My Road to TEDx Vail – Colorado’s Natural Beauty, Powerful Photography, Community Action, Women, and Rapid Prototyping Climate Change. -Robert Castellino
I have been thinking about this question: “How do I see the change I want to achieve today before it’s too late?” for a long long time. It’s a mantra I live by. You must know I have been working to make our suburban Lafayette, Colorado home net zero and to reduce our water use by 50% for about seven years. I have first-hand experience. It is not that hard, and it is possible to do in a little more than a year.
Recently, I have been working diligently to figure out how to solve the global climate crisis by taking definitive action locally. I have wanted to make a significant contribution to solving the climate crisis for years. And as unlikely as that might be possible, I had a dream of making a TEDx talk of significance to influence the potential for that to happen. The opportunity knocked one pre-dawn morning last November via an impromptu Facebook message with a new friend who wrote, “Hey Robert! Would you like to photograph TEDxVail on Friday, January 9?” I thought that’s fine but would she consider...? Let me explain.
A couple of years ago, I decided I needed to take action to save the natural beauty that has inspired me throughout my life. As a professional photographer, I had been making photographs from all corners of Colorado for more than thirty years. I saw the changes of the global climate crisis happening right before my eyes in the Colorado natural environment everywhere. I have 45,000 nature photographs on film and digitally archived to show, and have photographed, written and self-published five books about my love of Colorado’s natural beauty. In addition, I ran a small publishing based on the fundamental principles of Business for Social Responsibility and produced eco-friendly products to inspire folks by connecting them to nature through art.
Then things really started moving. The summer of 2013, I attended Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Training Program in Chicago. I couldn’t imagine having to give ten talks on “The Inconvenient Truth,” without showing how things have changed and are changing in Colorado, even though I signed an agreement that I would make them. But something was burning really hot inside me and I needed to find an answer to solve this problem. I was flummoxed with the idea of taking 30, 20 or even 10 years to get something done to put a hard stop on global warming and the climate crisis that could happen in 5 years. Why wait that long for a genius to deliver the world changing technological advance in a silver bullet, or have global leaders try to make the policy changes, we needed them to make 20 years ago, next year in Paris?
So I took my slide presentation, “The Effects of Climate Change on Colorado,” to Mario Molina the Director of Programming for The Climate Reality Project. Forty-five minutes into the slide show, he asserted, “Why not start a non-profit to build a movement in Colorado?” So I founded ClimateColorado.org.
That was the easy part. My dear friend, professor Emeritus at CU’s Environmental School of Design, and former Boulder City Council Member, Spense Havlick validated my thoughts in a conversation one morning after church by saying, “Why not by 2020?” Those numbers where magic to my ears. So I began developing a campaign to accomplish the mission --The Switch 2020-- campaign. The objective? Move Colorado away from burning fossils as fuels to renewables and reduce our water use 50% by 2020.
When I began doing my research to back up my argument that this was possible, I arrived at the idea about how to involve people to get it done. Community is the key driver to get anything done in-mass. Thinking about Colorado, how can we reach 64 counties and make a difference on the ground? There are seven diverse and different regions in our state. We have “hugely” different cultural interests based on where we live in Colorado. The daunting question - how can we reach out across cultural barriers, a vast geographic area, complex set of demographics; and how to bring normal people together who aren’t just activists but who are doing things, who care, and want to get this done?
Next, I began to dig deeper into who makes the decisions about the choices for how they choose to power and energize their lives. In a conversation with Lea Yancey Outreach Director for Boulder’s Energy Smart Program, the answer landed hard on the table with a simple smile in a powerful word, “Women!” Women’s role as leaders in combating climate change has a financial aspect as well. The average household in Colorado spends between $650 and $1,200 a month on energy — that’s everything from heating and cooling and electricity to purchasing gasoline for a car. On average, women make decisions about how finances are spent on energy in the home 83 percent more often than men. So if women can be convinced to make changes in the home —fixing leaks; adding insulation; changing to LED light bulbs, furnaces and hot water heaters to energy-efficient models; installing solar panels; purchasing an electric car— millions of Coloradan families will make the switch.
