher ed and being in my new role at National Geographic is the dynamism and excitement of a college campus. And back when I was college president and provost too, I used to teach every year, so I really miss teaching and being in the classroom and that interaction with students, especially. It's also great to be back in North Carolina, especially up here in Boone. I used to enjoy escaping the heat of Winston-Salem and coming up here and hiking and camping. I have very fond memories of my time both at Duke and Winston-Salem.

Lee Ball:

Yeah, it's funny, I go to Winston-Salem and I tell people that, "Yeah, we just came here for the day." They're like, "Oh my gosh, it's so far away." I'm like, "No, it's not. You should be coming here often."

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Yeah, just a couple hours.

Lee Ball:

What role do you think higher education plays or can play to help promote the type of education that is in line with Natural Geographic's mission?

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Well, I think higher ed is critical. I'm obviously a true believer in getting students to have awareness of these critical issues. And now more and more, I think they have that awareness through the media and through high school education, but they really still need those skills to figure out how to put them to work. To get the work done, we need to do both for climate change and biodiversity loss. I think they see the urgency. I also hope higher education really focuses on solutions, because I don't want our students to feel hopeless about the future. I want them to feel hopeful and motivated, inspired to make the change that we need to see in the world.

Lee Ball:

Yeah, that's definitely something that we focus on here is engagement opportunities, and I'm a real big believer that it does inspire hope when you can get your hands dirty or whatever.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Yeah, when you can see something change. When you can see something get better and you can see how the power of collaboration and community can make that happen, I think it can be really inspiring. I love that you're all doing that hands-on education opportunities here.

Lee Ball:

May I ask you a little bit about your childhood?

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Sure.

Lee Ball:

I'm fascinated by the stories I get to hear about my guest connection's to nature and place. Is there a memory or experience from your childhood that helped contribute to your development as such a strong advocate for the natural world?

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Well, I grew up on a farm in Iowa, so my everyday was being part of the natural world. And in fact, when a lot of people, as a grownup, I escape and had to the nature for my vacations. As a child, we escaped nature for the city or something. But we just saw... I was so lucky to grow up in a very small town on a farm where every day we were out there, and my mom would send us outside in the morning and shut the door and say, "See you at lunch," and then same thing after lunch until suppertime. I had the opportunity to love the natural world. And then as in my adult life, and especially spending time in Colorado in the West and in North Carolina when I was here, just the beauty of this country and the awe of what we have. And I think every day that awe inspires me now today as well, to do the work we do at National Geographic.

Lee Ball:

I really applaud the work that National Geographic does to really help people feel a connection to nature. It's an important part of my work and a personal interest of mine, to try to help people maintain that connection however they can. And I think that you all do such a beautiful job with all the different ways that you tell stories, and I just thank you so much for that.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Thank you. At the Society, we often say that science and exploration and education are our foundation, but storytelling is our superpower, and it's one of the things. There are so many great organizations out there doing incredible conservation work in supporting science and education, but we really feel like our biggest comparative advantage is with the brand telling those amazing stories so we can get more people to care, more people to be motivated, more people to be hopeful and to act.

Lee Ball:

Right. Exactly. If you were anything like me, having access to a National Geographic magazine was like a treasure that enabled me to explore some of the world's most beautiful and mysterious places. Can you share any early memories of reading a National Geographic magazine?

Jill Tiefenthaler:

I can. When I was in grade school, I went to this very small little Catholic grade school in Iowa called St. Bernard's School. There were about 20 kids in a class and we had a little library at our grade school and National Geographic was always there. And so, I always remember grabbing it when I was in the little library, but I particularly remember the 1977 when King Tut's funerary mask was on the front cover. And I remember it, the magazine was propped up so you could see the cover on one of the shelves. And I remember vividly being drawn to it and just felt like I was being transported to another world when I was reading about Egypt and King Tut and these amazing stories. When I travel the world on behalf of National Geographic, I hear so many amazing stories from people about their connection to the magazine. The stories, of course, the photography, and also just as you said, that inspiration to be somewhere else. In a day, especially in the past, when we had very few opportunities to do that like we do today with social media and the internet.

Lee Ball:

I remember that one.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Do you? Yeah.

Lee Ball:

Very well.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Yes. Stunning.

Lee Ball:

My grandparents had Nat Geo and so when I would visit them, I would devour them. And my grandfather was a world traveler, worked for a tobacco company as a salesman, and he was from North Carolina. And he had gone to Egypt with my grandmother on a vacation, and so they had brought also just some gifts and trinkets back to me. But I just remember just that wondrous sensation of not really even being able to imagine what it was like. Not just being in the culture they visited, but just imagine what it was like to live way back then when the pyramids were constructed and just all the historic culture.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Absolutely. And so, it's another way to be inspired by human ingenuity and what we can do and to be hopeful about the future, to look at that distant past.

Lee Ball:

I can't imagine all the incredible places you have visited since taking the helm as CEO of the Natural Geographic Society. Is there some place or experience that was not on your radar that surprised you or that you find yourself still thinking about?

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Well, it's funny because you were just talking about Egypt and King Tut, and just in 2022 was the hundredth anniversary of the discovery of King Tut's tomb. And so, I got an invitation to attend a bunch of celebrations in Luxor and in Cairo around that time. And after seeing that incredible image as a child and then now getting to go see it in person as well as to experience the tomb and to enjoy... I went to a conference specifically on King Tut's tomb while I was there in Luxor, so had both the academic and the amazing experiential opportunities when I was there, so that was special.

The other thing I'm completely drawn to is we have a project in the Okavango Delta in Botswana and working in the highlands of that delta in Angola, and I had the amazing opportunity to be out in the field with our team last fall as well, in September. And to see the work they're doing, they've done thousands of miles of transects of the rivers and the land there, and now we're really working on with the local communities, a education and preservation of that critical delta, as well as they found over 100 new species to science in their work there. To be out with those experts and seeing the wildlife there and the beauty and the birds. Oh, the birds were amazing. It was really a special experience.

Lee Ball:

I can imagine. I'm a birder, so.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Oh, the birds were just... You'd love it. You got to go.

Lee Ball:

Do you find that the locals are very receptive to your work?

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Yes, we're working very hard. All of our big projects and all of our grantees, part of the requirement is in a plan to be working with the local communities, and we're doing much more to be funding not the traditional way of funding. An American to go and look at something and to learn and to explore, but really to work to fund explorers in every country in the world. Our 6,000 now explorers come from more than 140 countries and we're funding about two thirds of our work is non-US citizens working in their own regions around the world. When I go with National Geographic, if I have a cap or a pin or whatever, everybody's dying to get National Geographic. I've only been to one place in the world where when people heard National Geographic, they didn't recognize it. That was up in the very north part of Kenya and their Turkana Basin. But otherwise, everywhere I go, the National Geographic receives an incredible reception and people know we do the brand and the magazine.

