While technology—and industrialization in particular—is a key cause of human-made climate change, technology alone can’t help us slow the warming of our planet and adapt to its impacts. Along with innovations in energy efficiency and mitigation strategies, also imperative is advancement in other areas. How do we advocate for safer consumer goods and governmental policies that protect the communities most vulnerable to climate change’s effects? How do we rethink old ways to bring clean, safe energy to more people, more quickly? How can we communicate the human toll of these changes, and articulate possible solutions, in ways that are clear, compelling, and actionable? How can we grow coalitions to preserve our waters and wilderness areas?
Here, we look to four Carls for distinct strategies on facing this existential threat head on.
The Innovator
Sam Kanner ’10, CEO, Aikido Technologies
Growing up in Massachusetts, Sam Kanner’s family would vacation often on Cape Cod. There’s the boy sitting on the beach, watching the Atlantic roll in, roll in, roll in. As an environmental science student in high school, he’s already awash in renewable energy, climate technology, and he’ll probably write his Carleton College application on wave energy.
It works; he’s admitted to the class of 2010. The ideas are flowing. The physics and geology major even wins funding allowing him and Emma Dobbins ’10 (now his wife) to travel Europe on a self-directed summer project researching wave energy. There’s a physics comps on the same topic and a geology comps that takes him to a shallow-water offshore wind farm in Rhode Island. Then he’s off to the West Coast for a PhD in mechanical engineering from Berkeley.
“But it was sort of starting to happen at Carleton,” says Kanner. He’s talking about his shift from wave energy to offshore wind—which eventually led him, in 2022, to co-found Aikido Technologies, a San Francisco–based start-up developing technologies for the floating wind industry.
In 2022, Kanner and his co-founders were named Breakthrough Energy Fellows through Bill Gates’s climate change organization. “This fellowship program gave us significant funding to help get our company and our technology off the ground,” Kanner says. “Our technology” means modular floating platforms for wind-energy turbines so they can be constructed, assembled, and installed much faster than currently—and much further offshore as well.
Here’s the idea. Carleton’s wind turbines (the nation’s first on a college campus) and those you see off several state seashores are cool, Kanner says, but “the number-one bottleneck to deploying more clean energy and grid transmission is not the technology. It’s not the funding in a lot of places; it’s just local opposition to these projects.” Basically, some people think they’re ugly.
Solution: Put ’em farther out. After all, “roughly 80 percent of the world’s attainable offshore wind resource is in deeper waters where you need these floating platforms,” he explains. Custom-built floating platforms are what the oil and gas industry has used all along in deep water.
“The balance is just basically in the cost of the offshore cable” to bring the energy to a collection point and in to shore, he explains. “I think at around 15 or 20 miles out, you can’t even see [the turbines] even on a crystal-clear day.” But “you have to balance that with the cost of the cable transmission.”
Meanwhile, “the wind industry has gotten very good at rapid production,” cranking out “relatively low-cost” turbines that can be set up near shore and essentially drilled into the seabed, Kanner says. The problem is, “conventional platform designs are not well designed for this serial production.” In other words, it’s hard to mass-produce wind turbines to work on and for anchored deep-water platforms.
Enter Aikido Technologies. The goal: speed up construction and installation “and ultimately lower costs to accelerate the deployment of floating wind in the U.S. and around the world.”
This isn’t a one-semester project. In fact, Aikido’s prototype platform—with help from a steel fabricator in Louisiana—is a one-quarter-size model that won’t even hold a turbine. As a demonstration model, “the key differences in our technology are all about the construction and assembly process.”
After that, everything pretty much packs flat: “We sometimes refer to ourselves as the Ikea of offshore wind,” he jokes. “Then just using a simple water ballast technique, we can basically upend and kind of unfold the platform simultaneously. And once we’re in that configuration, [another company will] install the wind turbine.”
Demonstrating this “upending process” took place in fall 2024 in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Now comes more testing, a full-scale demonstration, certification, and finding a customer.
The full-scale project will include 50 to 100 units at a time at four times the size of the prototype, involving columns, trusses, and so on that all come together at a final land-based assembly site. A customer would buy turbines elsewhere, combine them with the Aikido platforms, and ship them far offshore for renewable energy production at scale.
