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
mcevoydm@appstate.edu 
englandle@appstate.edu 
https://www.instagram.com/appstatetocop/ 
https://unfccc.int/ 
 
Transcript
Laura:Hello everyone and welcome to the Find Your Sustainability 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 is a bit different from the others that I've hosted. We have a bit of a party here in the studio today. I'm here with not just one guest, not two, but three wonderful guests. This team has recently returned from Baku Azerbaijan, where they served as App State's delegation of observers at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change's 29th Conference of the Parties or COP 29 for short. I'll briefly introduce each of our guests and then we'll get to know more about each of them as we go. Dr. Dave McEvoy is professor and chair of the Department of Economics here at App State. He has graduate degrees in environmental economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University College London.His research focuses on the design and effectiveness of international environmental agreements. And relevant to today's conversation, Dr. McEvoy serves as the organization head for App State's involvement in the United Nations Framework Convention on climate change. Also with us is Nicole Tran, a senior majoring in political science with a concentration in international and comparative politics and a minor in leadership studies. And we also welcome Grace Knapp, a senior majoring in global studies with double minors in Spanish and political science. Thanks so much Dave and Nicole and Grace for coming on the podcast, for being in the studio with me, and I'm really excited to hear more about your recent experience as observers of international climate negotiations.
Dave:Definitely happy to be here. Thanks.
Nicole:Thanks for having us.
Grace:Yeah, thank you for having us. I'm happy to be here.
Laura:Excellent. Well, first let's start with some context for our listeners. Dave, can you talk about the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change? A brief history, the purpose of the annual conference of the parties, what it's accomplished so far, a semester's worth in like three minutes.
Dave:Three minutes?
Laura:No pressure.
Dave:Sure. The UNFCCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is an international treaty that's designed to try to move countries collectively towards a common goal of avoiding dangerous climate change. It was drafted in '92, entered into force in 1994, and since then, every year minus Covid and a couple weird situations, there's been an annual conference of the parties. And those parties, around 200 countries try to work together to make things better. And it's a gradual process, but typically, countries are working under a treaty or a protocol that's kind of under the umbrella UNFCCC. These days, it's called the Paris Agreement. And so I think most people, while they may not know what the acronym UNFCCC means, they've probably heard of the Paris Agreement, which is, again, a treaty or an agreement under the UNFCCC, and that's the main context of the 29th conference of the parties that we just came back from and every conference of the party since COP 1.
Laura:That's excellent. And I know, David, thanks to your leadership that App State has the possibility of bringing a delegation. Can you say a bit about what that process involved and also the course that you developed that parallels the delegation?
Dave:Sure. So App State and many, not too many, but quite a few research institutions, even in this state, I can think of Duke and UNC Chapel Hill that are observers to the UNFCCC. And it was an application, it was a tedious process. Actually, if we had someone in Lower England's position right now helping with QAP and having your pulse on what's going on in climate-related initiatives across campus then, it would've been a huge help. But I had to gather everything that was going on in curriculum, in coursework, but also in research. So I just had to find everyone in any department working on climate-related research and take from their CVs a list of publications, any grant work that came in that had to do with it, and it ultimately had to go to the chancellor for a signature. And so it's Appalachian State that is an observer institution to the UNFCCC.It's not a particular college or person. I might be the focal point, but it's an institution membership. And as long as you don't screw it up, there's a code of conduct that we all follow. It's in perpetuity. And so it's not something you need to renew every year. And with that, the whole goal of doing that in my mind back in 2019, was to have ultimately a delegation of students that are interested in global climate policy and have a course that establishes the framework behind all this and how it all works and how climate negotiations work internationally, and actually, and how that feeds into domestic decisions. But then ultimately, we could participate as observers at the International Climate Negotiations Cop every year. So that's kind of what the course is. It's small because you can't just take as many people and whoever you want to these conferences.
Laura:So Nicole and Grace, you had to apply, I understand, to be a part of the course and then the trip to Azerbaijan. So maybe we'll start with Nicole and then Grace. Can you say a bit about first your interest in climate change and then what drew you to apply to this course in the program?
Nicole:So my interest in climate change actually grew the past couple of five years of just it's unthinkable about, how is it getting this hot? And one thing about me, I don't like warm weather, so this is really perking up my interest of, where is this coming from? Especially being from a city and then going to the mountains where it's supposed to be cooler but it's not getting any cooler.
Laura:Mm-hmm.
Nicole:And so that's where my interest in climate change came from. But because I've always approached things from a more social justice and advocating for vulnerable communities, I wanted to see if there was a different approach to that. At the time when the applications came out, it was through the Honors College that introduced me to Dr. McEvoy's class and the application process. And I was like, "Hmm, I want to see if globally, people are interested in how can we help and support vulnerable communities that don't have the resources that global North or Western areas typically have." And so that's where my interest grew. And prior to that, I went on a trip with Dr. Baker Perry on the Mount Everest Space Camp Trek.
Laura:Oh, wow.
Nicole:So it was just going hand in hand of, "I'm about to go experience one of the coldest regions that isn't really getting cold anymore." And so just following that experience and seeing that if that's getting addressed on the global stage in policymaking or with any delegation around the world.
Laura:Wow. So you've had lived experience with one of the more extreme environments where climate change is having a big impact and now also the experience of the international climate negotiations. Wow, that's fantastic. Okay, Grace, how about you? What's your interest in climate change and what drew you to apply to this program?
Grace:Yeah, of course. I have a couple of different things that motivated me to apply for this course. So I've always been pretty interested in creating a sustainable community and protecting our environment. My parents really raised us to compost and recycle since the day that I can remember. So that definitely encouraged me. But a couple of things come to mind when I think about what really motivated me throughout my college career to become more passionate about this issue. So during my freshman year, I started working with a national organization called the Sunrise Movement, and I started doing some phone banking and just small little meetings in my high school and freshman year of college with just friends and community members that I knew were passionate about climate change. And it wasn't a App State organization, but I worked online doing phone banking to politicians and encouraging a Green New Deal.And that was probably the number one thing that really brought me, number one, to a community that was full of like-minded people and cared about this issue as much as I did, but also motivated me to start doing things in my everyday life that impacted the environment in a positive way. For example, I started doing little workshops with students collaging making art out of recycled magazines. I find that to be really rewarding, while it's not impacting anyone on an international level, but it is a sustainable way to create art.
Laura:Mm-hmm.
Grace:And then the second thing is I studied abroad in Spain spring of 2023, and I took international relations classes there at that university. And in Spain at the university I went to, I went to Universidad de Europea, and you get to shape what you focus your projects on during most of those classes. And I chose to look at climate change issues and sustainability, and I got to learn a lot about how climate change is affecting Spain and droughts and heat waves that they've experienced.I found that to be particularly interesting, but very, very important. I currently work and have worked at Melanie's, a local restaurant, and last year I was talking to one of the customers there and it was just a single guy and it was right after COP 28. He had just took a cohort of students from UNC Chapel Hill to COP 28, and he was telling me about this and I was also sharing my passions and interest for climate change and policymaking and human rights. And he was telling me, he was like, "I think App State as a cohort or something you can apply to. You should certainly apply," since this was going to be my senior year. And so I started doing research and I actually emailed Dr. McEvoy a couple of months before, probably twice, being like, "Has the application opened yet?" So that's actually how I found out that App State had a cohort, so I'm very grateful for that small little random connection and I've certainly learned a lot about the connection between policymaking, human rights, and climate change,
Laura:And what a great experience for both of you in your senior year here at App State. I can see why you chose these two among the group to go with you, Dave.
Dave:There were thousands of applicants. Yeah. They're fantastic students.
Laura:Yeah. Well, I understand that this year's conference of the parties, there were about 60,000 delegates from, like you said, about 200 countries, and that's pretty enormous. There are lots of panels and sessions going on at the same time, I assume. I understand there's a Green Zone and a Blue Zone. Can one of you talk about the Blue Zone Green Zone organization of the conference of the parties, how that works, and what you all had access to as observers from App State?
Grace:Yeah, I can add a little bit and anybody else can chime on. But essentially the Blue Zone incorporated, first off the main negotiations that were going on, but then honestly, we could not get into a lot of the big negotiations. While it was open to observers, they either filled up really quick, but another major thing was we went during the first week and all the COPs consist of two weeks. And so a lot of them got pushed back and when they were open, we were not allowed to get into all of them. So I know for me personally, I went to a lot of the press conferences, I went to the pavilions. There were side events and there were also exhibits, which App State had one that partnered with Vanderbilt University. And then the Green Zone consisted of activities and different businesses. It was almost similar to a career fair in my opinion.
Laura:Exhibits?
Grace:Well, the Green Zone area.
Laura:Yeah.
Grace:If anybody wants to add on to that. I don't know exactly how I'd explain the Green Zone.
Nicole:I feel like I would explain the Green Zone, it's an area where you would separate yourself for a second from all of the logistics and negotiations of the conference. So like Grace was saying, that's where businesses are, that's where activities, like Grace went to yoga over there. It's essentially an area for people and delegates to feel like, "Oh, I can relax for a second and not be so overwhelmed by everybody running around, rushing to do things." So it's a very slow paced area.
