Meet Dr. Sarah Warren- Catalyst and Ambassador for Green

 
As a clinical and consulting psychologist, Dr. Sarah Warren uses her expertise in behavior change and communication to serve as an ambassador for green. Drawing on her work in the addictions field—that includes our addiction to oil–, her mission is to educate and inspire individuals and organizations in order to move them from denial to awareness to action and into “recovery”.

A seasoned psychologist, Dr. Sarah turned her expertise in behavior change to the problem of the climate crisis, helping people find their mission by greening their lifestyles, businesses and careers to protect the planet for future generations so that they may enjoy the “garden” that nourishes us and our economy. Along the way she helps people reinvent themselves and leave their mark.

Dr. Sarah knows that change is difficult, necessary– and possible. And Dr. Sarah knows that change is rewarding. The daughter of an MIT researcher who was in on the ground floor of artificial intelligence, Dr. Warren focuses on analyzing the big picture and delivering highly effective messages about our climate crisis. With a brother who has been writing about business and the environment for 25 years and is one of the foremost experts on ocean acidification— global warming’s “evil twin–” and a sister who is a district manager at Patagonia, a pioneer among environmentally responsible companies, Dr. Warren comes naturally by her commitment to inspiring informed eco-action.

When she realized that global warming threatened her two young boys, she joined a growing movement of people who are shifting from somewhat committed unlikely environmentalists to deeply committed and empassioned eco-warriors who want to save the “garden” that feeds us, sustains our economy, and offers us natural beauty.

The Founder of the Spheres of Influence Salon on climate change, Dr. Sarah enjoys public speaking, writing, and coaching businesses and individuals on greening their practices. She also works to help people become informed, engaged voters on the pressing matter of climate policy. We invite you to learn more about our services by contacting DrSarah@ourspheresofinfluence.com.

Keep checking back as this site grows into a comprehensive resource offering climate crisis news, information on the problem and the solution (as in what you can do!), tips and trends, and Dr. Sarah’s views and opinions as a behavior change expert for the age of global warming.

And sign up for her mailing list.

Raising and Educating Global Citizens in the Age of Global Warming

Climate change represents the greatest challenge—and opportunity– humanity has ever faced. Today’s children will require a new set of well-developed strengths, qualities and competencies in order to thrive in the age of global warming. How will we cultivate the necessary competencies and qualities?

How are we preparing our future leaders for the world that Thomas Friedman so aptly describes in his latest must-read book, Hot, Flat and Crowded?

The challenges on the horizon are detailed in a report released in November, 2008 by the National Intelligence Council entitled, “Global Trends 2025.” This stunning report portrays a world unlike anything we’ve known, in part because of the scale and scope of global social, economic, environmental and resource challenges. They anticipate a world in which we have rogue– even criminal– states and widespread wars over water, food and energy. Not surprisingly, they highlight the need for science and technology advances. Finally, they articulate the leadership opportunities afforded by this world transformed. Do we see an educational call to action here?

On a more experiential basis, the wildfires in the Los Angeles area in November 2008 highlight the ways that climate change impacts all social classes. Multimillion dollar mansions as well as trailer parks were leveled. And if you live in a trailer park, how hard is that loss going to hit? The UCLA Medical Center loat power – babies were delivered in the dark. Imagine that you’re the head of that hospital? Imagine that you’re the physician delivering the baby? Imagine that you’re the mother? Imagine that you run the Fire Department? Imagine that you run a corporation?

Regardless of where we live, we are impacted– already. In the Midwest, we have flooding from heavy rainfalls. Recall the picture of the bridge on the Mississippi River with homes crushed against it. Think of the Cubs being flooded out. In the Southeast, think drought. Anywhere on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, think fierce hurricanes and rising sea levels. Think Hurricane Ike which at one point was 600 miles wide. Hard to wrap our minds around, but we can and must in order to cope—and to prepare our future workforce and leaders to cope with a whole new world.

For instance, within our children’s lifetimes, we will be adapting to the presence of millions “climate refugees” who will be displaced by rising sea levels in coastal areas both here and abroad. How will we will we accommodate a whole new influx of people who arrive all at once from very different cultures? What will this mean for our social relations? How do we prepare our children for that new social world?

Another example: Water shortages are projected within the next few decades, even adjacent to vast Great Lakes. Water shortages can be hard to imagine when we’re sitting next to the Great Lakes which represent 90% of the world’s fresh water. But lake levels are down, and demand is up, and projected to rise yet further. And much of Chicagoland gets its water from underground aquifers that are drying up. Further, over a third of the US has recently been in drought. Last year, Atlanta came within 100 days of running out of water—with no backup.

