Back on the blog

Today was my first full day back at Ecologic - this time not as an intern, but as a contractor. I'll be helping out with some development and communications-related work for one-and-a-bit days a week. It's great to be back and to see everyone again, but the office is considerably quieter without Raleigh and Paula chattering away in the 'intern' office. Dominic has now moved in there from his office overlooking the side alley, and Michael has reclaimed his office from Arne, who now shares with Dominic. Ahmed's dark little corner remains vacant, as does Yvonne's office. Dominic was supposed to move in there, but I suppose it was just too soul-destroying to not have a window to look out of. I can understand that.

Yesterday, Dominic and I had a teleconference with Tanja Srebotnjak, a German Ecologic colleague who lives in California, and two colleagues from the German Ecologic office, on the Transatlantic Energy Efficiency Policy study that Dominic and I had been talking about before I left at the end of July. It started out as a grand idea to set up a comparative database of the energy efficiency policies of three pairs each consisting of a European Member State and a US state with comparable economic profiles.

In the last month of my internship, I did some research on what foundations look for when deciding whether to fund a study, and it can basically be summarized with: does it make the world a better place? In other words, does it bring about tangible results? In the original project idea, the most tangible result would be a searchable website documenting all the EE policies of the states/Member States that others could consult - a good idea, but not an original one, as an Internet search turned up two similar databases. Then there was the problem of scope: identifying suitable pairs and documenting and analyzing all their EE policies and then building a website on which to publish them would be hugely time-consuming, and hence expensive. It seemed a better idea to whittle things down a bit, start with a smaller 'ask' and then build on the foundations' confidence in us (hopefully).

This morning, I compiled a document with all the possible forms that the project could take so that the others can take a look and provide their comments. The four possibilities are: three country/state pairs, one region/province on each side of the Atlantic (e.g. the North-Rhine-Westphalia and the state of Michigan), or one town from each of those provinces (e.g. Detroit and a city/town in the Ruhr Region). A fourth option was to pair up two regions with a predominantly rural economic profile and abundant renewable resources, and examine the challenges of energy loss during electricity transmission to distant urban areas. In this connection, the German federal state of Brandenburg and in the US South Dakota were proposed as options.

This last option is pretty appealing, because a lot of work has been done on energy efficiency in urban areas because of the huge gains that can be had from retrofitting buildings and making industrial processes more efficient, but there is not a lot of focus on rural areas when it comes to energy efficiency. Addressing the challenges of energy loss during transmission would allow remote rural areas to exploit their renewable resources, for instance by establishing wind farms. This would lead to economic upliftment in those regions, while at the same time making the widescale adoption of renewable energy more feasible.

The other options – of setting up a partnership between two cities or provinces – is also very appealing, because although the advantages of energy efficiency measures are well documented and widely recognized,there remains a large gap between what is known about these benefits, and what is actually done to realize them. This is due to a number of factors, including the absence of accurate means to measure returns on investment, which makes financiers jittery, because the perceived risk is higher. In difficult economic times, however, it seems foolish, to say the least, to pass up an opportunity to develop initiatives that would create jobs and save money for individuals and companies.

I'm really excited about picking up the thread here again. It will be a challenge to do everything that I need to do in so little time, but I plan to give it my all. Besides working on letters of inquiry to foundations, I will also be doing some writing for the website and perhaps some social networking on behalf on the Ecologic office.

Introductions

The Ecologic Institute, Washington, DC, occupies a few offices on the third floor of a building on Connecticut Avenue in the Dupont Circle area of Washington, DC. The area is well-known for its great night-life and shopping, and is something of a hotspot for the GLBT community, but it's also well-known for its think tanks, with a number of well-known ones in the area, including the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (amongst others). We share the third floor with some other organizations: the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature), the Antarctic and Southern Oceans Coalition, and a small outpost of an academic honors society.

As I said in my previous post, we have three permanent staff members: Michael Mehling, the president, Dominic Marcellino and Elena von Sperber; plus Kim (who got the office administrator job that I applied for) and assorted interns. I'll spread the introductions over two posts, to keep things manageable.

Sharing an office with me is my fellow intern, Shanyn Ronis. Originally from Seattle, Shanyn has a Masters in Anthropology, and she actually started about a month before me, meaning that her time here will sadly be drawing to a close tomorrow. She has only been coming in to the office three times a week, because she travels in from Leesburg, Virginia (a two-and-a-half hour commute). Lately, she has been working on a project on the factors influencing people's environmental behavior with an intern in Berlin (Ecologic's head office). She and Andreas (the intern, not to be confused with Andreas Kraemer, the head of Ecologic in Berlin!) have had some very involved technical discussions about the interaction between internal and external motivators that I had trouble following. It looked interesting at any rate.

Michael is an expert in international environmental policy and law. He recently got back from China, and it sounds as if he enjoyed the time there very much. He says there is so much energy and enthusiasm for developing renewable energy there - in contrast to the seemingly insurmountable inertia on climate-related issues here in the US. Near the beginning of my time here, I edited a paper on the development of legislation related to renewable energy in China. It seems that although everyone in the West is praising China's renewable energy policies, they are largely born out of necessity rather than concern about climate change, because the country is going to have to deal with the rapidly increasing demand for energy without pumping the air full of smoke and sickening people and the environment. One of the big challenges of creating awareness for climate change and the need to reduce carbon emissions here in the US is that the issue of "visible" pollution here was largely dealt with in the 1970s, so people don't equate a reduction in carbon emissions with the tangible benefit of a cleaner environment.