Lee Ball:

It sounds like it's very local community centric and you work on-

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Very.

Lee Ball:

... capacity building.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

We know National Geographic's been around 135 years and there's been a history of colonial exploration and imagery exploitation, and we look back on it, aren't proud of everything that has always happened, but the only thing we can do there is recognize what wasn't right and move ahead in a new way, and that's what we're committed to doing. And we also know that conservation and really great work is only going to happen if it's led by communities. These are the people who care and know their places, indigenous knowledge being so critical. When you can get amazing indigenous knowledge together with some of the cutting edge sciences developed, that's what we're hoping we will really find the sustainable solutions that we need.

Lee Ball:

Oh, that's incredible. Along those same lines, is there a National Geographic explorer who has particularly inspired you?

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Well, I'm here in App State, so I have to say Baker Perry, who has now been to Everest three times, as well as Tupungato in the last couple years. And he's such a humble guy too, but so committed to the work at National Geographic and such a great model of an explorer for us. Someone who has this amazing scientific background, but also is truly an adventurer. And what we're looking for in our explorers is that talent and depth of knowledge and experience, but also that wonder and awe that really want to be out there in the world and talking to people and educating. Not just talking to other scientists, which is important, but can't be everything because at National Geographic, as I mentioned before, our superpower is taking that science and really sharing it with the world in a way that we can engage a lot more people. I'd say the work that Baker has done here has been a great example of that.

Lee Ball:

I couldn't agree more. Have you had a chance to meet one of my heroes, Dr. Jane Goodall?

Jill Tiefenthaler:

I have had a chance to meet Jane. She is amazing. I started my job during the pandemic, so a lot of my opportunities to meet our explorers was delayed. But in 2022, a little over a year ago, I had the great opportunity. We have a exhibit that's been traveling the country called Becoming Jane, and it's about Jane's journey. It debuted in the society, in our headquarters in Washington DC and is now been traveling around the country, and then we'll do even around the world. And so, after the pandemic, it reopened in LA and I got a chance to spend time with Jane and tour it and spend some private time with her as well. And she is an amazing force and we're so proud. We were the first to fund her through her mentor Louis Leakey in Gombe way back when, and her work with the chimpanzees. And she is a wonder and how her energy and what she manages to do today, the number of talks she's given, the places she travels, she's truly an inspiration.

Lee Ball:

Yeah, she is certainly a she-ro of mine. We were under contract to have Jane come to campus. And then the pandemic struck and she was going to come to Western North Carolina and they were going to have multiple stops, and she ended up doing a virtual event with us.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Oh, yeah. She's really gotten amazingly good at that during the pandemic because she was determined to keep her work moving forward during the pandemic.

Lee Ball:

And she did. And we had, kind of like what we're going to do tonight, we had students that were able to interview her on her Zoom. And she was just a force to be reckoned with. And she's funny and and humble.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

I've gotten to watch her with little ones, grade school kids, and it's magical to watch her with them too. That's when you know really see greatness, when someone who can resonate with people who have known and watched her since her earliest work, to little kids and teenagers and everybody in between. I've had so many young women tell me how inspired they're by Jane.

Lee Ball:

Her Roots & Shoots program is so important to her. And she still really focused a lot of their attention on supporting that all around the world.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

I think that's one of the things is true of so many of our explorers, and Jane is a great example of that. Bob Ballard, who's the famous oceanographer who found the Titanic, he has a big education program. He works with us. As well as Sylvia Earle, Her Deepness, who also has her Hope Spots, and she really is committed to education through that. I think everybody realizes that we can't do this on our own, and one of the best ways you can galvanize others is to get that next generation excited about the work.

Lee Ball:

We were invited to a fundraiser in Atlanta because her team wanted to meet us to test the waters with us, and I was able to watch her work the room because it was a fundraising event, and she was just tireless. And she stayed and shook hands with everyone who wanted to meet her and took pictures, and it was just so amazing to see. Even towards the end when people were sitting down, they were tired and she was just still up and fundraising, and it was just incredible to be around her spirit.

Congratulations on being the first woman to serve as CEO of the National Geographic Society.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Thank you.

Lee Ball:

It's clearly been a long time coming. I know National Geographic has featured numerous women over the years who have contributed to National Geographic's mission of sparking curiosity, empowering exploration, inspiring change. Is there another woman whose work is particularly inspiring to you?

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Well, I mentioned two of our incredible women, Jane and Sylvia Earle. But in addition to that, there's Louise Leakey, who's the third generation of the Leakey family who is now working in Kenya and just doing amazing discoveries for paleoanthropology. And then some amazing young women, Paula Khumbu, who is a Kenyan and is just tirelessly working for the protection of elephants on the African continent. She recently was featured in our National Geographic series on Disney+ called Secrets of the Elephants, which was produced by explorer at large, James Cameron, and it is so inspiring.

But Paula's also done a series called Wildlife Warriors, which is for Africans to really get people right there living next to elephants every day to care and love these animals, because they're the ones where the conflict happens and the difficulty happens, and to really get kids to fall in love with them.

I'm so inspired by Paula, and then I have to mention Tara Roberts, who was our explorer of the year last year in 2022, and she is a storyteller. And her mission became... She went to the African American History Museum and saw the divers with the purpose work who are diving scientists and historians and others who are diving to understand and uncover the mysteries of those enslaved Africans who died during shipwrecks in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. And she, determined to tell their story, went out and learned to dive, became an expert diver. And then she just tells the most beautiful stories about this project in her podcast, Into The Depths. And then last year she became the first black woman explorer appear on the cover of National Geographic Magazine. Again, too long coming, but to see her in her dive suit and truly a badass, she's amazing and we're excited about the projects that she has to come in that area as well.

Lee Ball:

Yeah, I remember that. I have that issue.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

It's a great issue.

Lee Ball:

Yeah. The National Geographic Society has a long and storied history. What can you share with us about your organization's future?

Jill Tiefenthaler:

A lot of exciting things happening. We have a new strategic plan, NG Next, that I helped to develop with the community when I arrived a couple years ago at National Geographic. And the big focus of our strategic plan is doubling down on the support for our explorers. We truly believe that when our work is explorer-led and they bring us their best ideas, we will achieve the most we can. We are increasing funding for our explorers, but also, maybe even more importantly, increasing opportunities for career development, for collaborative work across explorers, and for amplification on our media platforms and with our partners at Disney to get their work out even more.

We're also really excited about a big renovation of our base camp in Washington DC that's now underway, and it'll be a couple years. But we're quadrupling our public space and going to include so many new opportunities, including a public archives experience and an amazing education center for kids and families to visit when they come to National Geographic, to learn, of course, more about our work of our explorers, taking that geographic approach to understanding our world.

Lee Ball:

Well, I can't wait to visit it.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

Yeah, I can't wait to have you.

Lee Ball:

My favorite thing about the National Geographic Society is your phenomenal ability to tell stories. Is there a story that you would like to leave us with today?