Dave:Yeah, I would say that that seems like a good description of the Green Zone. The primary thing is that to get into the Blue Zone, you need a badge. Any delegation that is going through this UNFCCC process that we do has a Blue Zone badge for at least some fraction of the days. And back in COP 1, COP was the Blue Zone, and not only that, it was just the negotiations, so it was just parties negotiating. There were always the ability of observers to do exactly that, to observe. But over the years, now, if you think of the nucleus or the center of a big circle in the Blue Zone is like the negotiations. Then you have these side events that a lot of academics, a lot of institutions, students, youth groups, they can give presentations. And then what Grace mentioned, the pavilion space, these pavilions are country pavilions and organization pavilions, but the United States has their own pavilion, for instance.It may not be the most colorful and exciting, but it's busy. It's busy from 9:00 to 6:00 every day for two weeks with a lot of governors, senators, people in the policy space, also academics, sometimes students. And that's just the United States Pavilion, and I don't know how many pavilions there were. There were not 200. I mean, there's some countries that aren't going to have them, and then there are organizations that have them. But it's a crazy space. I mean, it's like a World's Fair. That's the way to describe that area. And so all this stuff is going on at the same time. And then the Green Zone is public facing, so anybody can go to the Green Zone. And so this year was a little bit more corporate than I've seen in the past, like Deloitte and McKinsey, maybe they're there, but the feeling of the Green Zone in the previous years has been outdoor space, a lot of interactive stuff, kids, like school groups. What was interesting about Baku is they just had remote school for two weeks for the COP.
Laura:Oh, wow.
Dave:So there were no students from K to 12 or the equivalent going to school, and there weren't those school groups going through the Green Zone, and so it seemed like a more business-y vibe.
Laura:Hm. A missed opportunity for those school kids.
Dave:Yeah, I think it was. It's public facing, so it's where, if you're looking for greenwashing, you're going to find it there for sure, because it's a lot of just businesses saying, "Look what we're doing." Whether they were selling caviar from the Caspian Sea or whatever they were showcasing. We didn't spend a lot of time there. To be honest, we just bought some junk and left. But it was a missed opportunity to have something for just the public to enjoy more than just a business-y trade fair.
Laura:Yeah. Well, so there's a lot going on at any given time, and I understand that each student in the course had selected a focus to follow ahead of time. And so I'd love to hear from you, Nicole, and Grace, about what you chose to follow, what you experienced as you followed that topic, what you learned, what you felt. Maybe we start with Grace this time and then go to Nicole.
Grace:Yeah, for sure. So yeah, me and Nicole sort of focused on similar issues, but definitely had our differences. So I focused on how indigenous communities are affected by these mitigation and adaptation plans, but also primarily indigenous communities in small island developing states. And the acronym for that is SIDS, so the entirety of COP is made up of acronyms. But I essentially followed a lot of issues on two major things, how marginalized communities, specifically indigenous communities are affected by climate change and climate disasters, but also what they are doing sustainably to combat these climate disasters. But the biggest issue that I found was they really lack funding in these small island developing states, but also any given indigenous population needs some sort of funding to continue these sustainable practices. And while that funding is present in a lot of different communities, there's a lack of political implantation that I've seen.And one of the most impactful talks I went to, it was a press conference, that I went to with Nicole actually, was an indigenous group, a women's group, it was called We Can, I believe, and it was a group of indigenous Brazilian speakers and leaders that were speaking on how, one, their communities were being affected by not only climate disasters, but also the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies, but not in a sustainable manner, if that makes sense.There's a lot of land grabbing and a lack of understanding of whose indigenous land this is. And not only are indigenous people being affected by this, but there's also a lack of understanding for the needs that women and youth need to continue to prosper. And this talk was done in their language, in Portuguese, and then translated. And that within itself was very impactful to me, that concept of translation and how powerful it was to hear them speak in their language and still be so welcoming because COP 30 is actually being held in Brazil. So the major concept they highlighted during that was the concept of a just transition. So when we are transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy, it's to incorporate human rights and understanding for the necessities that these communities need while doing this transition sustainably.
Laura:So not to just replicate the extractive approach that our fossil fuel economy has used.
Grace:Exactly.
Laura:Yeah. Did you find that, in your observation, did the indigenous leaders and speakers, did they have the same spaces and audiences and access to influence at the conference of the parties that maybe representatives of more western wealthier type?
Grace:Yeah, definitely not. Most of these talks that I went to that indigenous speakers were headlining and at, were press conferences. So these press conferences are essentially a panel of five or six different people, and they tend to only get 30 minutes to speak. And the audience was primarily other indigenous people. So I found that very interesting. While there were some other students and younger people there that weren't indigenous people, it was still interesting to see, one, the crowds weren't as big, and two, they weren't as diverse. There were indigenous people supporting other indigenous people, which is fantastic. But I feel like there should have been officials from Western countries hearing their perspective and their experiences to accommodate and gain a different perspective.
Laura:Well, thanks for sharing about your experience. Nicole, what topic did you select to follow? What did you learn? What was the experience like for you?
Nicole:So me and Grace, we basically were following the same kind of topic, which I'm grateful for because then that meant that someone was with me half the time, but my main focus was on climate change and missed conflict and war and conflict and what that looks like. More of what does it mean to be a climate refugee versus someone who has been displaced by war, but also the intersections of war and climate change, which is something that people primarily really don't focus on because when it comes down to it, what we are scared of is war, and we don't ever see the after effects of war, especially on vulnerable communities. So I was focusing on the Loss and Damage Fund that was created around COP 27, and its mission was to essentially have this funding for vulnerable communities or any country that has been affected by climate change at any vast moment that they could pull money out for it.But the issue with that is that there was a lack of consideration of conflict affected areas, so we were talking about the Middle East, any war that has been put in tiny or smaller countries. And so it was a really valuable experience, especially because at the time of this conference, the term climate refugee was pretty normalized, which is interesting because this was less than two weeks ago. But as soon as I got back, people started writing articles and research about how climate refugee is not a term that we should be using, how if we're going to talk about climate refugee and displacement, that we should be using ecological displaced person, only because the term and the connotation around refugee, it's always racially connected, which further disappropriates people, which makes it harder for them to gain resources and access to financial funds, such as the loss and damage fund.So that was an interesting obstacle I ran into because while at the conference, people were using climate refugee a lot because it's like, "We're getting displaced not only because of this conflict, but because this ruined infrastructure and this pollution and people having no choice but to move out of their homeland, also the climate there has been terrible, and so we haven't been focusing on that." So I got to attend a lot of press conferences with Grace and be able to listen to a lot of people calling for energy embargo, so that would be our BP gas stations pulling out of investments in oil extraction in other countries.It would also be like a arms embargo. So a lot of the press conferences were calling for that because these are two main factors, energy and arms, that basically contribute to climate change that we see here. So I actually grew a lot of fascination, this is going to sound weird, for this older woman who was a panelist named Lola who's from the Philippines, and she's been doing advocacy on behalf of affected conflict and climate affected communities for over 20 years at this point.
Laura:Wow.
Nicole:And so she's on the panel, the first panel I see her at, and she's sitting there and she's like, "I'm kind of sick of this. I've been here multiple times. I've been to this conference every year. I've advocated for the same thing. I've talked to people about the same thing. We're asking for more money in the Loss and Damage Fund."And so the conference this year was called the Finance COP, and so that's all we're talking about every single day is money. How much money are we putting in? Where are this money going? Who's getting the money? Are contributors going to add more money? Things like that. And so Lola is like, Every year I'm here and I'm telling people, 'We need more money.' Not only because you're seeing on mass media that these countries are clearly not going to sustain any life at any point." For example, in Palestine, they're saying that people cannot come back for another 30 years, that it's been that destroyed by climate and war, that there is no way of turning back.There's just no way. And so Lola is saying, "We need $5 trillion." And obviously to anybody, if I asked Dr. McEvoy to give me $5 trillion right now, he'd be like, "That's insane."
Dave:Just give me minute, give me a minute.
Nicole:And so while I understand that, and I understand that for any country, giving up any large proportion to contribute to $5 trillion is a lot. When we really think about it, we're thinking about communities that we don't even know about, indigenous people we don't know about that have been extremely affected by climate change and that need a Loss and Damage Fund.I've learned a lot just from that conference alone and just from all of the things following it and the research following it. But I really do think that at COP 30, that you will see Lola again and you will see the Pay Up Campaign that is advocating for $5 trillion simply because there's not an amount of money that you could ever put in the Loss and Damage Fund to recover the countries that can never turn back. But one thing that you can do is make sure that the people who are going through these experiences, the indigenous people who are making their way all the way to COP and using all their expenses to talk for their communities, are listened to and that they're in these negotiation rooms. That's one thing, if anything, I took away from this is that we need to keep pushing for indigenous voices and vulnerable communities to be able to access these rooms that their badges can get them where they need to be because, if anything, the documents and the policies should at least say that one indigenous person was in that room and was able to speak, so.
Laura:Well. You both followed some really important and really heavy topics while you were there. Nicole, you brought up finance is the overarching topic for this conference of the parties. Maybe Dave, you could speak to the trajectory of getting to this point where, in 2024, finance is like the topic and maybe it's going to be the one for the next few years too. What progress are we making at the international level on finance to address climate change? Both loss and damage, which is about once there's already been damage created and also the more prevention mitigation side, how are we doing on this?