Elena is also German (as is Michael). Before moving here she worked at the Blue Flag Programme in Denmark, a voluntary ecolabel certification program for beaches. Here, she is kept running with a variety of really interesting projects. At the moment, she is winding up a project called 'CALAMAR' - a transatlantic dialogue between the US and the EU on integrated marine governance for the North Atlantic, as well as one on the tourism to Antarctic. The latter is particularly interesting, because she says it's a subject on which not much research has been done until now. The industry for tourism to Antarctic has also grown and changed lately, going from small expeditions for relatively wealthy, well-prepared clients, to larger, less well-prepared expeditions for young people seeking adventure. Most of the tourism has been sea-based, as there aren't really any permanent land-based structures there (apart from a few research stations), but there is talk of this changing, with some of the parties involved in Antarctic (nobody actually owns Antarctic) not averse to putting up some kind of permanent structures to accommodate tourists. Also, the new adventurous young crowd are not content to just “stand there and look at penguins” - they want something more, well, adventurous. There is a considerable amount of resistance to this new trend, because, besides posing a greater danger to tourists, it is said that it will distract researchers from their work, as they may be obliged to be involved in search and rescue teams to look for lost tourists. I can just picture it: shivering tourists in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, cameras slung around their necks, getting lost in the Antarctic wilderness ("I told you we should have turned left at the penguin!").

Another big project that kept her very busy for a few weeks, and which I was also involved in, is a project for the BMU (the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety). In June 2008, the European Union adopted the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, a framework for managing the marine environment adjacent to the European Union. It takes an integrated approach, called an “Integrated Ecological Assessment” (IEA), which defines the desired outcome not in terms of how conditions would have been if no human being had ever come near, but as “Good Environmental Status”, or GES – a state where human activities and the ecosystems supporting them are in balance. This is pretty revolutionary, because until now, ecosystem health was assessed leaving out human needs in their interaction with the ecosystem. The question is, though, how do you assess the health of these systems, which involve the interaction of many different factors?

The EU has taken an approach that involves selecting certain key indicators – particularly sensitive species, for instance – and establishing levels at which they could be considered to be in a healthy state. The environmental status is then determined by the proportion of these indicators that are at the levels they should be. The particular report that Elena was working on (with three other colleagues in Berlin) was an overview of Integrated Ecological Assessment methodologies that have been implemented around the world thus far. None is as comprehensive as the directive envisages, but quite a lot could be learned from what has been done so far. Compiling a comparative study (including interviews with experts, factsheets and analyses) of the various methodologies was a massive job, and the subject matter challenging to get to grips with, but all in all a very worthwhile and challenging project.

A new intern started at the beginning of this week: Raleigh is in the middle of a Masters in environmental policy, and comes from Los Angeles. Two more interns will start at the beginning of next week, so the office is going to get pretty crowded…

Intern-ational

I think I might start out by introducing myself and explaining the reason for this blog, before launching off into all the interesting stuff I've come across since working here!

I was born and grew up in South Africa, where I studied French and German at university. When my dearest one got an opportunity to do a PhD in the Netherlands, I learned Dutch. We got married, and I joined him there, where I had the pleasure of living in the beautiful town of Delft for five years. While there, I built up a career as a translator, translating mainly from Dutch to English.

I think there are two professions in particular that are highly suitable for curious people: translation and journalism. You have to be interested in a very wide range of topics, and also retain the terminology used to write convincingly about them. I devour news magazines, articles on the Internet, news on the radio... I want to know, and I want to understand how the problems of the world work - and I want to contribute to the solutions.

When we moved to the US (my husband got a job at NOAA - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), I started looking for a job that 1) made use of my international background and 2) made the world a better place in some way. A friend who was thinking with me on the job search found a vacancy for the position of office administrator here at the Ecologic Institute in DC, and the organization seemed like a really good fit: international, and working on something that I thought about a lot and was concerned about (energy issues and climate change) - and just down the road from where we lived! I put together an application - and then promptly caught a virus that knocked me flat for 2 weeks. Shortly after I got better, I was in the Dupont Circle area for another reason, and as I had looked up the address, thought I'd pop by to see whether they had filled the vacancy yet. As it turned out, the HR lady was there from Germany, and they were conducting interviews for the position that very afternoon. Michael Mehling, the president, invited my into his office, and we had an impromptu interview that soon showed that I was definitely not suitable for the office administrator position, as I had no experience in financial management or HRM. As it turned out, however, they were going to be advertizing two intern positions, and they suggested I apply for one of those. I did - and I was offered a position here, which I started at the beginning of April.

I feel really fortunate to be working here. Not only is it a very small office (three permanent employees, the office administrator, and two interns) with people I would want as my friends even if they weren't my colleagues, but I also come into contact with some extremely interesting information. Part of it comes in the form of papers that I edit for Dominic Marcellino (who also directly supervises me and Shanyn, the other intern), but also in the form of the many discussions, debates and lectures that I get to attend and write up afterwards. This is how the idea of a blog started: this stuff is too good to not share! Often, it involves views "from the horse's mouth" - debates between experts in their fields, information right at the source. Sometimes, it's just stuff that I find really interesting to know (and suspect you might too). My only regret is that I didn't start with this sooner, but I'll try to post one entry a day for the next while, drawing on past and present experience, and so still share some of the fun facts from the past two months.

My other objective with this blog is that I hope that it might someday become official: that it will be incorporated on the Ecologic site, perhaps paired with another one by an intern in Berlin, so that people can read about the inner workings of a thinktank, and specifically the kind of work that Ecologic is doing. I would like it to be an accessible point of entry for potential clients, giving them an idea of the kinds of services that the Institute offers, but also for anyone interested in environmental policy issues.