Jill Tiefenthaler:

That's a good question.

Lee Ball:

Or another story?

Jill Tiefenthaler:

I know, so many stories. Let me think. Well, I think I'll just tell a story maybe of some of our history, because I think it's fun to think about all these amazing things that we've done. But National Geographic was founded in 1888 by 33 gentlemen who came together. You see these pictures of them all standing around in the Cosmos Club in Washington DC, and they were determined to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge. And through the history, because of amazing leadership, Alexander Graham Bell sat in my seat at one time. He was the head of the Society, for example, and he even expanded our mission more and said, "We cover the world and all that's in it."

And the idea of really moving away from being that original scientific journal that people had imagined and figuring out how to talk about the world to broader audiences, and to take science and complicated facts and ideas and present them in a way that can engage everybody. And I think that's what's so inspiring about our work, because that's given us a platform, I think, where the brand is so strong, so recognized, and it's bipartisan and it's loved by so many. And so, I think a story of that founding, of being focused on exploration, but also sharing it is a story that we try to live and be true to every day now, as we leverage all the important work that our explorers are doing around the world.

Lee Ball:

It's almost like it was Life Magazine for the Earth, but they probably influenced Life Magazine because they came before Life Magazine.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

And it's funny, because I'm going to talk tonight about the controversy that started in the early 20th century when photos started to show up in the magazine. Because originally, one of the board members quit because he thought it dumbed down the magazine. And if you think about what National Geographic is so known for, is not just the great narrative and the science, but of course the images that, as we talked about earlier, really transported you to another place. A place that you could never go in the past, but many of us can't go to today. And so, the beautiful imagery and the awe and wonder and empathy that I think that inspires for our world.

Lee Ball:

Well, Dr. Tiefenthaler, thank you so much for coming today to campus, to my podcast, Find Your Sustainability, and it's just a pleasure having you here.

Jill Tiefenthaler:

It's great to be here with you, Lee. Thank you for inviting me.

Outro:

Find Your Sustainability is a production of the University Communications Department at Appalachian State. It's hosted by Appalachian's Chief Sustainability Officer, Lee Ball. For more information about Appalachian State's sustainability, check out sustain.appstate.edu. For more podcasts, videos, and articles related to Appalachian State, check out today.appstate.edu.

Lee welcomes Dr. Dave McEvoy, Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics in the Walker College of Business along with Grace Waugh, a senior sustainable technology major and Matthew Mair, a senior economics and political science major. The 4 discuss their January 2023 trip to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

Links:

Appalachian Today Article about the COP27 Trip

Transcript:

Lee Ball:

Welcome to another episode of Find Your Sustainability. My name is Lee Ball. I'm the Chief Sustainability Officer here at Appalachian State, and today we have three guests in the podcast studio.

It's our first ever attempt to have multiple guests, more than one. First we have David McEvoy, Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics in the Walker College of Business. Welcome, David.

Dave McEvoy:

Thanks for having me.

Lee Ball:

Grace Waugh, a senior sustainable technology major. Welcome, Grace.

Grace Waugh:

Happy to be here.

Lee Ball:

And last but not least, we have Matthew Mair, a senior economics and political science major. Welcome, Matthew.

Matthew Mair:

Thanks for having me.

Lee Ball:

So, I'm going to start with Dave. The goal of this podcast is to share with our listeners an experience that we've all had together of attending the COP27 Conference of Parties in Egypt this past fall.

Prior to talking about the experience in Egypt, I just wanted to ask you, Dave, can you tell us a little bit about the UN Conference of Parties?

Dave McEvoy:

Yeah, sure.

My interest in climate change negotiations and the United Nations, the UN kind of Climate Conference, really started way back in graduate school as an economics major. Been interested in kind of the strategic aspects of policy surrounding climate change.

And so the body that governs this, at an international level, is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or the UNFCCC. And every year since 1992, except for maybe a COVID year, we have an annual conference of the parties. Roughly 200 countries get together and try to work towards a common goal of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and limiting the damages from rising temperatures.

Lee Ball:

So Dave, why did you want to provide students the opportunity to attend a COP?

Dave McEvoy:

I mean, to be honest, I just thought it would be a fun, cool, interesting, hopefully life-changing kind of experience. Not knowing too much about how it would shake out, we have two of our initial cohort students here with us today. And so I thought that bringing students would be kind of eye-opening in the sense of how massive this problem is.

And although from the press, I don't know, the coverage can be disappointing in terms of how we've done in trying to manage this problem. Just being there, kind of demonstrates how important this is for so many people. I mean, thousands and thousands, 30 to 40,000 delegates spend resources, time, energy, effort, to try their best to work on this problem. And so I think just being there is something that you can't capture in a classroom environment.

Lee Ball:

Grace, why did you want to attend the COP?

Grace Waugh:

Yeah, so my major in sustainable technology is in large part a very technical degree, so I added an economics minor my sophomore year, in order to try and get another perspective on sustainability because the biggest argument against a lot of the renewable energy initiatives that we have is that they're not going to be economically feasible, and I don't believe that to be entirely true and so I wanted to get another perspective on that.

And so when the opportunity to go to the conference and see, not only what all of the other countries are doing in their sustainability efforts, but also the economic aspects of it and the negotiation portions, it seemed like a really great experience to see what the rest of the world is doing and get out of the bubble that I've lived in, in the United States, for my whole life.

Lee Ball:

Matthew, I have the same question for you. Why did you want to attend the COP?

Matthew Mair:

This is, I think a really great opportunity for me specifically because of my combination of majors. I have a international concentration in my political science major and an environmental concentration in my economics major and so this really was just the perfect opportunity for me to go out into the world and see what people in my fields are working on, and it was just really eye-opening opportunity to see what kind of career pathways and opportunities are out there for people who are interested in sustainability and environmental problems.

Lee Ball:

Dave, what was it like observing the students while you were there?

Dave McEvoy:

Yeah, that's a great question because I think while I was there, I was worried about all the procedural, kind of day-to-day travel arrangements, and so I think it was the first day that we entered the conference, seeing how students took their own path in navigating this. Some, just kind of seemed comfortable right away in navigating such a huge conference and others need a little bit more help. It took a little bit of time. I think the cool part was witnessing that transition from overwhelmed, or what's going on, to towards the end of the week, it was just like, this is where we go every day, so let's see what's on the agenda and let's see what progress has been made. And so that's kind of cool.

Lee Ball:

Yeah, I thought for me, especially towards the end of the week after we'd been there for days and it was exhausting and there were a lot of challenges, but seeing you all just remain super engaged and really focused and interested. If we were going to stay another week, we could have, and I think you would've been just as engaged and interested the whole time. There was no shortage of content, that's for sure.

Dave McEvoy:

The hotel would've gotten a little old

Grace Waugh:

That yes. The lack of wifi would've gotten a little bit old.

Dave McEvoy:

We managed.