“This year, wind energy may deliver the most clean energy to the grid if you exclude hydropower,” Kanner declares. And none too soon, with increasing demand from everything from heat pumps and heavy industry to artificial intelligence and electric vehicles. “That’s where Aikido fits in,” he says. “We’re going to need tons of different solutions to fully decarbonize our grid, and wind is a key piece of the puzzle.”
The Coalition-Builder
Ingrid Lyons ’15, Executive Director, Save the Boundary Waters
It’s America’s most visited wilderness area, kind of an ironic moniker for such a pristine and beautiful million-plus acres of forests and waterways across northern Minnesota. People flock to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness for camping, canoeing, fishing, hiking, and generally enjoying the wonders of unspoiled nature.
The Boundary Waters was designated as a result of the 1964 Wilderness Act, and its management is overseen by the U.S. Forest Service—but the area is not fully protected. Most people boating and birding there probably don’t realize that among the area’s abundant and valuable resources is copper.
Ten to twelve years ago, it became known that a company was looking to develop a copper mine just upstream of the Boundary Waters. It was an alarming prospect. “This type of mining has never been done without some form of pollution. With that 100 percent chance of pollution, we think that this is absolutely the wrong place for this type of mining,” says Ingrid Lyons ’15.
“Minnesota has a rich legacy of iron and taconite mining, but this is a completely different beast. Our mission is to permanently protect the Boundary Waters and its watershed from the threat of sulfide-ore copper mining.”
“We” is Save the Boundary Waters, a coalition of over 350 businesses, organizations, and sportsmen’s and environmental groups ranging, as she puts it, “from Earthjustice and the Wilderness Society to the local outfitter on Main Street in Ely.” Lyons has been executive director since March 2022.
An environmental studies major, Lyons had spent years moving up through the nonprofit with stints in fundraising and regional organizing. Meanwhile, she earned a graduate certificate in nonprofit management and a master’s certificate in animal welfare and behavior. She also did marketing and communications for the University of Minnesota’s Raptor Center.
Along with the Superior National Forest, the Boundary Waters contains 20 percent of all fresh water in the entire National Forest system. We can’t afford to wreck this critical habitat with sulfuric acid, sulfates, and heavy metals, Lyons tells lawmakers in St. Paul and Washington.
Minnesotans often don’t understand the risks associated with copper mining, an industry that has never occurred in the state, Lyons says. A gentle geology lesson can show the difference: with a high percentage of sulfides, material brought to the surface from mining copper reacts to air and water to create acid mine drainage—“akin to battery acid,” Lyons says—which in turn results in the leaching of heavy metals within the rock, including mercury, lead, arsenic, and zinc. For every 100 pounds of rock mined, less than a pound of copper is extracted; so “unlike with iron, 99 percent is very toxic waste rock.”
Save the Boundary Waters had successfully lobbied the Biden administration to cancel two federal mining leases, advocated for proposed federal protections, and worked against a proposal to allow development and bypass environmental review. In November, facing an uphill battle with the incoming administration’s plans, Lyons stated that “we have fought through one Trump presidency, and we will do it again.” The nonprofit presses its case at the federal, state, county, municipal, and local levels.
According to 2022 sponsored polling, 69 percent of Minnesotans back a ban on sulfide-ore copper mining in the area. Some tell Lyons that the Boundary Waters is a nonpartisan issue and therefore not a political one. Unfortunately, international fortunes, critical minerals, landscape protection, and other factors have made it highly politicized.
Having studied the land, the wetlands, and the history of the Boundary Waters, Lyons takes the long view. September 2024 marked the 60th anniversary of the 1964 Wilderness Act, which legally defined “wilderness” and created the National Wilderness Preservation System.
“I see from conception of an idea to execution the ability to make a difference and to expand upon honor and continue the legacy that we are a part of,” she says. Not just recent legislative history but “the generations and generations of folks who stewarded this land before that” back to the Anishinaabe or Ojibwe people: “Protecting the Boundary Waters is also a matter of environmental justice.
“There are just so many different facets of society and industry who care about and rely on these places, whether you’re a resident of a wilderness-edge community and your livelihood literally depends on it versus you’re the founderof Patagonia, and you’re working from an ethos on which you have built this global brand,” Lyons explains. That’s the most rewarding part of all this for her: working with such a diverse range of people sharing the vision of eternally protecting the Boundary Waters wilderness.
“We’re here to do one thing,” she says. “And we’re going to be around until we get it done.”