Dave:Well, you make a good point because... And part of the negotiations this year about finance were because there was something called the new collective quantified goal on finance. This is the big thing. COP makes things hard on purpose, but they use the term quantum, which just means, how much? What's the number? But part of the negotiation is, is the number we're working on now going to feed into loss and damage? Ultimately, and we didn't realize this until we left, we left after the first week, is that it's not. So you make a good distinction because there's all kinds of money flowing for climate action.There's money to try to enhance mitigation, which is what you need to address the cause of this problem. Then there's money for adaptation, which you need to help countries most vulnerable to live in a world with climate damage. No matter what we do right now, we're still suffering damage. So even if we stop the emissions today, we still have warming. And then there's loss and damage, and just like you said, that's for damages that people are already suffering or have suffered. The tricky part is that the most vulnerable nations that suffer the most and will suffer the most have contributed the least, which also means they have the least leverage to help solve the climate change problem, too.
Laura:When you say contributed the least, you mean-
Dave:In emissions.
Laura:... the least emissions. Contributed the least to the cause.
Dave:To the cause of climate change. So there's sufferings for something that they had very little fraction in terms of the whole of greenhouse gas emissions. And what that also means is that they can't do a lot to help solve that problem. And this is why things are so thorny. So when the United States, and relative to the United States historic emissions, current emissions place in the world, the GDP, they're not large contributors relative to those metrics, but they're not going to say, "This is money towards loss and damage." Government funds flowing for climate action are not going to use that terminology. It's too contentious. But what they're going to do, or what a lot of countries do is say, "This is what we're giving to climate action." They can lump that altogether. But it really matters where it goes. And so this year, to answer your question of where we're coming from, I think it was in 2009, there was a collective goal of $100 billion a year.This wasn't loss and damage because Nicole's right, that came about in COP 27 and then in COP 28, the first day that fund was created. Which was a big thing because, you can imagine, loss and damage, that's not getting at the root cause of climate change, that is trying to make countries and people and communities whole that have been suffering. But it's a different goal. So that $100 billion was not towards loss and damage. There was some adaptation, but it's mitigation.The money flows from the global north or the global south or developed terminology changes, but this is the flow of funds and it makes sense because if the western world wants the rest of the globe to not take that same development path that we did, it's going to take a lot of money and resources and capacity to not use fossil fuels in the same way. So that's where that money traditionally had been targeted. And this is back in 2009. And then in 2020, it was supposed to start, it didn't get there, it failed. 2023, the global community finally hit the $100 billion. But it's just not even close. Trillions of dollars are talking about that.
Laura:We're off by an order of magnitude.
Dave:Ultimately, what happened this year is that they've tripled this. There's a commitment by, I think it's by 2035, that it would be 300 billion, and that would be through government funding, that would be through parties, but with this goal of 1.3 trillion, that's also in the decision documents from COP 29. But that gap is going to be made up by private finance, which we had Alex a delegate in our cohort, a student studying finance, was following COP finance, and she makes some great points. Ultimately, all of her students, Nicole and Grace as well, write a policy brief and she made good points of a lot of that funding from the private sector comes in the form of loans. They're responsible for the money as well, and that can be just as contentious and dangerous and unhelpful, right? Yeah. You're not less vulnerable in that kind of world. So I don't know about that gap between 300 billion and 1.3. I'm maybe a little suspect. And even if it does, is that a great thing? Because of the mechanism through which those finances are dispersed.
Laura:Mm. Mm-hmm.
Dave:Yeah.
Laura:Well, so we have a set of countries that have been the lead in terms of causing the problem, our country being among those, and then the country's communities that Nicole and Grace [inaudible 00:34:16] represent, the set of communities, countries around the world that are experiencing the harms first and worst contributed very little to the cause of the problem. We're not seeing enough support and maybe the right kind of support to clean up the mess. I'm going to ask an intentionally naive question here that I think has multiple answers. So when you're growing up, when you're a kid, you're taught by someone in your life, you should clean up your own mess.And most of us do that. Most of us do that. Most people do that in their lives, at least on a local basis. But we've really failed to scale that beyond very local, in a lot of cases with respect to environmental problems and especially to the global scale with climate change and other global environmental problems. So what are the multiple reasons why? Why are we not applying this clean up your own mess ethic that we have all held dear in our personal lives? Why are we not scaling that up to the global level?
Dave:I can start chiming in. I just don't think there are incentives for that to work. I think if the United States historically, and pretty soon China will surpass the United States, [inaudible 00:35:38] historic contributions to greenhouse gases. I think that that social norm that maybe I had as a kid to clean up your room is not a norm that would supersede any of the incentives, the motives that drives an economy like the United States.
Laura:Name some of those motives.
Dave:Well, just the fraction of what our GDP would account for in terms of fossil fuel based production, industry, transport is pretty large. And so in a simple world, where it's like, "Clean up your act now," it would shut down an economy. Now, if it was a, "Slowly clean up your room by the time I get back," and that might be 30 years, then perhaps. But I think what will drive countries or a country like the United States to make those decisions is the economics of it.You see that in COP 28 and 29 because they focus a lot, and when I say they, I'm talking about parties or maybe just country representatives that are in the policy space. They focus on what are called super pollutants. That really wasn't even a term a few years ago, but methane is one. So it's a strong greenhouse gas, it has a shorter lifespan. And for all kinds of different reasons that we don't have to get into, they're are low hanging fruit, and so it's cheaper to mitigate them, to reduce them. You get a bigger bang for your buck because they don't spend as much time in the atmosphere.And so the economics are in its favor, and that is the reason that that's the focus of the US in the last couple of years, the global methane pledge, a focus on nuclear energy, because statistically, it's very safe. Emotionally, it's difficult. But they look to countries like France or Spain that have a high fraction of energy use. And so I think that that's a push that was part of the US negotiations this year in terms of how they're going to meet these things. I guess that's what I'd say is I study what's called the dismal science, so just take this with a fistful of salt, just the incentives to have to be there, I would think, and I just didn't see how they would be for a social norm like that.
Laura:Nicole and Grace, what do y'all think?
Nicole:Yeah. I mean, I agree with Dr. McEvoy. I think that it goes down to two things that intersect with each other as well as the economics of it and the public interest on political will of, does the public even care for any of government officials? That's what they're thinking of... "Unless every single person in the nation that I rule over is pushing or pressuring me to do this thing, and if I don't, they're going to push me out of my leadership role," that there's no incentive there. Most of the time when we talk about political leaders of any nation, really, they're trying to keep their power and they want to keep their position and they want to stay as long as possible. So anything that is in public interest, if it's not getting pushed, if climate change and climate action's not getting pushed, then it's really like, "Well, if I don't do it, I'll still be here and I'll do this." And if I can sustain the economy, they're really not going to be mad at me because I can do this and get away with it.And so in terms with the US, like I was able to get into John Podesta, our Senior Advisor on Climate for the US, being able to hear him talk about what the next steps are for the US in terms of whether or not they're going to be sticking around or what the negotiations are looking like. And obviously he couldn't say much, but it came down to, "If this is something that people really want to happen and they want to see from our federal government, that it goes down to local governments continuing the climate action, public interest pushing for climate action, and climate activists still being out there and doing the work." Because who knows what it's going to look like coming January. But yeah, I mean, it really comes down to economics and public interest.
Grace:I would say I agree with both of those. In my opinion, the bottom line is the economy sort of rules these developed nations, such as the US and China. And I think also, when it comes down to political will, if the public is not encouraging or advocating for anybody to take accountability or make change in terms of climate action, I think politicians and policymakers at this level are not going to be doing much, unless there is that action by the public and some incentive for the economy, because we do live in a world where the economy is a major factor for any decision that we make. And I also think unfortunately, we also live in a world where if it's not affecting anybody's individual life, then many people do not care. There's a lot more going on and if people aren't paying attention to climate, it's not directly impacting them, there's not going to be much change made.And I feel like I saw this firsthand when Hurricane Helene hit in October, and I certainly have some friends that are not as cautious when it comes to the environment or definitely not as passionate or aware of climate change. And it is something that really occupies my mind and I'm very aware of and passionate about. But when this hit, it made a lot of conversations come forth, and very important conversations regarding climate change. And so I think unfortunately, I feel like if people do not experience something like a climate disaster, then maybe they don't care as much because it's not impacting their daily life. And I really do hate to say that, but I did see it firsthand when I saw friends asking me more questions on the conference I went to because of Hurricane Helene, and they are more insightful and interested about policymaking and climate change and how they go hand in hand.
Laura:Yeah, you make really good points there. It's easy for people to feel a psychological distance between their own life and the problem of global scale climate change unless or until the effects do become local. When you were abroad in Baku, did people know that you were from a region that just experienced a climate disaster? When you shared, "We're from App State. We're from Western North Carolina." Did you get any recognition or questions about, "How is your community?" That kind of thing?
Nicole:I will say if we ran into anybody from the US and we were telling them we were from App State, they would often ask us about the western region and how that went down for us. Our first day when we went to the 9:00 AM RINGO session, so the observer group we're under, basically all RINGO attached organizations were there. I don't know if I'm explaining this right, but-
Dave:RINGO is research and independent, NGO's non-governmental organizations. So yeah, it's just our constituency group that we are under.
Nicole:Yeah. So we got split up into what our interests would be during the conference. And I was talking to some people, I think Grace was also there, they were focusing on adaptation, so we went over there as well. We were like, "Oh yeah, we're from App State." And their first question was, "How was the hurricane? Did you experience it? Did you stay while the hurricane was happening?" And typically a lot of people, the way that they saw the hurricane was through TikTok, and so they bring that up too. They were like, "I kept seeing videos." But yeah, outside of that, I didn't really run into anybody internationally that would know about what happened to Western Carolina.