Grace Waugh:

I felt like I could have stayed there for another month and been fine. There were so many people to talk to, so many different perspectives, things to talk about. We didn't find the Green Zone, which was just this big several buildings worth of expos and different presentations of technologies and things that industry is doing. We didn't find that until probably day three or four, so halfway to three-quarters of the way through the trip and that I could have spent two days at on its own, so there was so much to see.

Lee Ball:

Grace, did the COP27 experience influence your career path in any way?

Grace Waugh:

Oh, a hundred percent. Absolutely, it did. Yeah, so before this, I mean, I said that I had the economics minor, but I didn't feel very engaged in the economics department mostly because of COVID. So, most of my econ classes had been online, but getting this experience, and as Matthew said before, seeing all of the different career pathways, possibilities, things that people were doing, was really inspiring to me. And so it really set me on more of a data-driven path, a more numbers economics-based path than the purely engineering state that I was in prior to going.

Lee Ball:

How about you, Matthew?

Matthew Mair:

I would say certainly. There were so many different people there with different positions and goals that I had no idea even really existed. There was one panel I went to, there was an economist from the IMF and he was talking about valuing economic valuation of animals and tidal marshes and grasses. It was just this wealth of information and you could tell that he was so much of an expert in his field, that it was really eye-opening to see how deep you can go, in even such a small corner of the world of sustainability and the world of climate change.

Lee Ball:

Matthew, what was something surprising about the experience?

Matthew Mair:

I was surprised to see the lack of protestors at the conference. I had been hearing and doing research, and I had heard that there had been often protestors at these conferences for people demanding more action or more concrete deliverables, but we didn't really even see that until day three or four, I think, until there was some small organized protests that were allowed within the conference.

Lee Ball:

Grace, what was your general takeaway from the COP? Are you hopeful that the COP process is able to make measurable differences?

Grace Waugh:

I would say it's kind of a mixed bag, as far as takeaways for me. Learning about the different conferences going in, I think we all kind of went in with a slightly cynical view of it, simply because we had gone through the history of the conferences and seen that really very little substantial difference had come out of the COP as a whole.

But going there and listening to the negotiations and seeing all of the people there, I came away with a more hopeful view of it. Even if this isn't the end all, be all, for climate negotiations and we're not going to solve everything through policy at these, this is still a big conference where everyone in the world who's interested in fighting climate change and making a difference can come together, share what they're doing, get a new perspective, and it was honestly kind of refreshing.

Lee Ball:

Matthew, how did it make you feel attending the COP? Hopeful for the future of the earth and humanity?

Matthew Mair:

I think I had some of the same sentiments as Grace did. Going into it, I didn't have a whole lot of hope to be honest, but I came away with this idea that at the very least, I have seen with my own eyes, 30 or 40,000 people, all in the same place, who are well articulated, well-educated and passionate about solving these issues of sustainability and climate change.

And so it did give me some hope that there are a lot of really great people out there working on this issue and even if we don't solve it at this COP, or the next one, or the next one after that, there's going to be change happening at every level around the world, which is I think I have something to be optimistic about.

Lee Ball:

How about you, Dave?

Dave McEvoy:

Yeah, I mean, I think as an economist I kind of faced these problems or approach these problems thinking the underlying assumption is that countries are kind of looking after their own self-interest, and that's just the traditional way we would model the world, whether it's people or firms or countries.

And the advantage to that is that not just me, but most economists, if not all, agree that we need to do something about climate change now. And the gist here is that there's these collective gains from mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and not exceeding our threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius and those collective gains are there. It's all a political process to try to reach some sort of goal, and it's going to take some transfers of resources from one part of the world to the other, but we've done that before. We've done that before, regulating the ozone through the Montreal protocol and there are important differences. There are important similarities.

But I'm hopeful that because there are gains to be made from this and the damages are so high that we're going to make significant progress, just not as fast as in an ideal world,

Lee Ball:

The COP27 was in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, on the southern end of the Sinai Peninsula. I think for all of us it was a new experience.

Grace, what was something culturally that surprised you or was interesting or fascinating, that you remember?

Grace Waugh:

One of the most memorable experiences from there was seeing the inside of the mosque in the new market center. The name of the mosque escapes me right now, but me and the other two women on the trip, we actually had to go in and put on one of these coverings and there was a woman in there who helped us put it on. She was very sweet and then we were able to go inside. We had to take our shoes off. It was very quiet, but it was absolutely gorgeous and it was an insane structure. So, it was one of the most memorable parts of that trip to me was inside of that mosque.

Lee Ball:

Matthew, what'd you think about Sharm El-Sheikh?

Matthew Mair:

I had a great time there and it was lovely to see different cultural perspectives. I came away from that trip realizing how friendly all of the locals were to us, and it seemed like all of the other visitors for the COP. It was really great to just walk down the street and they'd strike up a conversation with you about what they're selling in their store or what they want you to buy. I had a really great time just learning about the people there.

Lee Ball:

Grace, from the student perspective, would you recommend international travel to your peers?

Grace Waugh:

Definitely. I had been trying to go abroad for about three years at this point and COVID kind of stuck a wrench in that plan. But when I finally did get abroad, it was mind-blowing. My college experience wouldn't have felt complete without it.

Lee Ball:

Matthew?

Matthew Mair:

I would absolutely agree. I had similar travel plans, but COVID derailed those. But this trip really offered a lot of things for me educationally and culturally and really helped me gain that, I think international perspective, that up until that point I'd been lacking in my education.

Lee Ball:

Would you recommend students attend another COP trip?

Grace Waugh:

Honestly, yes. If you are interested in sustainability, international policy, the environment is going to be a major part of any international policy made now and in the future, COP27 was an amazing experience for me, interested in the environment and policy related to it, and anyone else needs to know what's going on at this conference in order to be properly literate in sustainability.

Lee Ball:

Matthew, would you recommend COP28, 29 or 30?

Matthew Mair:

Absolutely. I learned so much in that one week time-span.

I remember reflecting on the plane ride back that I think I had learned more in that week than I had in my entire college career up until that point. It was really, really transformative.

Lee Ball:

Dave, what are your plans for this year's COP?

Dave McEvoy:

Well, Lee, hopefully with you in tow here, we will be taking the second cohort in this program, the United Nations Climate Negotiations Program to Dubai for COP28, and that will be during the first of the two-week conference, that starts in December. It starts a little bit later this year. But I actually, I think it's kind of a nice time of year where exams are kind of starting and students aren't going to be missing too much in the way of classes. We'll be with hopefully six students in the second cohort.

Lee Ball:

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. Never been to Dubai. Another trip to the Middle East and it's going to be fascinating to see this kind of continued perspective and outlook from the Middle Eastern perspective on these huge challenges that we all call, sustainability or decarbonization, or climate action or helping with biodiversity.