The right to the use of the Great Lakes water is determined by Supreme Court Consent Decree. The States and Canadian Provinces that share the shores of the Great Lakes are each given a certain allotment. And that water can’t be sold, for instance, to the Chinese– which almost happened a few years ago. But such decrees may be revisited. And when they are, will we be prepared to address the moral dimension of deciding who gets access to 90% of the world’s fresh water when the much of the rest of the world is dealing with water shortages?

As a psychologist, as a parent and as a climate change expert , I would suggest that we are entrusted to prepare our children to …

be able to think systemically about complex inter-related problems.

be outstanding team players and collaborators.

be very tech, math and science savvy in order to innovate the solutions we need
to adapt to and manage new climate conditions.

have outstanding creative problem solving skills.

be resilient and flexible.

face loss and disappointment.

be informed about the policies that affect our climate and prepared to use
their voices because we can’t conserve our way out of these challenges

value nature and its resources.

have strong moral and ethical sense in order to make ethically challenging decisions
about stressed resources such as water.

be avid conservationists.

be compassionate and display grace under pressure.

have a sense of “enoughness” so that they can appreciate they have.

display generosity of spirit.

Most of these qualities may seem like nothing out of the ordinary. In a sense, they are the basic tenets of the world’s major religious traditions. They might seem like the essence of good education.

But are we educating our children with cultivation of these qualities and competencies in sharp focus?

These competencies are essential to preparing the next generation to manage the challenges our young people will face.As a society, as parents, as educators, as civic leaders thinking about our future workforce and leaders, we need to think carefully about not just what we teach our children about conservation and science but about how to get along in a world that is very different from what we have previously known.

This is not just about the substance of what we teach but how we teach– but that’s another conversation. We have an opportunity to prepare our children to thrive. Are we seizing that opportunity?

Join Dr. Sarah’s Green Career Circle

Based on the tremendous response to Dr. Sarah’s “Be Green & Make Green” teleseminar– which drew callers from Minneapolis to California to Florida– Dr. Sarah has created The Green Career Circle for early to mid-career professionals who want to transition into a job in the green economy, start a green business, or “green” their current position.

The Green Career Circle brings together professionals for dialogue and strategizing about opportunities to go green.

The next offering of Green Career Circle is a 3 session teleseminar running consecutive Saturdays from October 25- November 8 (11am -12:30 Eastern/10-11:30 am Central/8-9:30 Pacific).  New members will be accepted each week as space permits- members do not need to have attended all previous sessions in order to benefit. To register: http://www.ecoaction.ecoactionplan.org/ask/greencareercircle.php

With the current economic downturn, we will focus on how to green your current position– which can be strategically advantageous to your career.

And just about any job can be turned into a green job!

Here is an MP3 of a session in which we talked about Finding Opportunities in the Green Economy:

Download and Listen

Members learn what questions to ask themselves about how to find a career that suits their personality, skills and passion. We also discuss ways to transfer skills and training to green careers. Members will also learn about emerging nonprofit and for-profit opportunities in the green economy, and will leave with a plan for a green career transition.

“I found that Dr. Sarah’s Green Career Circle Teleseminar has really energized me.  For 21 years, I held various financial management positions, including Senior Vice President and Treasurer with Bank One (acquired by JP Morgan Chase in 2004). Later I served as Chief Financial Officer of a major insurance company. So my question became ‘How can I leverage my background and skills to make a positive impact on the environment?’ The Green Career Circle Teleseminar provided insight into the myriad opportunities available. More importantly, it has given me a road map as to how to access where I can make a difference.” Eileen Kennedy, Chicago IL

You don’t have to take a vow of poverty to make a difference!

Join Dr. Sarah, a seasoned psychological career coach who helps clients harness their talents and passions and develop more meaningful careers that save the planet.

Want to learn more? Email Dr. Sarah at DrSarah@ecoactionplan.org.

Salon Policy Experts on Pickens Plan, Mitigation & Adaptation- October 2008

 

On October 8, 2008 we had a Spheres of Influence Salon teleconference conversation with Betsy Taylor, founder of 1Sky, on climate policy.  We were joined in that conversation by Prof. Richard Rood of University of Michigan who weighed in on what the science suggests about the need to adapt to climate change, and by Suzanne Farver, Board member of Rocky Mountain Institute who has done research at Harvard on framing climate change. And actress Nora Dunn took away some challenging questions to pose to her presidential candidate of choice.

