Profile: Climate science and policy expert Lyndon Valicenti

Aug. 20, 2010

By Jessica Tobacman

As a consultant for the Chicago Department of the Environment, Lyndon Valicenti was thrilled to find out earlier this week that the department had landed a grant. It will provide incentives for residents, helping them to plant greenery in their front or back yards, including trees and native plants. Rain barrels can also become available through this program. “We’re really excited about that,” Valicenti said. The grant provides funding for two years, a time period that will likely begin this fall.

Valicenti manages projects for the Department of the Environment, and has worked there since March 2008. She is involved in three areas: in education and outreach to city residents; planning work for the city focused on the Natural Resources and Water Quality Division, including working to help the city with strategies to expand the tree canopies covering it from 17.2 percent to 20 percent by 2020; and policy work, including changes in ordinances and federal policies. She works on issues involving natural resources, urban forestry, urban agriculture, water conservation, storm water and waste water management, and water quality.

She is very pleased with her current position. “I adore it, and can’t imagine doing anything else.” Valicenti especially appreciates working at the city scale. She had previously been employed at the Global Roundtable on Climate Change at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, where she had worked at the global level from May 2006 to August 2007. There, she dealt with an immense population, with the potential to make a large impact. The job was fulfilling, but also moved at a slower pace than she preferred. Valicenti’s current job allows her to have a more immediate impact while working with 30 to 50 residents. “They remind me why I’m doing this. It felt natural to come here.”

Her path always seemed headed in an environmental direction. She has spent much of her career on the science and policy of climate change. Although she has always been interested in the environment, a family trip to Alaska during a spring break solidified her enthusiasm. “It was eye-opening.” Later, Valicenti completed a summer marine biology program at the Shedd Aquarium, and studied marine biology in college at the University of California-Santa Barbara, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree from one of the country’s top marine biology programs.

After she graduated in March 2004, Valicenti moved to Ithaca, N.Y., where she helped a friend with data analysis at Cornell University. That winter, she worked as a research technician in Antarctica for about six months. Graduate school at Columbia University followed, and she received her Master of Public Administration in Environmental Science and Policy in May 2006. Then she stayed in the area, working for her alma mater.

About three years ago, Valicenti moved away from New York City and the Earth Institute, and to an organic farm in France. She still keeps up her interest in growing healthy foods today by maintaining a plot in a local community garden, and being active in groups including the Chicago Food Policy Advisory Council, and two younger organizations—Growing Pride, which is the Humboldt Park community garden association; and Advocates for Urban Agriculture, which represents all food growers in the city.

Valicenti describes herself as a pretty goal-oriented person. In five years, she hopes that the U.S. Department of Agriculture will have created, and decided that she was perfect for, a new Midwestern food planning position. It would involve Chicago’s food planning system, helping to connect local farmers with institutional buyers, such as hospitals and schools, and dealing with policy at the state and federal levels.

Her current aims are for the short-term. The grant comes first. “We’re currently getting the project off the ground. It’s the next big project for me. There’s a lot of work to do.” She will be the project manager for the grant, often dealing with logistics. Fortunately, she’s looking forward to it. “It’s all very fun.”

She “always knew” that she wanted to be active in the environmental field, and has moved in that direction for many years. She is looking forward to more work and play in that area.

"Carbon Nation" -- Ways to Heal the Planet

Photo credit: Carbon Nation

Aug. 18, 2010

By Jessica Tobacman

The city of Chicago hosted a celebration on Aug. 10, 2010, that included a screening of the new movie, Carbon Nation, at Millennium Park.

Before the movie showing began, the stage at the front of the nearly full Jay Pritzker Pavilion was the setting for several live performances and speeches. One of the most memorable was an energetic, modern dance by the Happiness Club, a group of Chicago youth who sing, dance, rap and create original material with a message about taking responsibility for fixing environmental problems. There was also stand-up comedy, a video and a live song featuring Eric Petersen in full costume and makeup as the title character of Shrek the Musical on Broadway in Chicago, and speeches from the makers of Carbon Nation, including Director and Producer Peter Byck.

"We’ve made Carbon Nation to give a majority of people an entertaining, informed and pragmatic primer about why it’s incredibly smart to be a part of the new, low-carbon economy: it’s good business, it emboldens national and energy security and it improves health and the environment," Byck said.

Carbon Nation combines an approach detailing information about global warming and its effects with one describing potential responses to it. "Our film is a climate change solutions movie that doesn't even care if you believe in climate change," said Producer Chrisna van Zyl.