It's such a huge umbrella, the topics that are covered during these conferences, and there's a little bit there for everybody, so I feel very fortunate to have been able to attend and thank you all so much for being on the podcast. It's been a treat.

Grace Waugh:

Thanks for having us here.

Matthew Mair:

Thank you for having us on. I really enjoyed it.

Dave McEvoy:

Thank you, Lee, for inviting us to the podcast and I also want to thank you. Not all universities have a Chief Sustainability Officer attend with the student cohort, these COPs, 27 and 28 to come, and there are some significant advantages to that and so we appreciate your involvement.

Lee Ball:

My pleasure.

Brian Crutchfield joins Lee in studio for a discussion ranging from tobacco farming to photovoltaics and the Tennessee Valley Authority. A North Carolina native and Virginia Tech graduate, Crutchfield has seen his share of changes in the field of sustainability since the 1970s. Crutchfield shares some of the ways he has found to make real and lasting impacts in your community. 

Lee Ball:

Welcome to another episode of Find Your Sustain Ability. My name is Lee Ball. Today, we have joining us Brian Crutchfield, a longtime energy advocate, and I was really interested in getting Brian on the show because of the current state of energy in the world today. Brian worked with the Tennessee Valley Authority for many years. More recently, he worked with Blue Ridge Energy as their sustainable development director. Welcome, Brian, to the show.

Brian Crutchfield:

Great to be here, Lee.

Lee Ball:

How did you first become interested in advocating for the environment?

Brian Crutchfield:

Well, I was in grad school back during the original energy crisis, '73 and '74, when there were gas lines. OPEC had cut off the supply, sort of like they just recently did. Prices were high. And not only that, you couldn't get it. It was an odd-even day kind of thing, or according to your name when you could get in line just to get gas. At the time, I was in graduate school at Virginia Tech working on a degree in city and regional planning, had a professor who really was into this type of thing and got us working with a group that was trying to bring coal back to Southwest Virginia. They were selling so much coal and shipping it out of Norfolk to Japan and other places that low income folks couldn't buy it.

We were bringing a carload back on every return empty train just for local folks. It was pretty unusual. Got into energy resources analysis at that time in '74, got my master's degree, did some work up in Washington, DC. Basically being in graduate school regarding planning, realizing that all of a sudden energy was a factor, that you couldn't necessarily predict what was happening in that field anymore. You need to start planning around energy issues, not just transportation and highways and development, because now the cost of energy was driving a lot of things, business and communities and society. That was the beginning, during the first crisis.

Lee Ball:

Going back a little before that, you grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Brian Crutchfield:

Yeah. Mount Airy, Winston-Salem area.

Lee Ball:

Mount Airy is a pretty rural environment. Was there something about your formative years that enabled an environmental ethic that just kept you connected to the land? What was it about your childhood that led to being interested in being an advocate for the environment?

Brian Crutchfield:

Well, my family had been involved in agriculture. My great-grandfather was one of the folks that actually blended Lucky Strike and had his own tobacco company in Reidsville, North Carolina. Ended up selling his company to James Buchanan Duke of American Tobacco Company. And back then, it was the old handshake kind of thing. If you'll sell me your company, I'll make sure any of your kids, their kids and grandkids will always have a job. My grandfather worked for the company. My father worked for the company. It almost seemed like I was heading in that direction to be a tobacco buyer.

But knowing all the hard work that went into growing tobacco back in those days, they really didn't use a lot of chemicals. Everything was pretty non-filter even. But it was interesting to see how agriculture was changing, so an appreciation for rural farmers and what they had to go through. My dad was a tobacco buyer. He would buy tobacco from farmers. They would show their appreciation for him and the company buying from them by bringing us country hams, things like that. Nice relationship back in those days.

Lee Ball:

I have a very similar story from my family on both sides of my family. My grandfather was a buyer.

Brian Crutchfield:

Oh, is that right?

Lee Ball:

Yeah. He was born in Roxboro. He worked for American Tobacco Company and Virginia Tobacco Company in Danville. They probably knew each other.

Brian Crutchfield:

Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure they did.

Lee Ball:

And then on my mom's side, they grew tobacco on a farm in Edgecombe County outside Rocky Mount. That's where I spent a lot of my time really just wandering the woods, and I think that had a profound impact on me growing up. You mentioned before pesticides and herbicides and fungicides before what they called the Green Revolution. Now our Green Revolution is more about energy and sustainability. Back then, it was about trying to grow food more efficiently and feed the world.

Brian Crutchfield:

Exactly.

Lee Ball:

I'm fascinated to talk about your experience in the late '70s and early '80s because of the cyclical nature of the work that we do. There are so many things that we could be doing today that you all were talking about then the late '70s and early '80s, appropriate technology, energy efficiency, community energy and community scale, energy systems and food systems. Could you speak a little bit about that experience then as a young professional and really what you think we could be learning from today with our current problems that we're needing to solve?

Brian Crutchfield:

My first job out of graduate school in '75 was working for the State Economic Opportunity Office of North Carolina in Raleigh. They were the state level of the 35 local Community Action Agencies like WAMY, Watauga, Avery, Mitchell, Yancey, Community Action. We'd received a grant from Office of Economic Opportunity, OEO, or Community Services Administration back in the '70s to do a Low-Income Weatherization Program of weather rising homes. Well, at that time, there had never been a program like that, so this was all pretty novel. How do you do it? We had a grant for labor, so we were able to hire people to do it that worked for the Community Action Agencies.

But then we had to come up with standards as to, how much do you do? What do you do? How much can you spend? What kind of impact does it have? Are we just making it airtight or tighter? Are we putting in new windows and doors? Are we putting in insulation? Back then in the '70s, just like in the '60s, a lot of the housing stock of low income folks was pretty bad. If they owned it, it was a little better, but a lot of it was renter occupied. Just designing those programs, trying to decide who got the most money, I had to come up with a formula of things like poverty rate, owner occupied, degree days of how cold and hot it is in certain areas.

A lot of the Community Action Agencies in the western part of the state got more money because we were factoring in that you need to make a house warmer in the winter, better than you need to make it cooler in the summer, because a lot of the houses in Eastern North Carolina back then did not have air conditioning, by any means. Designing that program, doing the training, we decided to buy cellulose insulation blowing machines. I had a contract with a company in Northern Virginia that oftentimes they would come down, bring the insulation to us, and we would ship back reams of newspaper.

We ended up getting into a little bit of renewables, making the wood stoves, things of that sort out of barrels, solar window units that would bring in war air on the south side of a structure. It was about that time that this group also funded by the Community Services Administration, who had funded our Low-Income Weatherization Program, was created in Butte, Montana called the National Center for Appropriate Technology. It was designed after a similar group in England called the Intermediate Technology Center that was started by E.F. Schumacher, who had written this book in the '70s called Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.