For more on Lyons, watch a recent video from C’YA, the Carleton Young Alumni group.
The Advocate
Kizzy Charles-Guzman ’02, CEO, Center for Environmental Health
Carleton diploma in hand—with a major in geology and concentrations in environmental studies and cross-cultural studies—Kizzy Charles-Guzman ’02 headed straight back to Brooklyn, where she plunged into work with two environmental nonprofits. After “dabbling” in environmental justice issues with Dale Jamieson, formerly the Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Dimensions in Global Change at Carleton, she wanted to explore health disparities and the roles of race and economics and see where she might fit in.
One of those nonprofits, West Harlem Environmental Action, was involved with a bio-monitoring study that checked New Yorkers’ blood and urine samples for six chemicals of concern.
Charles-Guzman, a Venezuelan immigrant who’d spent her teens in Brooklyn, signed on without much thought. Sure enough, she tested positive for several chemicals. “It was flabbergasting,” she says two decades later, “I’ve been working on environmental health issues since.”
Now, Charles-Guzman is CEO of the Center for Environmental Health (CEH), a nonprofit working to rid society of the sort of toxins discovered in too many people’s blood—and more. “Cadmium, phthalates, arsenic, PFAS . . . these chemicals and others are key ingredients in packaging, cookware, clothing, dental floss, makeup, carpets, and furniture,” she says. “As long as something says it’s waterproof, stain resistant, or nonstick, you are potentially being exposed to chemicals widely linked to adverse health impacts because this is how they’re made.”
The classic story of environmental poisoning, she notes, was “I lived next to a landfill” or “I worked in this factory or that mine.” These days, studies show that 95 to 98 percent of us have PFAS “forever” chemicals, or Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, in our systems. According to the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry, “Health effects potentially associated with PFAS exposure include increases in cholesterol levels, decreases in birth weight, lower antibody response to vaccines, kidney and testicular cancer, pregnancy-induced hypertension, preeclampsia, and changes in liver enzymes.”
“I do not consent to having an environment where I have to worry,” she told a podcast audience in October—worry about water, food, air, and soil being contaminated because of greed or negligence or supply-chain breakdowns.
CEH is doing something about it. Just in the past year, it:
- Reached a historic agreement with 30 clothing brands (including Hanes and Asics) to remove BPA (bisphenol A, an industrial chemical used to make some plastics and resins since the 1950s) from socks.
- After a lawsuit, achieved a legally binding, court-enforceable agreement that requires Lululemon to remove cancer-causing nitrosamines from its latex yoga mats.
- Served legal notice on 11 companies selling canned coconut water claiming to be BPA free that testing showed in fact contained BPA. “We will negotiate with them in hopes that they will remove it,” says Charles-Guzman.
CEH also does policy work, engaging officeholders and public entities. One way it angles for systemic change is through something as seemingly mundane as procurement.
New York City, where Charles-Guzman spent years working for three mayors on various aspects of sustainability, climate, and public health, spends more than $30 billion a year just on goods and services, she says. It makes sense to persuade municipalities that healthier, safer, and greener choices don’t have to break the budget. CEH has developed toolkits and standards to share with school districts, for example, to demonstrate improvements to be achieved by using steelware and reusables rather than one-time-use plastics.
It takes a long time to get a policy passed, she points out, but when it does, depending on where, it affects thousands or millions of people: “That’s the power of making sure our environmental health protections are baked into our legislation.”
There is also power in having a seat at the table—but if you feel alone in that seat, power can seem diluted. Charles-Guzman has spent too many years being the lone Black or brown face at a few too many tables. Even the winner of a White House Champions of Change Award can feel tired. What would help, she told the podcast audience: “[M]ore people like me, coming from the kind of neighborhood that I came from . . . having had the environmental health impacts that affected my community, in order to better inform the legislation, the policy, the partnerships.”
Echoing fellow Carleton grads, she urges being part of a large-scale cultural shift. “Healthy people are the only way we get to a strong democracy, a sustainable economy, and a clean environment,” Charles-Guzman declares. “We are in a fight for our lives: solid waste management, clean energy production, a just transition away from petrochemicals, ridding ourselves and our environment of forever chemicals.”
“We need a full reframe in how we are living as a society,” she adds. “Together, we can create a healthier, safer, more equitable world—thriving communities where fewer people suffer from preventable health issues.”