Grace:I would say the same. Everybody that I talked to that did ask about the hurricane or was like, "Wow. Oh my God, how are you doing?" They were either from the US or they were younger people. There weren't many people internationally that knew what had happened.
Laura:That must have been a weird feeling. I had the experience of traveling to a conference in late October, which was a few weeks out from the hurricane hitting, but it still felt very fresh here. And it was odd to be in a space where people didn't really understand. They're like, "Oh, you had a hurricane, but that's over now," and it's clearly not over and won't be for a long time in the region. You've shared a lot about what you've learned since the intellectual outcomes from being a part of this experience. What was the emotional journey like?On this podcast before, we've talked about the ways that climate change is impacting the mental health of people around the world and especially youth. We had a leading expert on the subject, Britt Wray, a few months back, and the more recent research that she's a co-author on is showing the mental health impacts are growing. 38% of 15,000 US youth respondents said that, My climate worry affects my day-to-day life, including things like my ability to eat and sleep and focus on my work and my studies," and that sort of thing. That's significant. You are facing climate change head on in your studies, it sounds like in your change-making work, outside of your studies. You traveled to the international negotiations. What is your climate emotions journey like, both outside of this particular experience and what was it like to be a person in the context of all that you witnessed there?
Grace:I thought it was very interesting to go to this conference right after the hurricane, and it was actually up in the air if we were even going to go. One, because of the badge issue, and then, two, because of the hurricane. And Dr. McEvoy sent us an email probably only three weeks before going to the conference saying, "Do we still want to do this? And how are we feeling about this?" And I remember responding saying, "I think we should still do this." Especially because for me personally, the hurricane had a very emotional impact on me, and even on parts of my home, it did.And so it motivated me even more to want to go. And so I've experienced a lot more climate anxiety the past two years because of focusing on a lot of projects within school, focusing on climate action in global climate change, and also just experiencing it firsthand takes a huge toll on you. And then being at the conference was very empowering, but at the same time, very anxiety provoking because it was almost very overwhelming to see this issue at such a global level and have so many aspects being looked at and worked on.
Laura:And how slow it is.
Grace:And how slow it was moving. And in my head, I was just getting a little frustrated, but I was also very grateful to be there. So yeah, it was very interesting. I actually did go to a yoga class for decreasing climate anxiety, which the Greenstone had, so I was very grateful for that because I needed that for sure.
Laura:It's a complex emotional journey. How about you, Nicole?
Nicole:I think for me, prior to the conference and going through the hurricane, I was just like, "I am overwhelmed. I don't know what's going on, and these are very traumatic experiences, so I can only imagine what other people around the US and globally have gone through and how they dealt with that." And then being at the conference, just the same as Grace was saying, very grateful that I was able to go, but also every time I went to a panel, it was very anxiety inducing of, "Oh wow, so no one knows what to do," or, "There's only so much that we can do."But I think that it's also been a push for me to see outside of myself for a second and be like, "Wow, there are so many people who need support right now, and how do we support them in the best way possible? How do we meet their ask?" So my mental health around climate has been up and down, but I think that looking outside of that, it's been like, "Oh, there is a lot of change that can happen, but when are we and how are we going to push for that change?" Because it's going to keep adapting as our climate is changing, so.
Laura:Right. And we need all hands on deck. So I'm grateful to the two of you for the work that you've started, and hopefully will continue. I look forward to following you in the coming years. To wrap things up, Dave, can you tell us, do you intend to offer this course again in the coming year and take a group to the Conference of the Parties in Brazil?
Dave:Yes, good question. The answer is yes, that we did talk about yesterday in class, our last class or two days ago, what we thought about this whole thing. And everyone feels that there's a lot, like you mentioned, 60,000 people, this is COP 29. I would argue that there's improvements that are made, but of course it is slow, and there's a lot of people traveling and a lot of resources being used. And is this the way we want to do it? Is this just a waste of additional resources contributing to the problem, or is this helping? Or where's the balance with it? And so I grapple with that. So when you mentioned climate emotions, all of this is just kind of wrapped up for me of, "Is it the right thing to do to keep doing this?" And I think the answer is yes, but that's not the only argument. But yeah, next year in Brazil and not a... I forget how to pronounce the name, Belém?
Grace:Belém, I believe.
Dave:But not a huge city with hundreds of hotels. I mean, this is a different part of the world and probably a part of the world that needs to be hosting a COP for all the reasons that the last three have been in oil nations. And so it'll be interesting, but it is something I think about.
Laura:Well, it's an incredible learning experience for students and I'm really grateful, Nicole, and Grace, and Dave for you joining me in the studio and sharing about the experience. I do want to let our listeners know that the cohort from App State did have an Instagram, AppStateToCOP, which I think we can put the link, too, in the show notes, where you can learn more about their experience and especially get a visual sense of their journey. Thanks again, y'all.
Dave:Thank you.
Nicole:Thank you.
Grace:Thank you.
 
 
 

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: ramsdellcs@appstate.edu
Carla on Insta
Carla on TikTok
www.knowwattscooking.com
Register for Cooking with Purpose
Community FEaST Tuesday, October 22, 2024 from 4:30pm - 6:00pm
 
 
Transcript
Laura EnglandWelcome everyone to the Find Your Sustainability podcast. I'm host Laura England from the Department of Sustainable Development, and as of the start of this fall semester, I'm working full time as Director of Academic Sustainability Initiatives, with my main focus being co-leading App State’s Pathways to Resilience Quality Enhancement Plan, a five year climate literacy initiative. Today, I'm delighted to get to talk with an App State, Sustainability and Climate Literacy champion and the wonderful Carla Ramsdell. Carla Ramsdell is a practitioner in residence in the Department of Physics and Astronomy here at App State, where she has woven sustainability and climate content into her teaching for the past 15 years. Carla has a bachelor's degree in physics and a master's degree in mechanical engineering, and worked in the energy sector as a thermodynamic design and test engineer for 17 years. In addition to being a scientist, engineer, and educator, Carla is a food enthusiast. For years, she has combined these threads of her expertise and passion to support the transformation of our food system such that it better supports individual health, community health, and planetary health. Carla has created and led numerous public outreach programs, drawing community members into sustainability and climate conversation and action via a shared love of food and cooking. Carla also performs research on energy efficient food and cooking. And speaking of energy. Carla has tons of it. She's among the most dynamic teachers I know, and it has a lot of dynamic teachers, so that's really saying something. We've invited Carla to the Find Your Sustainability podcast to talk about the work that she's been doing, as well as the launch of her new sustainable physics inspired culinary education lab, or space lab, and how she plans to use that to grow her reach even further. In addition to sharing her bio, I should also share my personal connection. I've had the pleasure of collaborating with Carla in various ways for most of my 15 years at App State, and I've always admired her incredible ability to connect with people and ignite their interest in sustainability and climate change, often in indirect ways, like through the joy of food and cooking that really resonate deeply with people. So, Carla, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Carla Ramsdell Thank you for that amazing introduction. I hope I live up to that expectation, but thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. Loved working with you for the past 15, whatever it's been years. I think we have really been great partners in this work and you inspire the work that I do. And yeah, I'd love to continue this relationship and this conversation. So thanks for having me.
Laura EnglandAbsolutely. And it's been such a pleasure to work with you. I've learned so much from you over the years. You're leading so many wonderful outreach programs around food, sustainability, and climate. It's hard to know where to start, but I'll start with one. So a couple of Earth Days ago, the Yale Climate Connections News Service highlighted your sustainable food cooking challenge. So let's start by talking about that. Can you tell us about that program, sort of your approach with it, and then maybe talk more generally about your approach to engaging people on sustainability and climate through a shared love of food and cooking?
Carla Ramsdell Yeah, absolutely. So that was just sort of an idea I had in 2022 I think it was. Just to, you know, try to look for creative strategies to communicate climate knowledge and literacy, urgency, but also mitigation strategies that people can go home today and start to do. You know, I think the urgency of climate change really elevates the need for us to come up with new creative strategies, not just for the scientists in the trenches, but for everybody. And, I think it was inspired partially a lot of this work by, you know, these little moments in your life that sort of change your path. But I remember sitting in IG Greer Auditorium many years ago next to who was then our director of sustainability, Lee Ball for a film showing of, I don’t even remember the film, but I looked around the room and realized, I know the people that are here for this sustainability film, and they're not necessarily the people that need to hear this message.And, you know, Lee Ball answered by saying, but these are our agents of change. So, you know, we need to continue this vibrant community. But in that, I realized the need for some more creative communication strategies that would draw in a broader community that aren't going to come to a climate change film or a renewable energy talk or something. And, I'm Italian. My whole childhood and life have really revolved around delicious food. Cooking is my number one hobby, and so pivoting to this work of applying my love for science and my love for climate literacy, with my love for cooking just was so natural and joyful. So, yeah, I just started scrappily filming some little clips and putting it out on social media to try to again just broaden the reach of this. So that was a more concentrated effort to say leading up to Earth Day, let's do a recipe a day. Yeah. But I've just kind of continued that work in social media, sort of outside of my normal day job work, just sort of playing with recipes and figuring out how to bring in this audience, introduce some new flavors and ingredients, and also weave some climate knowledge into that work.
Laura EnglandIt's really genius.
Carla Ramsdell Oh. You're sweet. It's very fun.