He started this group that was doing village technology in places like India and Pakistan, other places. They were bringing in technology that just really didn't work. Or if it worked for a while, if it went down, you couldn't repair it. Trying to come up with ideas as to how to do better farming techniques and things of that sort. The center was located in Butte, Montana. Senator Mike Mansfield, that was sort of his parting gift as he left the Senate. He used to be head of the Senate back in those days. Nobody now remembers him. But they had a great facility, had a $3 million budget, which was big time back then, $1 million for staffing and administration, $1 million for research, and $1 million for grants.

I ended up going to work for them after a couple years with the Low-Income Weatherization Program and was their Appalachian Bio-Regional representative. I moved back up to Radford, Virginia where I'd gone to graduate school at Virginia Tech and worked Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, all that whole Appalachian Region, traveling around four days out of each week visiting folks, making presentations on the grant program, getting people to line up to do things. Did that for a few years, then moved on to Tennessee Valley Authority where I started an appropriate technology program there and also a community energy branch. And that was a lot of fun.

We had money to give away too, as long as you only did one project. You couldn't start a program that you had to consistently fund that particular thing. One of the projects we did in the community energy branch was to fund four communities to do energy assessments and energy projects. One was in Tupelo, Mississippi. One was in Norris, Tennessee, just outside Knoxville. We also had one in Alabama, and we also had one in North Carolina, Boone. At the time, Appalachian State had a program here called Earth Studies Program in a building not far from where we are right now.

They had a three-person board of directors that was the chancellor of the university at the time, John Thomas, the chairman of county commissioners, and the district manager for Blue Ridge Electric. The three of them, along with the local person that had been hired for that, Mike Epley, were doing a lot of things. They had a few faculty members here like Harvard Ayers, who was doing some things in micro hydro. They built a few micro hydro installations.

When we talk micro, we were really talking pretty small, just really a creek that's being damned up and a pipe coming out of it, going maybe a hundred yards down the hillside of a slight elevation change, and then dropping it real rapidly down to the bottom of the creek again, where you might have a small turbine of sorts, not much bigger than a lawnmower engine, that would run and generate some electricity. Those were the early days of micro hydro. Actually Appalachian State did a lot in that area in the '70s and '80s. That's also in the early '80s when the windmill was here. TVA did some work with NASA on that, as we were all over here during the dedication of that back in about 1979, '80.

Of course, the World's Fair was in Knoxville in '82 and the theme of that fair was energy. All the countries from around the world, and this is sort of the last of the Great World's Fair. After that, I think there was one more in New Orleans on water, but after that, people realized that Disney World and Epcot Center and all that pretty much had that covered and were going to do that on a permanent basis. No more need for World's Fairs. But countries like China, Australia, and others came in and showed off all their innovative energy programs and technologies. That was a lot of fun back then, watching that come in and being exposed to that.

And also working at Tennessee Valley, we got to do a lot. We brought in George McRobie, who had been E. F. Schumacher's partner at the Appropriate Technology Center and had him look at projects that we were doing at TVA right after Three Mile Island where one of the nuclear plants in Pennsylvania sort of went awry. There was a lot of money out there then after that for anything solar. TVA at the time under the leadership of Dave Freeman decided that we need to shut down a lot of this nuclear program and move toward renewables and conservation. It was a real big strategy to how can we come up with solar?

What was the solar technology at that time? Solar water heating was the most popular aspect. Wood stoves. How do you improve the technology of wood stoves with things like catalytic combustors inside the chimney of the wood stove that would burn the particulates butter than the old style? Then conservation programs, home weatherization. It was great seeing those programs being generated and how do you work. We have this one guy come in from New Mexico, Bill Yanda, who came up with the whole idea of solar greenhouses, having a greenhouse on the south side of your house where you could store the heat during the day, grow vegetables and get fresh air as well off these greenhouses.

We did programs where we actually went to a community and would build a greenhouse over a weekend. The creative days of doing things back then before the internet, before computers, based on word of mouth, based on actual experience, based on getting on the phone and calling somebody saying, "Can you send me some of those plans," as to what you were doing. TVA really had a great lead role in doing that. But like any federal agency, I was there for 10 years, went through a lot of changes. Reorganization were real popular back in the '70s and '80s.

I'd always had, as my career path, do as many local projects as you can at the state level, at the federal level, and then take that experience and try to apply it to a community where you're going to be there for the long-term. We had the opportunity with Blue Ridge Electric back in those days and Blue Ridge Energy now to help them write a job description in economic development and sustainable development. I helped them write that description. Six months later, they got it approved. Six months later, they called me asking if I knew anybody might be interested, could I help them with that.

I was thinking about it and thought, ah, good time to move back to North Carolina and work at the local level, and came here in 1988. Worked with Blue Ridge Energy for 25 years doing a variety of projects. I was sort of the only person doing that type of thing for them. It was great to be able to apply that experience in local areas with a whole variety of projects over that 25-year period.

Lee Ball:

I have a ton of questions.

Brian Crutchfield:

All right.

Lee Ball:

That was terrific. I'm going to go back to David Freeman. At the time, it seemed like we didn't have battery storage. Thinking about photovoltaic solar energy at scale was next to impossible. The focus was more decentralized at the community level, at the user level. That makes sense, focusing on energy conservation, solar thermal, and that's when we saw, I guess, the installation of a lot of these wood boilers and solar thermal like the Carolina water stoves.

Brian Crutchfield:

Exactly. You still see a few of those around.

Lee Ball:

You do see those. Another question, going back to the Center for Appropriate Technology, when you're doing that work in Southwest Virginia, you're working with homeowners, farmers, I take it, what are some of those projects? I mean, were they small solar thermal, like you said? Were they more efficient wood stoves? Just curious.

Brian Crutchfield:

Little of that. We would work with the Community Action Agency who wanted to build the solar window boxes and come up with that design and provide them funds to say build 10 of them. And then same thing with the old wood stoves that were made out of barrels, where you had a barrel that was horizontal, you'd put legs on it, get it off the ground, a front cover to it. And then where the chimney came out the back, it would then go into another barrel, and then circulate that heat from the exhaust or the smoke and gather it before it went out the final chimney out of the house. Barrels were almost like now fairly cheap to do.

It just required some welding and a good design. We came up with some designs that could be passed out and printed. Same thing with the window boxes. We had our folks up in Butte, Montana work on that and figure that type of thing out, come up with some conservation techniques. Ultimately, they end up being the agency that evaluated a lot of the weatherization programs around the country and have done that for decades. Working with Department of Agriculture and others to try to determine what's the best way to do home weatherization in a home that's in potentially pretty poor shape to begin with, what's most important.

And over time, it was not just air infiltration and weatherization, but actually replacing heating and cooling systems and even additions to houses and so forth. That program's really changed over the last 40 years when you look at it for the better.

Lee Ball:

The window boxes, were they vertical in angle like a solar thermal flat plate collector without the water lines?

