Adventures outside this Western, air-conditioned box await...

Finally. My first year of graduate school almost completed. I breathe a little easier knowing I won’t look at this tiny computer screen, eternally scarring my vision, for longer than the minutes it takes to check my email once in a while for at least two months… Well, that is, once I finish my last final.

I am printing off my final Written Testimony to Congress (a faux committee, I’m not that important yet  ) for my Energy and Climate Change course today. This afternoon I will lock myself in my parlor for three hours to finish an essay final for Food and Water Security. A few errands around the house as the young fellow subleasing my apartment this summer is moving in this weekend. A week with my folks and friends around the great state of Colorado – running a 10K with 50,000 other runners in one of Colorado’s craziest races, touring the breweries via bicycle and barbeque-ing with some of my old friends in Fort Collins, a backpacking trip up to Conundrum Hot Springs for a couple days.

Insert – alteration of my mind… or at least for a few months. This summer, I am off to Yachana Foundation in the heart of the Ecuadorean Amazon, to complete my research proposal I have completed with a team of five others in my Multi-level Data Analysis class. Our discoveries will not be the sexy, risky research adventures doted on in international journals of development (those I have made myself all too familiar with); nonetheless, its important work we are doing.

Yachana, in Kichwa “A place for learning”, was founded in 1991 and is the best representation of holistic development I have yet to be introduced to. Perched alongside the banks of the Upper Napo River, a tributary to the Amazon, embedded in lush, serene rainforest, Yachana is a technical high school educating indigenous youth, an award-winning eco-lodge, an organic cacao production facility, an agricultural extension services provider, and a symbol of opportunity for a people previously untouched by opportunity, out of which flows dignity and self-sufficiency…. and jobs. Yachana focuses on education and conservation, preserving 1800 acres of precious landscape hosting some of the world’s most diverse flora and fauna, and some of histories most precious cultures fast losing their memory to oil exploitation and globalization. Last year, Yachana recieved a grant to open a post-secondary technical training institute where they will train high school graduates in three areas which are linked to available jobs in the area: eco-tourism (catering, gastronomy), Agroforestry, and Renewable Energy production. Hopes are to link students with apprenticeships with local businesses and/or to assist in the creative development micro-consignmnet. Yachana wants us to do some focus groups with potential students to better inform their development process of the school’s curriculum and structure. We will also do individual household surveys gathering socioeconomic data on the families in the area to track (in years to come) how the post-secondary institute has amended the economic vista of the community.

I sense, as the wander-lusting, vagabonding type usually do, I will learn more from my indigenous Kichwa partners than I could ever offer to them in my mere two months. I am humbled, actually, thinking of the intractable generosity and openness it must take to allow strangers to infiltrate their communities. I imagine elite Frenchmen galavanting around my neighborhood, knocking on my door, investigating my personal life with questions of monthly income, aspirations, nutritional intake, asset possession and contraceptive use. I would rightly say (shout, perhaps) a rather un-kind collection of uncommon words and shut the door in their face. I aim to do my best, utilizing the trust and relationships Yachana has built there in the last 20 years to make myself as human as possible, a partner, a companion willing to share the risk.

For at least a couple months, I will not stare this LCD lighting int he face. For at least two months, no endless, enervating, sometimes seemingly pointless reading of articles and academics pontificating in their esoteric circles, sitting in their air-conditioned corner offices sipping on their mass-produced Starbucks latte. For the next two months I get to see it, live it, experience it, share the risk. I humbly embed myself in a culture and a people, thriving ideas and brave attempts, experiential knowledge and welcomed challenges.

How Graduate School is Different

My professor said something to me last night that struck me. I guess professors say a lot of things and probably most of them should strike me; however, this one was a winner:”At this level of education, its all about skills. Knowledge is great, but knowledge is out there. You can always gain new knowledge. In grad school, we are trying to teach you skills.”

Okay, I really like this. I also don’t want to hear it. I’m one of those curiosity-driven people that loves new knowledge, obscure facts, and saturating my brain with (sometimes) useless tidbits that make my neurons giddy. I don’t know if I want the skills. The skills are harder to obtain, and harder to maintain. And they require a courage to improve.

For our class in Energy and Climate Change co-taught by the law, business and ecology professors, the final project is looming like a black cloud over my sunny spring fever: an oral testimony to a professional entity, arguing for or against the Genesis Solar Electrification Project in the Sonoran Desert of California. The State of California, in its true progressive, populist, independent style has called for 33% of its electricity retail sales to come from renewable sources by 2020. That date is rapidly approaching and corporations like NextEra energy are jumping on economic opportunities for solar farm projects like wildfire, Genesis Solar is just one of those projects.

Buried in the thousands of pages of legal briefings and documents I have engulfed myself in for preparation for the oral testimony, I have discovered that a solar farm is not the cure-all to our climate change woes. Solar Farms require a significant amount of water to heat the transfer fluid which flows through the parabolic troughs to gather the heat/energy; in this project, that water will be coming from sensitive, already-depleted resources that may be connected to the Colorado River. Solar farms are no small feat and the 1800 acres of desert this project covers will have significant impact on precious species and their habitat like the desert tortoise. Furthermore, this land is owned by the Federal Government, which means approval is required not only by the State but also by the Bureau of Land Management. And extensive Environmental Assessments must be made to prove there is no significant affect on environment or its inhabitants.

This is a clear case of the “not in my backyard” case. Californians want clean air, Californians want clean energy, Californians want to lead the way in the progressive march to mitigate climate change. But Californians don’t want ugly parabolic solar troughs muddying their serene desert vistas. The real question for my testimony, is what are the alternative approaches and what are the costs of those alternatives? As the project will produce 250 MW of energy output that can be used to power homes in L.A. with lesser emissions and more efficiency, would the benefits of scrubbers on coal-fired power plants be comparable at all? How bad are those acres of mirrors and a couple towers compared to the ever-present gray smoke stacks bustling out of power plants down the street?

The skills are plentiful: structuring a clear, concise argument which is backed by scientific evidence and supported by many, an argument that recognizes the opposing viewpoints and has adequate responses, an argument that is presented to a body of important people who don’t have much time to listen to what you have to say, a compelling argument, a creative argument.  This is where the skill becomes undesirable for me – you mean, I have to actually take a side?  I can’t stay in the grey area dancing in theoretical circles forever?

Sometimes I wish I could go back to my undergraduate degree where professors didn’t expect much out of you and the acquisition of knowledge of the arguments out there was really the only goal. Alas, I’m paying no small chunk of change to be in this school and I suppose a challenge is welcomed. I notice I procrastinate on things not because I’m lazy or too busy, but usually because I’m afraid of doing them – rather, I’m afraid of failing at them. I think grad school is about a number of things, including acquiring skills; its also about learning how to try, and sometimes fail. Its about learning to be brave, confident and to try. Because every time you speak in front of an entity of specialists regarding something you don’t know too much about, you’ll get a little better… at least I hope.