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What’s your
background; how did
you get interested in
sustainability?
How do you see your
role at Taft?
What does ‘sustainability’
mean to you?
A
I grew up in nearby Middletown, Connecticut, and spent my childhood playing
in the woods of New England and sailing off its shores. I’ve been obsessed with
the water and boats since I was a kid and rowed competitively through high school and
Dartmouth, and have sculled ever since.
As an avid hiker, I was passionate about being outdoors and continually wondered
how those hills, mountains and valleys formed, and why the forests grew the way they
did. After college, I sought work in the Colorado Rockies, where I scored a job as a
geologist, working on a large-scale gold exploration project at the Summitville Mine,
at 11,500 feet, high up in the mountains, on the Continental Divide, and surrounded
by elk and deer calving grounds with golden aspen leaves in the fall and buried in
snow by late October.
We drilled 300-foot holes and analyzed rock on a grid pattern to construct a 3D map
of the hydrothermal zone of a former volcano. As much as I loved the adventurous life of
minerals exploration, that was also the turning point that drove me into the field of environmental
cleanup work. Ironically, that project later became a major Superfund site.
Instead, I found myself exploring the soil, bedrock and groundwater of the
Northeastern U.S., in a different kind of earth exploration work—assessing and addressing
impacts to natural resources by releases of oil, metals, solvents and other
contaminants. I got to use all kinds of the latest technologies to delineate and clean up
localized effects of the Industrial Revolution.
Having enjoyed a great education, and after my wife and I had two adorable daughters,
I became drawn back to academia. Not only did I want to be closer to my own
kids than distant fieldwork allowed, I was also excited to further my education and give
something back to the world as a teacher.
I took full advantage of my thesis research time to perform case studies of eight institutions:
Smith, Williams, Middlebury, Tufts, UNH, Harvard, Andover and Exeter.
I focused on the experience and challenges of sustainability directors there and strove
to understand how they became effective agents of change within different traditional
and successful institutions. Their stories were mesmerizing, and they proved to be a
fascinating lot of people, who found ways to work productively with the whole variety
of groups on their campuses.
A
I plan to assess the school’s present and ongoing environmental initiatives relative
to other campus-based institutions, and I hope to foster leaders for the
future, to promote qualities within the community that would guarantee rigorous and
comprehensive discussion of current environmental issues now facing the world,
I also want to help Taft to be an institutional example of sustainability, from community
awareness raising and engagement to operational methods and systems.
I see myself becoming embedded within the academic, community and operational
life here in order to get to know everyone and everything well enough to make sound
recommendations to the organization, and to work directly with the many key players
who can make change happen.
A
For me, it literally means caring for the world and making choices in life that
will provide future generations with an undiminished capacity to survive and
thrive, as our own forebearers gave us. Humanity is faced with an increasingly complex
and populated world and with an overflow of information due to the growth of every
area of science. We are in exciting times where the choices of current generations will
have long-lasting import, and where we must all work well together to ensure that the
marvels of our blue planet are sustained in perpetuity.
24 Taft Bulletin Winter 2012