Brian Crutchfield:

Exactly. You'd have a space behind, generally just almost a piece of tin or some type of metal that would store the heat, and then underneath would be an open space where air would come into it, and then at the bottom of the unit flow back over the black metal with either glass, sometimes plexiglass, but oftentimes it was just an old window or something else that would try to make it somewhat airtight.

And then as it goes into the bottom half of a window, the heat would come in at the top part, and then you would try to have colder air from the floor of the house come in. It was just a passive non-fan type activity. Even now, every now and then I'll be riding around the back roads, I'll see something like that out there on a house. It's pretty interesting to see.

Lee Ball:

I think it would blow the minds of an appraiser or a realtor trying to sell a house if they see those stick out the windows, but the functionality is really legitimate. I know they work well. Let me ask you about Chancellor John Thomas and his involvement with this committee and the Earth Studies Program. Now, this is making sense now because John Thomas used to always show up to a lot of my talks. He's always been interested in sustainability, and I think tracked it more closely than I ever realized when he was still alive. Just a really sweet man. He was a great leader for our university.

Brian Crutchfield:

Oh yeah, and he was an engineer too.

Lee Ball:

I know. That's right. He was an engineer and a lot of people don't remember that. He and others were involved with the early beginnings of the Earth Studies Program here at App State that eventually evolved into a few programs, appropriate technology and sustainable development. They kind of went different paths. What else do you remember about those early days?

Brian Crutchfield:

One of them was in agriculture. There was a guy with a program who was into French intensive gardening. They had an appropriate technology farm. You go up into Valle Crucis.

Lee Ball:

194 near Matheny, right?

Brian Crutchfield:

It was up near Matheny, and it had a house up there. Some students lived there for a while. But they had this guy, and I'm trying to think of his name. It'll come to me soon. He's still around. He taught this biointensive gardening method. You would come in and put a spade into the ground and do just one turn and then go completely through your flower bed that way. But they had a passive solar collector there made out of concrete blocks filled with sand and facing south, of course.

Just doing a lot of agriculture, in some ways much like the current Earth studies farm or whatever we want to call it out in Ashe County, because they're growing food and bringing it in and being served here in the university. When you think back on some of these programs, they've gone through lots of changes over last 40 years. But in reality, they keep current with the times.

Lee Ball:

There seems to be a common thread that they're very hands-on, grassroots, a lot of low tech appropriate technology. However, they're using high tech data analytics and some other technology that we have at our disposal now.

Brian Crutchfield:

Well, one of the projects we did at Blue Ridge Electric and provided some funding for the county was this methane collector out at the landfill. That was just 15 years ago. After they closed that landfill, there was still gas to be collected, and they were flaring it off because they didn't want it to go into the atmosphere. But it was determined that you could take that gas and run it through a generator. Now, the big landfills for places like Hickory has one, it's a big, big diesel generator, fits inside the back of a semi, like the one we have out at the Watauga County Landfill that's closed is a modified truck engine.

They were using those at coal mines in West Virginia. We decided, let's give it a try. I think they've got three small truck type engines, and they provide a little electricity that goes back on the grid. We ended up making that whole landfill area of buildings a microgrid. There's one meter as the power comes in, and we allow them to use the lines that were out there so they can circulate whatever power they generate off that generator into the rest of the buildings out there, which is not significant, but it's still unique and a great learning experience.

Lee Ball:

Yeah, exactly. It's closing the loop on a waste stream. Speaking of waste, I was reading in the materials that you sent over to me early this morning about your experience at TVA with waste reduction and recycling, and I really honed in on the fact that you're involved with inventing the convenience center. That fascinates me. I'd love for you to expand on that a little bit.

Brian Crutchfield:

Well, back in the day, and I'll just use Watauga as example, counties did not do door-to-door waste collection. Only municipalities did that. But obviously there's a lot of waste being generated out there in the houses that are around the county. Oftentimes people would have their own barrel in the backyard and take their waste out there and burn it. And of course, that's not very environmentally appropriate. The second phase past that, counties would establish what they call green box sites. They would consolidate somewhere between five and eight, maybe 10 green boxes, containers for garbage, on the side of the road, drive by, throw your garbage in there, and go on.

Well, those sites, the garbage, somebody might catch it on fire or put ashes in there that would cause a fire. They were exposed to the weather. They would rust. Vermin, rats, bears, everything got into it. There would be scavengers or dumpster divers out there, potholes, glass. You were taking your car and yourself a little risk just by disposing of garbage that way. There would be, like in Watauga County, anywhere from 30 to 50 sites like that around the county. The trucks would have to go out there and lift up the boxes, put them in the back of the garbage truck. Of course, they didn't know what was in there, so oftentimes it could already be on fire.

They'd be throwing it into the back of a $200,000 truck and have to go down the road. As the air went in, the fire gets bigger and they'd have to stop and dump the whole load on the side of the road. It was just not a good system. We came up with an idea of let's consolidate it. Let's fence it in. Let's have a person out there. Let's have certain hours of operation. Just like now, I know that Thursday morning is my garbage pickup day, and I have to get my two rolling garbage cans out to the curb. You know here's the days that it's open, here's the days that it's closed. There will be an attendant out there maybe to help elderly people to do that.

We came up with a book of different designs on how you do it and what are the best locations. Initially, there was some resistance to that. People didn't want them near their home or their neighborhood. But once they saw how clean they were, it was a welcome addition. I guess we have five or seven sites here in Watauga, and they're all fenced in. One problem we have is people who are Airbnb type folks. They'll go there. And as they're leaving town on a late evening, like a Sunday, and they'll just put their garbage out by the front gate, usually the attendant will go through that to see if they can get a name that they can send a ticket to. But for the most part, it still works very well.

Lee Ball:

This was primarily for health and safety, trying to get people to stop burning garbage, throwing it in rivers, down ravines, that sort of thing. Was TVA involved with the early days of recycling, trying to divert certain things like aluminum probably first?

Brian Crutchfield:

Yeah. Back then, you also had jails that had prisoners. They needed to help them do something. They used prisoners in a lot of small counties to do roadside pickup. And as they were doing that, they were also realizing, we've got a lot of aluminum here or glass that could be recycled. Let's come up with programs for that. We came over here and provided two grants, one to the town for recycling and one to the county for the convenience centers. Ultimately, both of them came up with very good programs that over the years have been improved dramatically, where we have curbside recycling in Boone now and a lot of recycling opportunities in the county, including the convenience centers.

Back then, we were doing a variety of programs, and when I came here initially to Watauga, they had a bond issue that had been associated with the hospital that had been finished and they got some money back. And they used this $2 million to establish a program to do bailing of garbage at the Watauga County Landfill. They built a facility with those funds and put a baler in there. This is a baler that you have a concrete floor and you move the garbage around on the floor in front of it and mix it together, and then put it on this conveyor belt that goes up and then drops it into this bin, and then a hydraulic press compacts it into a bale about the size of a table, 30 by 60 by 30, and wraps it with wires.