Before the call with Betsy Taylor, Melissa O’Mara, who works in sustainability at IBM, posed several great thought-provoking questions that we did not get to on the call regarding Pickens’ Plan–which is in clear evidence in both presidential candidates’ energy platforms– and about where we are on energy options. After the call, I posed Melissa’s questions on line to our Salon experts on climate policy which prompted the following responses from both Rob Harmon, inventor of the REC (robharmon@b-e-f.org) and Richard Rood (rbrood@umich.edu) . Richard Rood invites comments and responses to a piece that he has written at http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0813-rood_thoumi.html .

Listen to that conversation at:

www.ecoaction.ecoactionplan.org/audio/SpheresBetsyTaylor10-8-08.wav

Read the subsequent email exchange in full below. Their responses are worthy of reviewing in their entirety.

Here is what Prof. Richard Rood says about Pickens’ Plan and our various sources of energy:

“I have listened to him a couple of times.  I think that he speaks a lot of sense.
His plan is very focused on energy security, with little direct concern about climate change.
In general, I think that it is critical to consider the approach to energy and climate and economic growth and consumption problem in both the near term and the long term.  It is clearly impossible to just abandon fossil fuels.  For climate protection we have to find a way to break the correlation between energy use, economic success, and CO2 emission.  Wind farms as in the Pickens portfolio is one of the best tools we have for doing this.  Hence, a diversification to wind and solar etc. is an important piece of the puzzle.  One issue with wind, geothermal, etc. if you add up the possible energy from the source and compare it energy consumption, it does not match.  Plus there are potential environmental impacts from massive wind and solar farms.  Of the “alternative” energy sources solar has the potential to scale to be large enough to become a primary source.  But there are a number of technological issues that need to be addressed.  Hence, a bridge is an important concept.  Of the other “alternatives” nuclear is the most straightforward to make wholesale replacement in say, electrical generation, but there are many techno-emotional issues involved.  Coal looms there as accessible and cheap, but without sequestration is climate disaster.  So again, we need some bridging strategy.

To be clear.  By far the biggest and best tool in the tool box in the short term is efficiency.  But we have to have some sort valuation of efficiency so that we don’t just use more energy because of our efficiency savings.

So … Pickens is a voice that makes sense.  But it is in terms of energy security, not climate change.  His help to climate change is a side product, which is fine.  But energy security can trump climate change.

Might be interested in this piece I published recently with one of my business students, who is now a carbon management director in the corporate world.

http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0813-rood_thoumi.html

Would be interested in the comments of others.

ricky,

Richard B. Rood
Professor: Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences
University of Michigan

Rood AOSS Web Page <http://aoss.engin.umich.edu/people/rbrood>
Rood Weather Underground Climate Blog <http://www.wunderground.com/blog/RickyRood/show.html>
Rood AMS climatepolicy.org <http://climatepolicy.org>  Blog <http://www.climatepolicy.org/>

++++++++

Here is Rob Harmon on our energy options, including his response to Pickens on natural gas for cars:

1. We can reduce energy consumption in US buildings by at least 50% and put the country back to work by improving the energy productivity in buildings.  That requires a major push.  We could start with neighborhood pilots where we do everything that is cost-effective over the life of the measure.  (A 5 year payback on weather stripping that lasts 1 year is a bad investment, but a 20 year payback on attic insulation that lasts 30 years is a good investment.)  We have to keep our eye on 2050, here.
2. If we do this, we don’t need to build any nukes.  Lovins has a great piece on nukes here:  http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid467.php
The notion that solving the problem with solar would use up too much land is misplaced.  First, you start with the rooftops we already have.
3. We need a smart grid.  We currently have a really dumb grid.  Because electricity is tough to store, you have to use it in real time.  That is an information management problem.  We need to get the IT geniuses working on this problem.  If demand and supply can’t “talk” to each other, you need much more infrastructure.  We need more brains and less brawn for this problem.
4. We need to move from changing light bulbs, to changing laws.  Without good policy, none of this is going to happen.  Right now the incentives are to pollute.  We need to make it profitable to save the planet, rather than trash it.  Until we do that, we are fighting ourselves.
5. On the transportation side, only 8% of the energy in a gallon of gas is used to move the passenger forward (Lovins).  The rest is lost to inefficiencies.   Again, application of brains would really help here.  It makes no sense to me to build an entire natural gas infrastructure for transportation when it does not solve the climate problem, it is inferior to electricity, and the cars are unbelievably inefficient.  Plug in hybrids make way more sense.  Public transportation would help too.”