The film advocates increasing the amounts of wind power, geothermal energy and solar energy used, increasing fuel efficiency, using algae as an energy source, and improving the energy efficiency of buildings. It states how these responses are leading to more clean energy jobs.

Other solutions include helping to stop deforestation and sequestering carbon in forests, farms and pastures, all of which would help to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. Deforestation occurs in locations such as the Amazon partly because of the tremendous demand for meat around the world. The movie suggests that it would be helpful if omnivores avoided meat one night a week.

In Roscoe, Texas, at the same time that the town’s Dairy Queen closed, a wind farm developed. “[This] has turned out to be a blessing,” said Cliff Etheredge, a West Texas cotton farmer turned wind farm organizer. About 20% of the electricity used in the United States could come from wind energy, stated Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory, a federal research lab.

Another option for energy is algae. It efficiently converts carbon dioxide into energy, taking it in and returning it to the atmosphere. Increasing the use of algae would be an inexpensive way to decrease emissions.

Making buildings more energy-efficient is another key approach to addressing global warming. This has the potential to decrease electricity use worldwide by 20%, partly because of the large dependence on coal, a dirty fuel, as an energy source.

A straightforward way to see the difference that green building can make is to compare the variation in temperature between a black roof, which is between 160 and 170 degrees, and a green roof, which is between 80 and 90 degrees. In addition, a green roof cools the ambient environment around a building, decreasing it by 1 degree. White roofs also reflect sunlight.

Retrofitting structures with environmentally-friendly home improvements will lead to thousands of contracts and billions of jobs, said Van Jones, a green jobs activist and founder of Green for All, a national organization working to build an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. Ridding homes of old refrigerators is an easy way to raise energy efficiency. Many workers are weatherizing homes in low-income communities. “It’s the people that nobody’s heard of that are going to solve the problem,” Jones said.

“We need a World War II level of mobilization,” Jones said. World War II involved producing more than 100,000 planes in several months.

The movie depicts Jones’ close relationship with his father, who passed away relatively recently. His father was a junior high school principal who inspired Jones in his current work by going beyond the expectations others had for him. He fixed up a building in one year, instead of in the five years that were allotted for a particular project.

“I’m doing this for him and myself. This is the most beautiful thing in the world, right here,” Jones said, pointing to workers weatherizing a home. “People want to turn this ship around.”

Building engineers

Jan. 15, 2010

By Jessica Tobacman

Does the United States need more engineers? Pres. Barack Obama is one of those who say yes, that the competitiveness of the country depends on it. This idea indicates that the 18th annual National Engineers Week Future City Competition is right on track, encouraging seventh and eighth grade students to pursue engineering as a career. The contest also helps them to consider how to have a positive impact on the environment and how to design affordable buildings, with a theme for the current contest called, “Providing an Affordable Living Space for People Who Have Lost Their Home[s] Due To a Disaster or Financial Emergency.”

In fact, the 1995 Future City contest was crucial to Denise Armbruster’s decision to become an engineer. “It boosted my interest in engineering. I was interested in environmental science, but didn’t know what to do at the time,” she said.

Armbruster competed as an eighth grader at Central School in Glencoe, Ill., at the regional and national levels. “I had a blast. It taught me that engineering wasn’t so difficult. It paved the way for me,” she said. Armbruster is now a civil engineer at MWH Global, Inc., based in Broomfield, Colo. Although she participated as a student many years ago, her increased enthusiasm for, and career in, engineering are results that the competition aims for today.

Future City involves inventing a city and constructing a model of it to-scale. The contest focuses somewhat on the environment, including strongly encouraging students to use recycled items to build the model. Students must also create a virtual model using the SimCity 4 Deluxe computer program; research and write a 700- to 1,000-word essay describing the design of the imagined city; outline the most important aspects of the town in a 300- to 500-word City Narrative; and complete an oral presentation about it.

Learning to protect the environment is one of the reasons that students must design spaces that meet the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) guidelines for environmentally-friendly housing, created by the U.S. Green Building Council. This means that teams must address six major areas: the sustainability of building sites, including the proximity of alternative transportation and whether the site’s development protects habitat; improving water efficiency; optimizing energy usage; reusing building materials and other resources; the quality of the indoor environment, including whether materials emit low levels of harmful chemicals; and design innovation.