Laura EnglandWell, tell us about one of the meals that you have in this sustainable food cooking challenge. What makes it climate friendly?
Carla Ramsdell There's so many. Let's see. We could...so lentil tacos are you know my go-to because I think they present for us an opportunity to see how we can slowly pivot from an animal centric diet to a plant centric diet. So my childhood and even my early motherhood, all of my meals were designed and planned around an animal. You know, it was pork night, it was chicken night, and it was fish night, and then it was beef night. And then the other things fell into place around the animal. And so when I transitioned to plant based, I'm not vegetarian, but I do eat predominantly plants. I realized that there would have to be a whole restructuring of how I think about meal planning, because the animals may be a flavor additive or a side note, but it's no longer the main sort of focus of the meal. And so lentils become a really great ground beef replacement. And so and so many of the meals that we do, from shepherd's pie to tacos to even salads, we throw together to have some cooked lentils on the go in the refrigerator, they're always there for me. Sprinkle on top of a pizza, whatever. They have great surface area to volume ratio, so they take on flavors really well. And so we start real simple with just transforming them into tacos. Also, if you're not ready to go all the way vegetarian, cutting your beef in half with lentils makes an enormous difference in the greenhouse gas emissions. So yeah, I think that was one of my easy go tos and one of the ones of that challenge. Also,
Laura EnglandI love that one. I tried that one of my family, my family is all, big fans of lentils in general, though I had not put them in tacos until you inspired me to do so. And that was a hit. So thank you for that.
Carla Ramsdell Super. Yeah.
Laura EnglandYeah, and I really appreciate this approach of, you know, it's not a black and white. We don't have to give up this thing. It's more of the flexitarian approach.
Carla Ramsdell And I think it's more about amplifying what to eat rather than trying to say what not to eat, you know? So I think it's human nature that if you're told you shouldn't eat a hamburger, I just really want a hamburger at that moment. Yeah. You know, like there's something that rises. It's like, oh, that sounds delicious. Whereas when you take a beef burger and add in a bunch of minced mushrooms, you extend the beef. So you're using less beef. And actually taste tests show that people enjoy that more. They don't even recognize there's a bunch of mushrooms in there. It makes it more moist. Mushrooms have this umami, which is what we typically only get from meats, but we get from the mushroom. So, you know, there's a lot of really creative things we can do to not necessarily relinquish the things that we love so much, but to augment them and also make them more sustainable. So highlighting those things, I haven’t done a video about that yet. Perhaps you’re giving me an idea here. So yeah.
Laura EnglandAnd I think your approach can be applied in other areas of climate communication too. You know, for so many years the focus has been on the problem and what we need to not do and stop doing. And it's not that those things are untrue, but presenting the broader public and decision makers with, you know, sort of beautiful, delicious visions of what we could have is much more inspiring, you know, invokes action and that sort of thing.
Carla Ramsdell Yeah. That's great. So, I mean, I work with a lot of people in the space both at App State and beyond, and I feel a burden sometimes in the work they do in their communication. I think sometimes when you're really in the trenches and seeing all the consequences and the slow movement of action, it can be a dark place. I mean, I think some, you know, struggle with their own mental health through the work that they're passionate about. You know, I feel like through this work, there's so much action that we can do. Cooking in general is mentally grounding. You know, you get the smells and all these, I don't know, these feedback loops that are really helpful to our mental health. And also at the same time there are climate solutions. So it's a light and beautiful place to have some climate solutions I think.
Laura EnglandI love it. I want to talk about some programs that you've created and co-led on this campus that offer opportunities for students including ones that are upcoming this academic year. One is called Cooking with Purpose. Can you tell us about that program? It's goals and ways that our students and other members of our university community can be involved.
Carla Ramsdell Absolutely. Yeah. Cooking with purpose is super fun. It's a great community, sort of a small but mighty group of faculty and staff and students who come together. And the goal of the program is really to intertwine delicious food that is inexpensive and healthy and also sustainable and simple to prepare could be done by people living in dorms. So we're kind of asking a lot of these recipes to try to put all those pieces into one program. If I go back a little bit and talk about the history of how we got here, I was teaching a physics of food and cooking class, and then Covid struck and, we used to do a little bit of cooking demos in class pre-COVID. And, you know, there was this cooking component to a physics of cooking class. So when it pivoted to Covid times and I had to go online, I was thinking this was going to be a disastrous transition and then just said, okay, here, you know, all of you buy a couple, like, simple laboratory equipment for your kitchen, a scale, a thermometer, whatever. Let's meet once a week and cook together. I'll be in my kitchen. You be in your kitchen. We'll take data, we'll chart differences. It was fabulous. It was so much fun. In a time when people craved community granted zoom community is not as great as face to face. But at that point it was lovely. Right? And so kind of buoyed by that success, I approached Jennifer Maxwell, who has been just a rock star in this work in our Office of Sustainability, and asked if we could approach, you know, try to develop a program for people using the Mountaineer Food Hub as a way to talk about how to use the items that are typically in a food pantry, like the lentils, rather than the grab and go mac and cheese in a styrofoam container that you know nutritionally are pretty not great. So she was all in very enthusiastic. And so that really was the birth of cooking with purpose. And it's been, you know, a transition. And we've had to make some real significant changes during Covid. It was very popular because again, people were just looking for anything to do. So we had these cohorts and they were vibrant. They showed up every time. And we had great community. And then post Covid, we saw a real drop in attendance a year ago in fall of 23, we had, I think, 12 people in the program, you know, so we went to a conference...Sherry Nikbakht in the mathematical sciences she is faculty and one of my partners in this work, and we went to Mexico for a food studies conference and presented this work as a dying program. This like, obviously after Covid, this isn’t popular, but asked them for suggestions...all these people in the food space that are doing this work. We got a slew of ideas. We implemented all of them in the spring, and we had 107 participants. So yeah, you know, also a point this is to say like, let's not try to reinvent the wheel, lean on the experiences of these other people. This semester, we've broadened it a bit to welcome staff and faculty this time. We're super excited to launch this semester. The first session will be this coming Wednesday, September 4th. And then they'll run every other Wednesday for four Wednesdays. It's a voluntary program. Just drop in when it works. It's time well spent. After the hour, an hour and a half, you have this meal you can share with friends. So we welcome anyone to sign up. Even up to the last session, we never close enrollment.
Laura EnglandWe're going to publicize all four of the sessions through the resilience.appstate.edu website. And so come learn about it there and sign up.
Carla Ramsdell Yeah. That would be great.
Laura EnglandYeah. We'll also put the link in the show notes so you can access the registration there.
Carla Ramsdell Spread the word. It's a great program. Super fun. We laugh, you know I think it’s different also from watching YouTube. There's so much out there is that you're actively cooking with us. Yeah. And so very often a student will be making pizza dough and they'll be like, I don't know, something's not really going right. And we'll just say, you know, point your camera down, let's see what's going on. And it looks like you need a little more water, a little more flour. Try this or that. So there's active feedback there to help improve the cooking. So I mean we have people come to the series that don't know how to cook pasta. Like literally zero cooking skills and we welcome that. Everything is simple enough for that to people who cook a lot and get in a rut and want new flavors and ingredients, or people that just come for the sustainable tips and tricks. And so yeah, anybody is welcome.
Laura EnglandAnd there's not a limit.
Carla Ramsdell There's no limit. It's zoom. So just come on.
Laura EnglandWell I so appreciate that you've opened it up to faculty and staff. And you mentioned food ruts. I think lots of us who have children can identify with getting into food ruts. And so you've timed this perfectly. I can be working, you know, with my husband to cook a family meal, watching Cooking with Purpose.
Carla Ramsdell Of course. Yeah. And I really applaud...I think Sherry Nikbakht has really helped me in that way. She just cooks really passionately about food and flavors that aren't something that I use typically. So my flavor profile has changed just by working with her. And then Jennifer Maxwell also bringing in like this focus on community. That's one of her big drives in this work is to connect these people to each other. So we try to have some events outside of those four Zooms also where people can connect or join in their own kitchens. We had groups that, you know a group of four friends that just went to their kitchen and cooked together and then shared the meal together, and were happy. It doesn't have to be one person in one kitchen. It can be roommates or friends or whatever. We’re very open to creativity in cooking in this process. So there’s prizes too. So every session we’ll have...Karla Rusch in the Off Campus Student Engagement has provided some prizes like cast iron skillets and an immersion blender. So after each session for people who are there and actively engage with us, cooking with us, with their cameras on, they’ll get entered into a drawing for prizes. At the end of the four part series, we do a grand prize drawing for an Instant Pot, so those are only available to students because student fees are paying for those prizes. But, there's some extra perks to the program.
Laura EnglandSo fun. Well, you mentioned community, so that's a nice segue to talking about Community Feast, another one of the genius programs that you started on this campus and co-lead that's been going on for this will be the eighth year. So tell us about this program and ways that members of the campus community can participate this fall.