A big factor in convincing people to make that shift is showing them that it’s within their financial reach. There are many financing programs available for households and businesses to make efficiency upgrades, install photovoltaic and solar thermal systems. But they aren’t designed to reach everyone. Reaching across diverse community lines is the key to addressing the climate change crisis.
Census data shows that Latinos make up approximately 21 percent of the state’s population or about 1.1 million people, and according to projections from the State Demography Office, Latinos will make up one-third of Colorado’s population by 2040. That is close to 2.64 million Latinos. And that’s not including African Americans, Asians and others. Latinos and all ethnic populations in Colorado need to be empowered to make the change, and offered financial options that they can afford to decrease their energy expenditures.
"We can break our bad habits, if we want to. There are good, conservative Americans who are concerned about their household budgets. If we can demonstrate that by making solar upgrades and switching to electric vehicles, they can then be putting $7,000 a year (saved) in their back pockets. You'd think this would be something they wouldn’t turn their cheeks to."
HOW? I kept hearing one word from people that listened to my proposal to make the Switch by 2020---“How?” During a meeting last spring with a graphic designer and activist working on our project, a very strong young vibrant woman, she asked, “Ever hear of Tom Chi and Rapid Prototyping? You might really like his idea.” With the Colorado Climate Summit scheduled for mid November “The How,” was delivered to me in a TEDx Talk found online made by none-other-than Tom Chi the Rapid Prototyping Guru from the infamous Google X Engineering Design Team. His presentation was one of the most inspiring fourteen minutes I had witnessed in years. The light went off about how to move people to get it done and to create inspiration and creativity in the process.
Tom Chi, Co-Founder of the Google X-Team, came up with the idea of rapid prototyping for engineering new products like Google Glass, the “driverless” car and the “smart contact lens” to help diabetics measure and regulate their glucose levels.What is rapid? Google Glass was brought to life in a day. What is prototyping? Prototyping is taking the best idea, testing it now, evaluating feedback to improve it and creating a new iteration to implement and test again.
Through his curious nature and travels, Chi began to apply the process to other worldly problems. Rapid Prototyping is about facilitating change and fast.
If the rapid prototyping process has helped Google come up with creative new ideas, why not apply it to other areas of life, where solutions to problems are stymied by politics, economics, and social stratification?
As fast as the climate crisis is advancing this is one process where all of us can engage.
The process for making action steps happen with our Climate Colorado Climate Summit Nov 14-15 was now clear. We presented summit attendees with Key Leaders who were facing Challenges on the ground here in Colorado attempting to solve the global climate crisis locally. Using rapid prototyping at the core of the summit’s process to solve these Challenges was the answer to begin the movement to make the change happen by 2020.
Two critical Colorado challenges delivered at the summit are vital to solving the climate crisis around the world. The first was to get every community to engage in taking action toward living Net Zero. The second challenge is to engage Latinos in places like Vail and communities around Colorado in the climate movement. The solutions were team driven using the rapid prototyping process. The solutions are plans each team has agreed to implement to begin the process to make the switch by 2020. The next step is to track with each team by checking with them as they knock-down milestones on their punch lists they set as markers on their path to successfully make the changes in Colorado’s climate.
Is there a magic bullet to solve the climate crisis? There isn’t one yet; but, by engaging people in taking action we are making progress and creating momentum and hope. And, by taking a high-tech engineering design team concept to invent products, then applying its principles to drive social change in short order, we are creating action toward solutions that we have all been waiting for. This is a recipe with tremendous potential to solve the problem locally.
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November 28, 2014. Private Message Exchange:
Kat to Robert, “No pressure, simply inviting you to play, since you requested being friends.”
Robert to Kat, “I would much prefer to make a presentation on Rapid Prototyping and Solving the Climate Crisis plus photograph. Both together and you have a deal.”
Kat to Robert, “Oh. I don't make deals, I only amplify good ideas. Though with my son, I must admit, I do find myself saying "Here's the deal" too often to coerce his better choices.”
I drove to Vail November 30th to ski and talk things over with Kat about giving a TEDx Talk, “Solving the Climate Crisis by Rapid Prototyping Change.” Now you can get involved! Come to my TEDx Talk on January 9th, 3-9PM. See you at the Vilar Performing Arts Center in Beaver Creek, CO.
Get your TEDxVail tickets today.
Robert Castellino,CEO & Founder, Master Photographer