The Chicago regional competition will take place on Jan. 16, 2010, at the University of Illinois – Chicago, and national finals will occur during National Engineers WeekTM, Feb. 15-17, 2010, in Washington, D.C. Registration begins at 7:30 a.m. and the contest continues until 3:30 p.m. Each regional competition will have one winning team that will qualify for a trip to the national, final level, in mid-February. Organizers expect that 33,000 students from 1,100 middle schools in the United States will participate.

Although Future City originally included only five regions, it has grown to 40 different ones from across the nation. The Chicago Region has a special distinction, as the only district to participate each year. Although it technically includes all of Illinois, it historically involves mostly participants from this city, with occasional contestants from Rockford, Peoria and Springfield.

Participants connect the cities they create with the environments around them, and perhaps make the corresponding tie between the towns in which they live and their own, natural worlds; these links may, ultimately, help lead them to careers as engineers, which is the underlying purpose of Future City.

Armbruster is one former participant who demonstrates the success of the competition. She enjoyed being a part of the contest so much that, after attending college at the University of Iowa, she returned to first act as a mentor, and then as a judge for the contest, for six years and counting. “I get a kick out of it, as an engineer, to go back and get students interested. I love doing that, to see the connection and the link [to the present]. I can teach about engineering, how helpful it is to society. It’s very rewarding for me. It’s really neat to see the kids get involved with science.”

Armbruster notes that working on Future City as a student years ago offered the opportunity to develop valuable skills that have been useful to her as a professional. “It was great. It provided a lot of practice with presentations. It helped with writing skills, answering and asking questions and teambuilding skills.” Armbruster also learned a lot about the field of engineering. “It taught me a lot about urban design and the connection between engineering and the community, and the needs of it [the community],” she says.

“I would mention to other engineers to be a mentor to a team. It’s very rewarding,” Armbruster advises. She would also recommend participating in the event to current students. “I would tell kids to get involved. It’s a lot of work, but it’s rewarding at the end. You learn a lot of good skills.”

Oil spilled in Michigan; moving forward

Aug. 13, 2010

By Jessica Tobacman


Enbridge Oil Spill Site, near Marshall, Mich., Aug. 8
Photo credit: Lighthawk for the Sierra Club's Michigan Chapter

This summer has seen two major oil spills in the United States. The first occurred on a tremendously large scale on April 20, sending around 206 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, according to the federal government. The second was much smaller, taking place on July 25 in Michigan, when a ruptured, 30-inch pipeline dumped oil into the Kalamazoo River; the total amount of that spill may have been 819,000 gallons, or more than 1 million gallons, depending on the source of the estimate—the owner of the pipe or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), respectively.

Enbridge Inc., owns the ruptured pipe near Talmadge Creek, which feeds into the Kalamazoo River. Enbridge had been receiving notices since January describing the corrosion of the since-broken pipeline. However, the problem was a low enough priority for the company that it did not notice the pipe had burst until the following day.

For some of the areas the Michigan spill affects, the Calhoun County Public Health Department has issued voluntary evacuation notices for residents. This is because of the high levels in the air of benzene, a chemical that may cause short-term nausea, vomiting, rapid heart rates, sleepiness, dizziness or headaches, or long-term increases of the risk of cancer. Notices for evacuation are for temporary relocations, until the threat has passed.

The Michigan disaster has devastated the habitats of local ducks, frogs, geese, herons, muskrats and swans, perhaps for years into the future, with oil sinking into 30 miles of marshes. The oil has also coated turtles, birds and muskrats with residue.

Although the response to the spill was relatively fast, oil remains on the riverbank, re-contaminating the Kalamazoo River and Talmadge Creek, where the spill started, said Anne Woiwode, state director of the Sierra Club’s Michigan Chapter.

The EPA is now in charge of containment and clean-up efforts. Before accepting a cleanup plan from Enbridge, the agency had rejected several other proposals by the company. “A lot of work has yet to be done,” Woiwode said.

Josh Ellis, water expert at the Metropolitan Planning Council in Chicago, noted that his two major concerns about the oil spill are the state of our infrastructure, i.e. the broken pipeline, and our continued demand for oil.

“We don’t maintain our infrastructure as well as we need to,” Ellis said. “Continued demand is increasing and the shift in our thinking and behavior at the cash register is not happening. We need to get serious about decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels.” That includes building alternatives, such as public transit and locally grown foods, which use less energy to transport items to their destinations. “Unfortunately, that’s happening only piecemeal.”

The likelihood of another oil spill is almost certain, Ellis stated. “There is going to be more and more risk associated with getting this resource. … We have already found and consumed the oil that is easy and safe to get.”

