Green Fords

KEITH SCHNEIDER '78 Director of Communications, Apollo Alliance, San Francisco

What he does: A former New York Times reporter, Schneider is an innovator in the field of non-profit public interest communications. As founder of the Michigan Land Use Institute he staffed an independent news desk with reporters and tapped the power of the web to help use information to move public policy. For the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of business, labor, environmental, and community leaders pushing for clean energy and green jobs, Schneider oversees a website (apolloalliance.org) that functions as a kind of wire service for clean energy industry news, packed with articles, reports and data generated by Alliance staffers and freelancers.

Why he's optimistic about America's move toward sustainability:“First, the case has been clearly made that pursuing a fossil fuel economy is a dead end in every way you look at it. Second, the clean energy sector—wind, solar, bio-fuels—is the fastest growing industry in the country. And third, we have a president now who really gets it. The first policy moves he made after the inauguration focused on clean energy. He directed the Department of Transportation to establish higher fuel efficiency standards for 2011 model vehicles and he allowed the states to raise tailpipe emissions limits above the national standard. And the economic stimulus package that President Obama signed, and which the Alliance helped design, commits over $113 billion to clean energy investment, increased energy efficiency, modernizing rail transit and developing electric vehicles. We haven't seen anything like that since Congress authorized the interstate highway system in 1956, or since President Kennedy committed the nation to landing a man on the moon in 1961.”

MARK MILLER '84 Founder and CEO, Project FROG, San Francisco

What he does: An architect and the founding principal of the research-based architecture firm MKThink, Miller has recently launched Project Frog, a company that produces modular, high-performance, smart-building systems for the commercial and institutional market. The bright, modern, flexible structures are made from 100 percent recycled or renewable materials, have the option of green roofs or solar panels, and can be configured in a variety of ways.

Why Project FROG-style building kits will be the sustainable wave of the future:“Think of the way phone communications has evolved. Fifty years ago your phone was attached to the wall, the headset was attached to your base and you had to spin a dial to make a call. Now we talk to each other hands-free on a light-weight device that can perform hundreds of other tasks and applications. But the construction industry builds buildings the same way it did 50 years ago. Building is slow and expensive. Construction is also devastating to the environment: It consumes huge amounts of materials and energy, and 65 percent of all landfill comes from the building industry. This value system is warped. We have a world of smart phones and dumb buildings. To truly have a sustainable environment, we have to revolutionize the construction industry. Our goal is to build smart, healthy buildings while simultaneously leaving a substantially smaller environmental footprint. At Project FROG, we highly engineer all of our parts and are able to produce our buildings in quality-controlled environments. This method results in a 90 percent reduction in project waste. With photo voltaics and energy-efficient design, we are able to generate more energy than we consume in the footprint of the building.”

KATE STEPHENSON '00 Executive director, Yestermorrow Design/Build School, Warren, Vermont

What she does: Stephenson runs an organization that offers hands-on, experiential classes designed to demystify the design and build process for construction and design professionals as well as do-it yourself homeowners.

Building, sustainability and the big picture:“Over the past six years at Yestermorrow we've seen a huge increase in interest in green building and sustainable design from people from all walks of life. We're trying to tackle sustainability by promoting smart design which takes into account climate, solar orientation, insulation, energy efficiency and local materials, and also looks good and creates comfortable places to live, work and study.

“Our curriculum is based on three scales of the design/build process and the large scale track is what we call ‘Whole Buildings and Communities.' We're interested in thinking about how buildings interact with the rest of the environment—looking at smart growth, transportation issues, and designing agricultural systems which are integrated into our communities. Through my work with the Mad River Valley Localvore Project, we've been partnering with local farmers to help educate consumers about the benefits of eating locally grown food. We teach workshops on topics such as canning and preserving, building root cellars, growing vegetables year-round and raising animals for food.”

PETER GOLDMARK ‘67 Commissioner of Public Lands, Washington State Department of Natural Resources

What he does: Elected in November, Goldmark, a rancher and wheat farmer, beat the two-term incumbent with a campaign platform that emphasized sustainability. In his new post he is responsible for 3 million acres of publicly owned forests, agricultural and grazing lands, as well as 2.6 million acres of aquatic lands, including shorelines, tidelands, rivers and lakes. Goldmark also oversees regulations concerning timber harvests and forest road building, and monitors the cleanup and restoration efforts of mine operations.