Carla Ramsdell Yeah, absolutely. So we are super excited to announce Community Feast for this year, which will be on Tuesday, October 22nd. And it is down the middle of Sanford Mall. It's a 100 yard long, continuous table, and we serve a community meal. It's free. It's open to anyone. There's no registration or tickets, and the focus is just to engage in a conversation about the importance of an equitable, sustainable food system. So there's several goals of the program. It came about eight years ago when a group of us across campus from all these different departments and programs, realized we were all doing food research but not communicating with each other. And we thought we could augment each other's work by meeting every once in a while and sharing ideas. So we called ourselves the Apple Fresh Collaborative, and that stands for Appalachian Food Research for equity, Sustainability and Health. And then we kind of grappled with, well, what can we actually do together collaboratively and Community Feast was born from that. So we have seen pictures of these long meals at other locations and thought, let's give it a try. Yeah. So it's definitely a community effort. We all kind of fall into place and, and do, different parts of it, from gathering the band to ordering the tables to getting the food ready and engaging students and set up and cleanup and conversation starters to put down the table.So it has become an Appalachian tradition. It's just a beautiful gathering. I think it helps us all recognize the significance of that commensality. Commensality means gathering around a table and eating food together communally. And it feels great, you know, on Covid also, we had to pivot that to zoom. It was well attended. Nothing like gathering around the table. The next year we went picnic style, so we weren't in such close contact with people. And then the next year that we came back in person, it was just…it was lovely. We couldn't get people to leave. Like, you know, we actually had to clean up the tables and chairs because the rental company was coming to pick up and people were just lingering and talking, and there was just really a beautiful feel to it. So last year was our biggest year. I think we were at 500 or something. Yeah, it is, it's growing maybe beyond the capacity of our 100 yard long table, but we try to have it long enough where there can be two sittings and order enough food to accomplish that. So yeah, please come. It's open to anybody. Community, community feast. Feast stands for food, engagement and storytelling. So it's really about let's share our stories about food. From traditional food ways to new food ideas to charting future food ways. And the more diversity we have around that table, the richer that conversation becomes. So we want diversity in every possible way. So faculty, staff, students, but also community members and family members, whoever dogs.
Laura England Kids. 
Carla RamsdellKids! Absolutely. Yes. Great music. And yeah, we just hope for good weather every year. But so far it’s been pretty good.
Laura EnglandI've been able to come most years and it really is a beautiful and meaningful event.
Carla Ramsdell It’s lovely. And just, you know, the whole community that pulls it together. It couldn't happen without the Office of Sustainability. Their sustainability ambassadors just like show up and there's this pile of tables and chairs. And before I know it, there's a table set with tablecloths and flowers and vases. And, you know, we have the art department that has helped through the years to make vases that are then for sale, that the sale of which helps the Mountaineer Food Pantry. And there's food drives that we usually have concurrent. Community groups can come and table like Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture, hunger and health coalition groups that are involved in sustainable work in our community. And they gather more volunteers through that. So just yeah, that storytelling and opening a dialog and gathering about the importance of all these pieces is, yeah,
Laura EnglandYou're multi-solving which we’ve talked about on this podcast before...programs that have co-benefits.
Carla Ramsdell Oh lovely. Yeah, yeah. And we eat too. And that's always good.
Laura EnglandYeah. It's delicious and fun. So you're doing all this amazing work on our campus. And you're also part of a network of faculty members at universities around the country who are working at this nexus of food and energy and water. And this team recently published a paper titled Implementing Interdisciplinary Sustainability Education with the Food, Energy, Water Nexus. What's it been like to be part of this sort of national level collaboration?
Laura EnglandWhat have you learned? What’s it meant for you?
Carla Ramsdell Oh, it's been fabulous just to connect to other people who are passionate in this space. So the FEW Nexus we tend to call this is and this was an NSF (National Science Foundation) funded grant through Virginia Tech. It's exactly about sort of building relationships with people in the same space to help us inspire the work we do. And there's been several sort of takeaways and lasting relationships. We all attended a conference in Philadelphia recently and sort of shared the work that we're doing collaboratively. Yeah. Like any community that comes together around these things, I just get so many great ideas and and sharing. And I think the other part that's been great, part of writing that paper collaboratively helped us to see that, you know, this collaborative nature, this this collaborative work that will be critical in solving climate crisis also represents some real struggles, especially in academia, when we are tend to be historically siloed. To try to break those silos and work across those lines is challenging. In the same way that writing this paper was challenging because we came at this from such different backgrounds. So to put the words of that paper in a language that was meaningful for all of us and intertwined all of our work was, I would say, more difficult than writing a paper with a bunch of other physicists. Sure. But I think richer because of that struggle and that dialog. And I think we even said that in the paper that this sort of highlights, you know, the importance of this work. It was a better paper because of it, but also a little more of a struggle. Right. We have to learn to talk in each other's language. We can't just throw around these acronyms that we tend to do in our own individual spaces. We have to expand the dialogue and the communication. And I think that's yeah, it's been great. It's not over. We are going to continue working together as a team, and we've applied for books and whatever. And I think it's really a great thing that NSF would fund something that's really focused on community building like that. And we'll have some real significant impacts.
Laura EnglandAnd thanks for representing App State in that national collaboration.
Carla Ramsdell Absolutely.
Laura EnglandSo coming back here to campus, there's a really exciting new opportunity on the horizon with your new facility, the SPICE Lab, the Sustainable Physics Inspired Culinary Education lab. Can you tell us how this project came about? You know who is involved and what are the labs capabilities? What do you imagine you'll use it for in the coming years?
Carla Ramsdell Yeah. I am just beyond excited to finally be in a space that's completed here. It's been about a four year journey from when my department gave me this fairly small room that was available to sort of expand the work that I was doing. It's a 10 x 24 ft space, and there's been this evolution through these four years to try to see how I can transform that into a space that has a wider reach than just our campus. And it's also included a really exciting integration of other parts of campus. So an interior design student did the design work for me about four years ago. An art student handmade the clay tiles that are on the back wall that are spectacular. Patrick Richardson, who's a genius in our department, electrical engineer, wired the whole lab so that every outlet and every oven and refrigerator are data logged. So when people join a zoom class, they can go to a website and see actually the curves of energy of everything I'm using, from the mixer to the convection oven to the induction versus radiant cooktop. And I actually think it's the only place that does that. I haven't found anywhere else in the world that has this kind of cooking energy component that's sort of live action energy use. So yeah, I am delighted. I'm so thankful for all the support I've received. My department, the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been behind me and supportive of me from day one, from just encouraging these initial ideas of what about a physics of food and cooking class? Through giving me a space through supporting the, you know, the growth of that space. I do want to do a shout out to the REI which is the Renewable Energy Initiative on campus, which uses student funds to fund some really important renewable energy projects on campus. And they funded the construction of this space into this redesigned cooking laboratory. So, yeah, I really appreciate that. They recognize the outreach work that could occur in there and how that could expand the knowledge of renewable energy and energy knowledge. So I think my background as a mechanical engineer in the energy sector has allowed me to see food as a critical energy resource. And those corollaries I can make between the electric energy grid and the food energy grid have been really fun. And also sort of merge at some point too, right? So we can talk about microgrids in electricity, which might be a PV panel on your roof or in the food sector might be a backyard garden. And the grid is this connectivity of copper cables in the electric world. But trucks and trains and ships transporting our food network. So making those connections has been really fun. So very excited to see where the SPICE LAB goes. I think one of my biggest challenges will be to focus the work in there into ways that are most impactful. The list of ideas I have is longer than the years I have on Earth.
Laura EnglandI bet. You’re very creative.
Carla Ramsdell Well, it's just there's, like, while some may think that, doing climate education through a food lens is, is a narrow communication mechanism, I actually think that food is universal. Right. And so instead I can see opportunities to plug into so many other initiatives that are already happening with this food content. So, you know, just trying to find a community that I can work with in that space, too.I don't intend to just be by myself in there. I love working and being fueled by other passionate individuals. So stay tuned. We'll see. My physics of Food and Cooking class PHY 2220 will be taught sort of hybrid out of that space. As a starting point, cooking with purpose will be taught out of that space. And then from there, yeah, it's just wide open. So I'm very excited.
Laura EnglandIt is so exciting. And I hope some time I'll get to come join you in the SPICE LAB, to see you in person, in action.
Carla Ramsdell Please! Yes, you are welcome to cook with me. I want co-chefs in there. That would be fabulous. So bring your favorite recipe. Be happy to do that.
Laura EnglandSo Carla you have a website called know watts cooking and that's knowwattscooking.com
Carla Ramsdell I say it's know as in knowledge watts as in power and cooking as in delicious. So yeah it is a tricky website.
Laura EnglandBut also really clever. And there's a lot of really great information and resources that students and others listening can access on your website. So I encourage folks to go check it out.
Carla Ramsdell I will be clear that it is a work in progress. I am still working, you know, understanding how to do that, but there are links in that to a TikTok and to Instagram and Facebook and little videos that, you know, may be interesting to some people. So. Sure.
Laura EnglandYeah. Absolutely interesting. And on your about page one of the phrases that caught my eye is cooking evangelist. Tell us about what it means to be a cooking evangelist and how you became a cooking evangelist.