Despite all of this grim news, individuals can take actions to help deal with the current situations of rising demand for oil, increasingly difficult-to-reach resources and deteriorating infrastructure.

Steps include looking into what produces a home’s electricity and where that source is located, Ellis advised. “Finding out would be a huge step,” he said. This process sounds relatively straightforward: The source of a home’s electricity is likely to be available simply from the web site of a local utility, such as ComEd.

The goal is to become a more knowledgeable consumer; to learn about the costs and results of consumption, and then to use that information to communicate with politicians. “People need to demand a higher level of discussion with their elected officials … to get more informed and act on it,” Ellis said.

Profile: Water Expert Josh Ellis

Aug. 11, 2010

By Jessica Tobacman



Josh Ellis has worked for the Chicago-based Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC) for about four years, and is currently a project manager and water expert there. He has always been interested in the environment. Ellis grew up participating in outdoor activities with his family, including long canoe trips, which helped him to be mindful of what he consumed. Every summer, he attended a camp where environmental consciousness was at the forefront.

In the spring of 2006, Ellis earned joint Master’s degrees in Public Policy and Middle Eastern Studies, with an environmental focus, from the University of Chicago. Afterward, he chose to stay in Chicago. Ellis accepted a research assistant position with the Campaign for Sensible Growth, housed at MPC. The campaign eventually disbanded, and, when the work began to shift to MPC in late 2005, he followed, and became a full-time employee there in the fall of 2006.

Currently, Ellis primarily manages an array of projects related to sustainable resources management in Illinois, including developments in wastewater, storm water and drinking water. His responsibilities include working on legislative issues and enabling rainwater harvesting, which involves catching and storing fresh rainwater, which does not need to be treated for use. These efforts keep rain out of the storm system, helping to maintain a manageable amount of water within the system, and are used in states including New Mexico, Oregon and Texas. Ellis also helps with the public campaign on which MPC partners with Openlands, called, “What Our Water’s Worth.” The goal is to help increase the value that individuals place upon the easy receipt of clean, available drinking water; the ready handling of storm water; and the disposal of wastewater.

Ellis feels that he has succeeded in his work at MPC at times when the general public and the media begin to discuss his policy ideas, and to use the language that he does. The large amount of talk about the future of the Chicago River in the media has also led him to participate in roundtable discussions at MPC, and to speak at the University of Chicago and at a University of Chicago event at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.

In addition to working for the council, Ellis also teaches English as a Second Language four nights every week at the Poder Learning Center in Pilsen on the city’s southwest side. The students are primarily Mexican, which somewhat reflects the makeup of the surrounding community, but there are also individuals from Bulgaria and China. “You see more immediate results there than at MPC,” Ellis said. Work at the council includes much more long-term efforts.

Ellis is satisfied with his current situation. “I’m happy with now, so I’m happy how I got here.”

His path began in Brentwood, N.H., in a town of about 2,000 people, approximately 20 minutes from the ocean. Growing up, Ellis travelled with his family regularly. His mother worked as a teacher, and her summers off allowed for a voyage each year. The family visited states including California, and countries including Canada and Switzerland. They were active, hiking and skiing, and Ellis played baseball and football. He also played the saxophone, and at one point, was a member of a ska band.

Ellis’ travels with his family led him to study Russian and to live in Ukraine for a month as a sophomore in high school. As an undergraduate, he attended the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., where he double-majored in English Literature and Comparative World Religions. His studies taught him to write, but little else related to his current endeavors, he noted. Immediately after graduating in 2000, Ellis spent two years in Japan working for a private firm that was similar to Kaplan. At first, he taught English in Sapporo, and then the company promoted him to the manager of a school in Otaru.

After Ellis returned to New Hampshire in November 2003, he took classes at the University of New Hampshire on subjects including the environment and society, and international relations. Then he began graduate school at the University of Chicago in September 2003.

Ellis tries to be mindful of his surroundings, to maintain an awareness of his behavior. He rides his bicycle by Lake Michigan each day, from his home in Hyde Park, to his job at MPC, to his work teaching ESL in Pilsen, and back home. “It’s an almost perfect mode of transportation,” he said. He plays pick-up basketball near his home, and tries to travel locally and beyond.

In five years, Ellis anticipates that he will still be living in Chicago. In 20 years, he hopes to be doing comparable work on new problems, working for a nonprofit or advocacy organization in a leadership position, or in an elected official position. His home base could still be in Chicago, in New Hampshire, or elsewhere. “I enjoy Chicago, but could see myself going to any number of places.”