The Storyteller
John Fiege ’97, Director, Fiege Films
“This throw-away society.” It’s a term a lot of people throw around. John Fiege ’97 takes it literally. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he’s making a feature documentary, The Valley of Ashes, to combine the history of solid waste in New York City with the promise of creating a circular economy and changing a throw-away mentality to a zero-waste mentality.
“We’ve been asking where to put all the waste we’ve been generating in dramatically increasing quantities,” he told a State University of New York at Buffalo publication in October. “Instead, we should be asking how we can redesign our economic systems and ways of living to eliminate waste or transform it into something we need, like soil.”
At Buffalo, Fiege is assistant professor of media study and teaches several environmental media courses. Through Fiege Films, the producer, director, cinematographer, and photographer has been urgently bringing climate and ecological crises to Americans’ attention. Slow Season (2014) focused on Louisiana crab fishermen’s hard times following the 2010 BP oil spill, and the award-winning Above All Else (2014) documented resistance in East Texas to the Keystone XL pipeline.
“The pipeline fight made enormous progress in connecting with people in the middle of the country. Ranchers, farmers, everyday folks,” Fiege, who holds a master’s in cultural geography and environmental history and an MFA in film production, told KETR-FM at the time. “If oil prices were to drop, suddenly tar sands production would shut down. So the flip side of that is, if you can make it too expensive to get tar sands to market, it will shut itself down.”
Fiege’s new film emerged from a call he got from environmental historian Martin Melosi, who had just published a book on a 2,200-acre landfill in Staten Island, Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City. Fiege wanted to explore the idea of making a related film. Fresh Kills, once the world’s largest landfill, is undergoing a reclamation project to become a park three times the size of Central Park.
And Fiege’s title? In The Great Gatsby, the valley of ashes is a fictional version of the Corona Ash Dump, which was a dumping ground in Queens for coal ash from the city’s furnaces, with “spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it.” Above the landfill sits a billboard for an eye doctor featuring a pair of “blue and gigantic” eyes staring down.
Is Fiege the accusing set of eyes here, saying that the city and humankind are covering up their trash problem? What will The Valley of Ashes tell us?
The title is both figurative and literal. In the novel, the valley of ashes was a depressed industrial area that separated Manhattan from the wealthy Long Island suburbs. “Fitzgerald used the image as a metaphor for the corruption of money and societal rot,” says Fiege.
Fresh Kills was supposed to be a temporary solution to the problems created by the patchwork of dumps and incinerators around the city and the practice of dumping waste into the ocean. In fact, it was open for more than half a century. Since then, much of the city’s waste has been sent to small towns all over the East Coast by train. Restating his “wrong question” premise, he says, “Then, we asked, what do we do with all our trash? When really we should ask, ‘How do we not produce it all?’” With food and yard waste making up some one-third of NYC trash, composting and waste avoidance are major goals.
Meanwhile, Fiege is the Carleton Pied Piper of environmental filmmaking. He collects Carls and takes them along on his mission to enlighten, educate, and inspire the viewing public.
On tour with Above All Else in 2015, when he was Bernstein Visiting Scholar and alumnus-in-residence at Carleton, Fiege met Sofia Chang ’16, who worked with him the following summer in Austin on early research and editing. Later, Leah Meltzer ’18 and Lina Fisher ’19 interned with him on the upcoming environmental justice feature Raising Aniya. Fiege hired Chang to edit the same film. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she helped connect him to other Carleton interns, who worked on his new eco-podcast, Chrysalis. One of those interns, Sarah Westrich ’22 now works with him regularly and will be assisting on The Valley of Ashes.
Fiege hopes that with NEH support, The Valley of Ashes will finally have the kind of impact he’s always dreamed of having—to reach a really broad audience. “The vast majority of people don’t appreciate the severity of ecological problems we face,” he says. That’s barely beginning to change. “How we live, eat, buy, vote, express our values—it’s a difficult process to change the culture.”
Part of his role is to make it a little more attractive. “The environmental narrative has long been ‘We’ve done terrible things to the planet, and fixing it will require austerity.’ I say, if we fix it, things get better: happier, more fulfilling, more beautiful. We can heal a lot of the damage from the Industrial Revolution.
“That’s what films are for. They inspire us.”
Ellen Ryan is a Rockville, Md.–based writer who specializes in profiles.