Carla Ramsdell Yeah, I think it just comes out of this like the joy I get from cooking. And I think the importance of this cooking gathering around a table get regain gaining control of our ingredients. Right? We relinquish all of that control when we start eating, you know, processed foods or take outs or whatever. And you know, it is just an incredibly grounding event for me. I feel particularly fortunate to be doing this work in a college campus, because I feel like college is the first time typically a human has a kitchen of their own, and so they get to make this decision, am I going to use that space, or am I going to rely on processed foods or takeout foods or whatever?And so just to sort of nudge a little bit toward the give that place a try, the kitchen's beautiful. It's mentally grounding. It's not as hard as you may think. I think we maybe have dropped the ball a bit on passing simple food preparation strategies down the line. And so some students come into that space with only, you know, knowledge from YouTube videos or what have you that are really overly complicated sometimes. Sure, have at it if you want, but I don't think it has to be like that. And so just sort of evangelizing to go in that space and learn a couple tricks. I'm a huge fan of sauces, like that's the place to start. If you don't cook, just get five sauces that are just amazing. You can transform a piece of chicken, a bowl of pasta, some rice or potatoes.It's always about the magic sauce. So if you want a place to start, sauces take like five minutes to pull together and, just sort of I guess that's where the evangelism comes, is just trying to nudge students into that space. I think often they're like, oh, so busy, and we have exams and whatever, but that is really important time spent in there, creating those things, sharing them with friends and what have you.
Laura EnglandAnd there's a whole course worth of tips and information that you teach related to cooking and energy and sustainability. But can you give us some quick tips? Yeah.
Carla Ramsdell Oh my goodness. So, you know, just having things on the ready, I think maybe one of the best tricks would be always double cook. Always make a double batch. It takes maybe 10% more time to make a double batch of anything that can be granola bars, pasta, stews, soups, whatever. And then you...It's like a gift to your future self. You know, you now have the pre-frozen, processed or to-go food on the ready in your refrigerator. So that one simple hack I think really can elevate the amount of home cooked food that you're eating. And you know, when we start to think about that, not only are we in control of our ingredients, but we're reducing packaging enormously. Right. And all these other secondary effects of our food system. And then also just again, kind of having things on the ready. So this lentil trick, I always have a half pint of lentils in the freezer without liquid in them. They're just the lentils frozen. You can pop those in the microwave for a minute and they are ready to throw on anything.
Laura EnglandSo they’re already cooked.
Carla Ramsdell Already cooked. Exactly. Yeah, that's on my TikTok if you like to see how to do that. But also, you know, then you, you have that base. It's like you already have pre-ground ground beef and then whatever you want to do with that, it's ready to go. There's less cleanup. And so I think, you know, we all get those, I come home, I don't really want to cook. And having some of that stuff ready to grab and go is great. So when I cook those lentils pre cook them I'll do 2 pounds at a time. It's a lot of lentils but they freeze beautifully. You have them ready again. It took me no more time to do that. And so thinking you know a little bit more about big batches which can be frozen for later use.
Laura EnglandAnd less energy use per volume of food.
Carla Ramsdell Yes! Also thank you for highlighting that. Yeah for sure. So you heat an oven, you better just let...If you heat an oven, you're heating 35 pounds of steel. So the more things you can do in there while it's hot, you bake a loaf of bread. Also, maybe roast some vegetables for tomorrow's lunch. One of my favorites is to throw in a tray of granola. It can cook passively while the oven cools down, so it's kind of free on the energy scale. And then you have some really inexpensive, nutritious breakfast for the next morning. So yeah, I think there is an energy component there also. And just yeah, while you're in the groove, just make a big batch and your future self will thank you.
Laura EnglandI love that. And I'll never forget probably more than a decade ago. And it may not even have been a work conversation you talked about, just put a lid on your pot when you're boiling the water, right. So simple. Yeah. Explain why that matters so much.
Carla Ramsdell I have a little jingle for you. Would you like the song? I literally did this when my daughter was in second grade, I came and talked about the energy efficiency of cooking to second graders. Which one would have the question why I did that in hindsight. But anyway, I thought that a jingle would be helpful. So my jingle goes something like this. Put a lid on your pot when you cook, don't be tempted to open it and I look because the food is in your pot and you want to keep it hot. Put a lid on your pot when you cook.
Laura EnglandThat's amazing, I love that.
Carla Ramsdell My apologies as that will likely run through your brain. Now for the rest of the day.
Laura EnglandWell, I haven't forgotten. I did forget the jingle, but I haven't forgotten the simple stuff. I mean, I took physics, multiple visual classes in college. I know PV equals NRT. I know the science behind it. But having the reminder just always have a lid on.
Carla Ramsdell All that vapor coming off the top of your pot is just energy you put into the system of the cooking pot that you intended to cook with. That now is just escaping into the room. Now your air conditioning has to overcome that load. Also, there's secondary effects. So there's a lot of, yeah, fun additional tie-ins we can talk to you about cooking efficiently.
Laura EnglandWell hopefully this is just getting people interested in coming to Cooking with Purpose.
Carla Ramsdell Excellent.
Laura EnglandCarla, you embody an idea that one of my favorite climate thinkers has put into the world. And I know you kind of follow her as well, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She has done lots of things. Co-edited the All We Can Save Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis anthology. And in one of her Ted Talks, she introduces a tool to help people think about finding their own personal climate action niche. And it's a Venn diagram asking people to think about and get at the intersection of three things. First, what are you good at? Second, what is the work that needs doing? And third, importantly, what brings you joy or satisfaction? And you mentioned joy a couple of times. And I have my students work with this tool and in class.
Carla Ramsdell I use that on my course also. Yeah. So great.
Laura EnglandIt's really helpful for thinking about really what is your own personal intersection? And I always share you as an example. And your work is an example of someone who's really found and is living into that very personalized climate action niche. So I want to ask as a last question, you know, you're so inspired in your work, who inspired you along the way?
Carla Ramsdell Yeah, so many people. You for one. So our work together, you know, continues to inspire me and the things, the creative ways that you come up with. I love working with you and look forward to continuing to do so. If I really had to look at sort of, you know, heroes or people that set me on this path, I would look back to my parents and I think they uniquely sort of define where I am now. My mom is an incredible cook. So she...like literally our house was just always filled with smells and delicious food. It was a very strict rule that we were going to sit at the family table together. If that meant we had to wait until one of my brothers got out of play practice or something, that was just understood. And Sundays we were going to spend at home and always eating delicious food. So really, I have no formal culinary education. But that was all learned there, you know, and very openly and beautifully and continues to be. I'll call her and ask her how to make something I'm struggling with.
Laura EnglandI bet she loves getting those calls.
Carla Ramsdell Oh, yeah. We love talkin’ food. So that's super fun. And I'm appreciative of that. My father is deceased, but he, I think really is a lot of how I chose physics. You know, I just remember coming home, even maybe in middle school, sitting around that dinner table, and dad would ask what I did. And it seemed like when I mentioned something related to the sciences, he would sort of tell me more, I want to know why did that happen? He was an architect. Very beautiful mixture of a left brain and a right brainer. And I think just his engagement and his interest and his prodding, I think, sort of gave me some confidence in that space. And then when I got to college, I had a bit of a hard time finding what I was going to do, in that space.And, then just physics came naturally, was enjoyable. I think in the background I probably heard his voice saying, tell me more like that's exciting. And even when I got into my early stages of work at Westinghouse as an energy engineer, he asked me to show me what these turbines look like. And I pulled out the drawings and, you know, yeah, that constant feedback and encouragement from home, I think, got me to where I am, both in cooking and in science.So appreciative of that for sure.
Laura EnglandThanks so much, Carla, for sharing that about your story and for sharing about your work with us on the Find Your Sustain Ability podcast.
Carla Ramsdell Thanks for having me.
Laura EnglandYeah, it’s such a pleasure to talk with you and listeners, I hope you'll go to knowwattscooking.com. We'll put the link in the show notes, visit resilience.appstate.edu to learn about these upcoming events that you can participate in and Carla, I hope we'll have you back again sometime.
Carla Ramsdell Love to be here. Thank you.