Sustainability initiative that holds major promise for his state:“We have a tremendous amount of waste material left over from timber harvesting here in Washington, and a tremendous amount that can be removed from the forests to make them more healthy. What happens now, tragically, is that it gets put in piles and burned. This contributes to CO2 release and to water contamination. But there is emerging renewable energy technology that allows you to use all of this woody biomass. There are gasification systems that turn wood into fuel that can be burned to drive turbines to create electricity, or it can be turned into liquid fuels. Based on a careful inventory, there is enough waste biomass in the state that if we just used half of it on an annual basis we could power half the grid in the state. But one limitation has been the high cost of transporting this material. We're proposing mobile units that can move into economically depressed areas and turn all of that biomass into energy. We have a bill right now before the state legislature that will allow us to test these concepts and see which systems are most economical. Once we have those findings, we believe private industry will step in.”

KATHERINE IRVINE '86 Research Fellow, Institute of Energy and Sustainable Development, De Montfort University, Leicester, England

What she does: An environmental psychologist by training, Irvine does interdisciplinary applied research on the human dimension of sustainability. Working with wildlife ecologists, she has studied the human benefits to increasing ecological diversity in urban green spaces. For a local energy company, she is investigating effective interventions to encourage decreased home energy consumption. And, for the Leicester city government, she is working with a team on a groundbreaking effort, dubbed 4M, to“measure, map, model and manage” the carbon footprint of an urban area.

Why she believes the 4M project could help advance sustainability:“So much of this stuff has never been measured before systematically. We are studying the sources and sinks of carbon across an entire city. We will be interviewing 500 households to find out how people get to work, their use of public transport and energy use in homes. We will also study energy use in non-residential buildings and study traffic patterns across the city, including how kids get to school, and we'll look at green space, both public and private. We know that soil and vegetation can be sinks that pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, but to what extent does that happen in an urban area? All of this information will be put into a model that can help create evidence-based public policy. For example, depending on what we find, the policy might become to plant more trees. If we find that people are driving a lot, we might look at ways to get more of them to walk or take public transportation. Eventually, what we're hoping is that the study's methods can become a model that others can use to help make cities more sustainable.”

STEVE SAWYER '78 Secretary General, Global Wind Energy Council, Brussels, Belgium

What he does: After nearly 30 years with Greenpeace, where he was CEO of Greenpeace USA and then Greenpeace International, Sawyer, who lives in Amsterdam, now plays a major role in advocating for the wind energy industry around the world.

Why he thinks wind energy is key to moving the planet toward sustainability:“Wind power is relatively technologically mature, economically competitive and fast to deploy. If you are thinking about building a coal-fired power plant it will take five or six years to get on line. Gas is a little less and nuclear takes at least 10 years to bring on line, and can be as long as 15-20 years. With wind, after you get the planning and permitting out of the way, you can have your wind farm generating electricity in six to eight months. Also, when a coal power plant is 90 percent complete you get nothing. With a wind farm, you start generating electricity and revenue as soon as the first cluster of turbines is complete and connected to the grid.“Also, not only is wind power clean, it's one of the best ways we have to create quality local jobs in rural areas. We need people to manufacture the turbines and components, people to do the siting, planning and construction, as well as the operations and maintenance. In the U.S. we have a 250-mile corridor that runs from Texas east of the Rockies up to the Canadian border that has some of the best wind resources in the world. These are areas with lots and lots of wind as well as a great need for economic redevelopment.”

AL NIERENBER '85 President, Evergreen Consulting & Training, Boxford, Mass.

What he does: Nierenberg helps businesses and institutions develop strategic alliances, manage change and find sustainable solutions to marketplace and workforce challenges. Recent projects include helping an airline develop a carbon offset plan, facilitating a green building network in Boston, and helping state agencies to better work with the private sector on the construction of green schools and other buildings. Earlier in his career, he launched the Dixie recycled line of paper cups.

The challenges to creating a sustainable economy:“I just read a book review on Energy Future, which was a bestseller 30 years ago. It's about the problems with our reliance on fossil fuels, how we can move toward energy independence— and it applies to our current situation. So the good news is we know what to do. The bad news is we haven't done it yet. We take a step or two in the right direction and then the price of oil drops and we keep partying like there is no tomorrow. In that book they talk about the problem of human inertia, about people not wanting to make sacrifices today for benefits in the long term. And what I've found in my work on change management is that it's very hard to bring about change. People can say they're for the environment and that they'll spend more on sustainable products, but when push comes to shove they are likely to buy the cheapest products and the environmental attributes are lower on their list than they claim. So it's important for anyone working on sustainability issues to make sure they have price and performance parity with other products out there—in addition to being more sustainable.”