Rob

Robert Harmon
Chief Innovation Officer &
Senior Vice President
Bonneville Environmental Foundation

Addiction to Oil– and the Path to Recovery

Dr. Sarah Warren is a psychologist, and she brings to bear her expertise in treating addictions.

Tom Friedman, author of Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America, has referred to us as addicted to oil. President Bush, who has slowly come to acknowledge the reality of global warming, has referred to “our addiction to oil.”

So the rhetoric of addiction to oil is part of the discourse. And as an addictions expert, I can attest that the mechanisms of addiction — denial and rationalization,– come into play in our use of fossil fuels.

It’s as if we’ve been on a collective binge since about 1960-only instead of drinking, we’ve been directly and indirectly consuming lots of fossil fuels. And instead of getting DUIs and lab results telling us that our liver is shot, we’re getting global warming and a host of related complications that take the problem to a crisis level. Our actions have caught up with us. 

And just as alcoholics can go into recovery, we as a society can recover from our addiction to oil. 

We don’t just ask alcoholics to change their behavior– we regulate alcohol. We treat the problem of excessive use of alcohol not just as a matter of personal responsiblity but as a policy issue.

To go into recovery, we need to get out of denial, shift to a state of awareness, and move from awareness into concerted action. As a society we are moving into a state of awareness of the consequences of our dependence on oil. From there we need to move into collective action– now.  We need to start to reduce our dependence on oil– and when we “relapse” we need to get back on track. We need to confront our resistances to change. And we need to create the policy conditions that support us in shifting away from oil.

As a society, we can go into recovery.  We can change our lifestyles, our business practices and our policies. We can share with recovering alcoholics and addicts the rewards of a new way of life–including the knowlege that we’re doing right by our children.

Recovery: Hope and Rewards

The good news is that as an addiction specialist, Dr. Sarah Warren can say that there is hope. Recovery is possible. She has helped many drug addicts and alcoholics change their habits. And they have to go through physical withdrawal, which thankfully we don’t when we walk the kids to school instead of driving– or when we overhaul our policies to incentivize renewable energy.

Change is hard-and necessary, and possible. And the rewards are immeasurable.

Won’t you join us in confronting our addiction?

The Climate Crisis: What Global Warming Means for You

So what does the climate crisis mean for you?

If you’re a business owner, it could mean business interuption thanks to unpredictable weather.   Just think about the bizarre ice storm in 2007 that stretched from Maine to California to Mexico. And it could mean tremendous opportunities to develop new ways of doing business in the growing green economy.

If you’re a professional looking for new career opportunities, it means more jobs in growing fields like wind and solar, water management, and corporate sustainabilility.

If you’re a parent or grandparent or future parent, the climate crisis–unchecked–is likely to mean that your children will face tremendous challenges in the form of global economic downturn, food and water shortages, wars over resources such as water.

You’ve come to the right place if you want to know more about what Global Warming looks like and what you can do to make an important difference for the future of our planet.

The planet is the garden that nourshes us. Don’t we all want to live in a lovely garden? Don’t we want our children to live in an abundant garden?

Keep coming back to learn more as the site expands to become a comprehensive resource on the problem of global warming– and you can do!

Learn More About the Eco-Action Plan

Dr. Sarah’s EcoAction Plan is designed to help guide you though the transformation process that will allow you to…

Harness your talents, skills and passion to make a living while saving the planet.   

Reduce your business’ environmental impact– and improve employee retention while saving money!

Green your lifestyle and join the growing movement of unlikely environmentalists and new ecowarriors.

The EcoAction Plan will help you identify opportunities to reduce your environmental impact, and actions that will allow you to have the greatest possible beneficial effect. And what’s really cool is that not only will you benefit economically, you will find the EcoAction Plan tremendously rewarding.

Want to Make Difference?- Vote Green! Hold Your Elected Officials to Account

In order to successfully wage war against the threat of global warming, we need both lifestyle and massive policy changes. As voters we have power to hold our elected leaders to account on the policies that can make or break this effort. All it takes is twenty people– that’s right, twenty– writing letters and making calls to get politicians’ attention! So use your voice.

We have a presidential election coming up, and this is a chance to have your vote make a big difference.  And state and local officials vote on policies that affect our global warming policy, too.  What kind of policies are we talking about? Learn more about the hot policy issues.