 

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 info@phius.org 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 BallWelcome to the Find Your Sustainability podcast. My name is Lee Ball. I'm the Chief Sustainability Officer here at Appalachian State University and today we have part two of a three part series where we're talking to members of Appalachian State University's Team Sunergy today. With me, I have Logan Richardson, who's the embedded systems lead, majoring in computer science and actually a graduate student in computer science.Lee BallAnd Zack Howard, a mechanical lead who is majoring in sustainable technology. Welcome to the podcast.BothThank you. Thank you.Lee BallYou know, in part one, we talked to the team about various different things. I have a feeling that we'll get into some of the same things. But I wanted to ask you, Zach, what first attracted you to get involved with Team Sunergy?Zach Howard So, I was looking for schools, looking for colleges. I'd come across App State and I had heard about the solar vehicle team. I saw it on Instagram a couple of times and I deemed the team and Sam Cheatham responded to me. He gave me his personal number and he just told me to reach out when I had questions. And I think the first person I met when I started coming to the team was Reed.Zach Howard It just was a really cool community and I really enjoyed being a part of it and it just felt natural.Lee BallWere you a first year? Had you started when you heard about the team, or is this even before this was?Zach Howard I saw I knew about the team coming into the school, so I was looking out for it at the club fair that my freshman year and my fall semester.Lee BallIt's amazing how many people have heard about us. You know, in high school.Zach Howard Yeah, I was really looking forward to it. I wasn't sure what the team structure was going to look like and if I would be allowed to join the team or if I had to try out or submit a resume. But being a really inclusive team really opened up that opportunity and I've been super excited about it.Lee BallYeah, now I want to clone you. Logan, what first attracted you to get involved with Team SunergyLogan RichardsonWell, funny enough, I. I saw Rose in the homecoming parade when I was an undergrad, and I knew nothing about the team. And I just saw Rose in the parade, and I went, “Man, that's cool looking!” But during my undergrad, I never did get involved in it. And I came back for my master's degree and it was kind of one of those, friend of a friend of a friend things.Logan RichardsonAnd I knew Sam, who was on the team, invited me in. And I think just the first time I walked in the warehouse and saw the car up front, I was hooked. I knew.Lee BallSo, both of you joined the team. In your first race last year, 2022, during the Formula One Grand Prix American. So, our challenge we raised from Independence, Missouri, to Twin Falls, Idaho. Zach, can you share a memory from that race?Zach Howard I mean, yeah, that race, there was a lot that happened in those three weeks. It's hard to take just one thing. I have to say, one of my favorite experiences overall through the structure of the race, the camaraderie of the teams is super cool. And adding on to that, we shared a campsite one night in Idaho with Polytech, Montreal.Zach Howard Their team was called Esteban, and we taught them how to play American football. We just had a great time. And we sat out there after dark for hours with a campfire, and they were passing around a cowboy hat, singing a bunch of country songs. And we were trying to sing French Canadian songs and it was a great time.Zach Howard We completely forgot about the competition. They were our biggest competitors and we were just having a great time together, just two schools trying to do the same thing and look forward to sustainability. So that was really cool.Lee BallHow about you, Logan? Do you have a memory that you'd like to share?Logan RichardsonYeah. So last year we raced the Oregon Trail and the whole time I just couldn't get over it. Here we were in this, you know, convoy of solar powered vehicles going out west just like they did back in the day with the covered wagons and the whole thing. And just the juxtaposition of that, I just couldn't get over.Logan RichardsonAnd the, you know, I agree completely with what Zach said, the camaraderie. You're out there and you're on your own. You've got it. You got to figure it out yourself. And really, that sense of of of just roll your sleeves up and get it done was just incredible. But all the little towns we visited, the the beautiful scenery, just the whole thing, just incredible.Lee BallTo build on that. What was it like competing against and and getting to know students from schools located all over North America?Zach Howard I mean, it was that's one of my favorite parts of the competition, how different everybody is and how different every single team functions. Different teams have different strengths, but we all are working towards the same goal. And so it's really cool seeing that in each team. We're all willing to help one another and all willing to...we want to race against each other.Zach Howard We want to compete together. So we helped the other teams get on track and we got help and we helped others and it was super cool to see that. But really what's cool is just how much you can learn from other teams and how much you can teach other teams and just feeding into that camaraderie I mentioned earlier, it's it's super cool.Lee BallHow about you, Logan? What was it like competing against and getting, you know, students from schools located all over North America?Logan RichardsonIt was incredible. You meet so many like minded individuals from all over North America and and not just in your subject area, you know, I love computers. I love working with them coding. But you meet people who are really into mechanical or they're really into electrical or marketing. It's just incredible. And and you make friends from all over the country and you you talk to them after the race, see how they're doing.Logan RichardsonYou you see their development, what their team is doing, their cars. And all of a sudden you've got this network that spans the whole country that you didn't have before.Lee BallThis time I’ll go to you. Logan. What are your thoughts about how collegiate solar racing is contributing to the future of sustainable transportation innovations?Logan RichardsonOh, it's the cutting edge. It's absolutely the cutting edge. I mean, you've got teams from all over North America who are building prototype solar vehicles. That’s wild. That’s wild! And I think it's self-evident how much on the cutting edge it is, because you have recruiters from really big companies there, trying to recruit this talent for their companies because they want people with these skills.Logan RichardsonIt's it's really something.Lee BallAnd what do you think, Zach? How is solar racing contributing to advancing technology?Zach Howard I think really what it's doing is it's at this point in time, I feel like it's marketing to a lot of the world right now. We're showing that it's possible. It's something that can be expanded upon. We're a bunch of college students figuring this out right now. And if you think about that, put into large industry and how many amazing minds are out there, something like this truly is possible in our infrastructure one day, and that's my favorite part of it.Logan RichardsonAnd one of the things I'll say, the excitement that you see when we were going through those small towns, people would line up on the sidewalks to watch us go by. And you can see the excitement in their face. You know, they're sitting there with their little kids and little kids would come out to these parks that we would go to and we would show them the cars and the kids were interested in it.Logan RichardsonAnd I think the potential to get young minds invested in science and math and technology and engineering is yeah.Lee BallYeah, I agree. And I also remember seeing people that we would pass and they were looking at staring at their phones and they never even saw that we passed that we could have been a whole bunch of aliens and they would have never known. Can you expand on what it's like to work in a really collaborative, multidisciplinary team, Zach?Zach Howard Yeah, I mean, what's super cool about it is that none of us are specifically engineering majors, and so everybody comes from a different background, meaning that everybody has some skill that nobody else has, and we're learning from each other on a different level than some of the other schools, which I think is really cool. There's so much individual talent brought into this group by music majors, by political science majors, by pretty much any major you can think of.Zach Howard We have on our team and we contributing to this car that's really kicking butt, which is really fun.Lee BallWhat do you think, Logan?Logan RichardsonOh, it's been awesome! I've gotten to meet so many brilliant people from other departments who know things about their specific area of expertise that are not covered in my program. And having that exposure and being able to learn from people who have the mechanical knowledge or the electrical wiring knowledge or the business marketing knowledge. You just learn so much just by being in the room.Logan RichardsonIt’s the exposure and the opportunities that are opened up to you by being on the team and what you can learn from the team. I think I learned way more out in the warehouse than I do in classrooms. So yeah.Lee BallYeah, I wanted to talk about that kind of warehouse culture first with you, Logan. What kind of things are you working on and can you talk a little bit about some of the telemetry solutions that you've been trying to reach?Logan RichardsonYes. So, I work with a team of students to do the coding for the team, work on the telemetry aspect. When we first got started, the number one thing the team wanted us to do was code up a speedometer. So we worked on that and we worked using magnets and a hall effect sensor. We got that working and then we moved on to a nav system.Logan RichardsonWe moved on to fault code prediction to monitoring the battery metric system off the car, and we built a dashboard display and that data is pushed from our BMS to our dashboard, and then it's pushed to the cloud, and then we pull it back down from the cloud into our lead and chase vehicles so that our whole team can see the telemetry off the car simultaneously.Logan RichardsonSo that's been one of the biggest challenges that we've worked on. And we're looking to expand our telemetry, expand the capabilities of our setup as well, and just see how far we can push it.Lee BallGreat. And Zach, can you tell me a little bit about shop culture? You've really added a lot to Team Sunergy and your willingness and desire to make our shop more safe and more organized. And can you just talk a little bit more about what it has been like this spring leading up to the race?Zach Howard Yeah, so the stress has built up a little bit as we're preparing to get into race season. What's been really awesome is we've had the opportunity to test the car and really put it through its paces before we get to the race. And through that, we've been able to train a lot of new members to be very comfortable around the car and be ready for whatever might happen.Zach Howard So within that, you know, we spend, you know, 30, 40 hours a week in that warehouse doing every little thing we can to make sure everything goes perfect. And so every little thing we can think of that could possibly go wrong, we prevent and try and fix it. We spend hours in that warehouse together and there's a different level of bonding and a different level of communication and teamwork involved because you're tired, you're hungry, you're living off of Cheez-Its and mac and cheese.Zach Howard You're ready to go home and you're trying to fix these problems you don't know how to fix. And so you build a really strong team out of that. And it's been really cool and I'm really excited to see this team perform and, you know, succeed at this race.Lee BallSo Zach, how is your experience with Team Sunergy influenced, your career path and maybe what you might want to do after you leave App State?Zach Howard I mean, this is what I want to do and I'm going to find any means I can to figure out how to continue this. This it's so much fun because I care. I want to do something that can possibly make a difference and contribute to something larger. But I also I love cars. I love the mechanical and technical aspect of it.Zach Howard And this is that perfect combination for me. And so this has become my passion in school right now, you know, whatever that looks like outside. However closely I can be involved, I want to be.Lee BallSo, Logan, I happen to know a little bit about what you're doing this summer, and you had mentioned about tech companies that have been attracted to the students that are involved in these competitions. How has your experience with Team Sunergy influenced your career path and can you share a little bit about what you're doing this summer?Logan RichardsonTeam Sunergy has had such an incredible and immense impact on my life and my career trajectory. It's given me the opportunity to get hands on experience with engineering that you can't do in the classroom. In addition to that, the recruiters are there. So in particular, last year there were recruiters from Tesla and Blue Origin and I am headed on to an internship at Blue Origin.Logan RichardsonI'm going to go down to their launch site in Van Horn, Texas, and I'll be working on their test and flight ops team to help test their prototypes and develop telemetry for their rocket systems. It's it's it's my wildest dream come true. It, it really, really and truly is. And Team Sunergy...Team Synergy opened that door for me. 
Logan RichardsonTruly, because I was able to, at the race, I was able to speak with the recruiters. Over this past Thanksgiving break, they hey flew me out to their headquarters and I got to tour their rocket production facility. They paired me with a mentor and that's now led to an internship. And the next step from here is career in aerospace engineering.Logan RichardsonSo, hats off to Team Sunergy for opening that door.Lee BallNice. Maybe the next time I have you on the podcast, you'll be joining us from Mars. Yeah, we'll see so. Well, thank you very much. It's been a real pleasure talking to both of you. Can't thank you enough for all the time that you've invested in the project and Team Sunergy. It means the world to me.Lee BallIt means the world to Appalachian State University. And thanks so much.Zach Howard Thank you.Logan RichardsonThank you. 

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.