And then you pick the bale up that weighs somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 pounds with a front-end loader and put it on the back of a flatbed truck. Flatbed truck goes to what is now called the balefill and stacks them up. And then you cover up the face or the top of the balefill each day and then come back and start again the next day. The landfill here, actually, I guess the last two years of its operation was a true balefill. Some law came up from the state that allowed them to get out of the landfill business and avoid a lot of future liability. As it turns out, they're just saying counties under a certain size of almost 100,000, it doesn't pay to have a landfill.

You need to do a regional landfill, and that's what we do now. We have a tipping station at the landfill. You tip it on the floor. They don't bail it, although I think that would still be a nice way to compact it. It's certainly much more efficient than running a large compactor back and forth over garbage. But I guess we're shipping our garbage either to East Tennessee or down to Caldwell County outside of Lenoir. I guess we send about five loads of garbage down there every day when the landfill was operating.

Lee Ball:

Let's talk about now and the future. I'm really interested in what you think is a very promising off-the-shelf technology that can help us with our urgent need to decarbonize, fight against climate change. Looking to the future, what do you think is emerging that might be very promising? Not that it's ever going to be a silver bullet of energy, but what are you tracking?

Brian Crutchfield:

Well, I remember when photovoltaics first came out. We used to say something by the mid-1990s, photovoltaics will be everywhere, on top of phone poles and utility lines and things of this sort. They'll be so cheap and available that they'll be everywhere. And that electricity will then become almost totally decentralized. No need for central station power plants anymore. Well, that's 25 years ago now. It didn't happen, but a lot of that technology has happened in the last 20 years. It just didn't get the push back then that it needed.

But I think if you look back at the last 40 years, every five or 10 years got a bump of some sort, an improvement in the technology, whether it was in solar panels, photovoltaic panels, or improvements in the battery storage technology. I know in the early 2000s I was working on some projects where we thought fuel cells would be the new thing, where you're taking natural gas or propane, breaking it up and turning it into hydrogen electricity and water. I think that still has some potential, but I think that's in the next 25 to 30 years. I think right now, photovoltaics, battery technology are going to be the real thing that we see.

People really like electric vehicles. The fact that they can be charged with photovoltaics, the fact that they can be a battery for the grid itself, the cars and vehicles, and the fact that photovoltaics are really coming down in price, I think all of that's tied together. I never thought that transportation would necessarily be the push that made a lot of that happen. But with privatized space exploration and rockets, a lot of stuff going on there in pipes of photovoltaics, very thin type of PV worked into roofing panels, into windows, into all types of siding, on the tops of cars, it's pretty amazing. The ROSE car that you guys have here at ASU, a very thin type of PV, not cheap, very expensive.

How do you take that technology and make it affordable? When that type of thing happens, where you buy a roofing system and PV is built into it. We've had over the last 40 years a lot of Solar Home Tours here in the county. We've gone out to look at a lot of these innovative systems. I remember somebody had what they call a standing seam roof, which is a type of metal roof with a seam that sticks up about two and a half inches. The company that sold it to them had a type of... It was actually like PV on a roll that went between the standing seam. It was pretty amazing. They were able to reduce the cost of the roof by almost half because the rest of the PV panel got tax credits at the time.

I'm not too sure that was the best use of that technology. The plastic overtime, like a lot of plastics, degrades and reduced the efficiency, but even if it had a 10 or 15 year life. It helped with the learning curve, if nothing else.

Lee Ball:

I have time for one more question. You touched on some community events like the Solar Home Tour. I know you've been very involved with the Green Drinks effort here in the high country. Could you speak to its origin and what you're doing today?

Brian Crutchfield:

Yeah. Green Drinks International is a group that said, "We're going to save our society one drink at a time." Social networking, a lot like networking on Facebook and other types of things, where a great way to meet people is oftentimes in a bar or a bar type setting where you're having drinks and you're just talking back and forth, like we are now, asking questions. What do you think about this and that? We have a group that 10 years ago we met for about a five-year period almost once a month, usually on a Tuesday or Wednesday night from say 5:30 to :30 in a restaurant on an off night so that it was beneficial to them.

They oftentimes would provide the appetizers and a drink special. Oftentimes we'd have a topic, but most of the time it was all about socializing. You just came in, put on a name tag, put a little card in the fishbowl, and we'd pull out some door prizes. If you win, you come forward and tell us what you're doing that's green. We quit for about a 10-year period when I first retired, but we had a meeting here, I guess, about a year ago that ASU sponsored with your sustainability program, your Appropriate Technology program, your programs in business that were looking at sustainability and said, "How can we get more going in this area? How can we get people talking?"

I volunteered to restart Green Drinks. We've had about four meetings over the last year. We had one this week that was a little lightly attended, where we were looking at the new Tesla charging station and the new electric bus from Apple Car, the first charging station here in Watauga County at Makoto's. The owner of Makoto's 10 years ago had a Tesla, one of the first buyers of the Tesla, and put a charging station out front. He's now added a second supercharger in the back, so you can go in, have a meal, charge your Tesla. He pretty much lets you charge it for free if you were having a meal there and go on your way.

We're looking to do some more around the area where we'll look at green projects and just have people get together. We had a great one couple months ago at Booneshine. Your group here at ASU that did the ROSE electric vehicle racing car was the spotlight. We were able to walk over to your garage and see the vehicle and talk to the students who had been involved. That was great for them. We all had a good time. It really felt good. I guess we had close to 45 people there. There were just a lot of good things going on. With a local newspaper that only comes out once a week, it's hard to find out about them.

Getting people together just to socialize, talk about green. You don't have to have an alcoholic drink to participate. You'll meet some interesting people. I was surprised at some of the folks that came to that meeting we had at Booneshine I hadn't seen in 10 years or so, and they're talking about some PV projects in the community. Just a lot of interest, especially with lead certified buildings here and other things, things that people need to know more about and how do we address future topics like affordable housing and still transportation issues and waste management, food production and distribution.

There's just some great people in this community doing lots of unique things that are part and parcel of the last 40 years that I've been around Boone.

Lee Ball:

I really enjoyed the Green Drinks opportunity to, like you said, socialize and just cross pollinate and learn what's going on.

Brian Crutchfield:

Yeah, meeting new people.

Lee Ball:

Everybody's sharing information and ideas, sharing what doesn't work and what does work. Even more than that, I appreciate your being here and your time today.

Brian Crutchfield:

I'm the old green guy.

Lee Ball:

Brian Crutchfield, the old green guy, the original OG. I just really appreciate your time here today. Thank you so much.

Brian Crutchfield:

All right. Thank you, Lee.

Outro:

Find Your Sustain Ability is a production of the University Communications Department at Appalachian State. It's hosted by Appalachian's Chief Sustainability Officer Lee Ball. For more information about Appalachian State Sustainability, check out sustain.appstate.edu. For more podcasts, videos, and articles related to Appalachian State, check out today.appstate.edu.