Author: blum

Author:
Brittany Schell

Since it was established in 2006, the Blum Center has supported green innovation at UC Berkeley and around the world. Both the Big Ideas@Berkeley student competition and various faculty-led initiatives have produced projects that simultaneously improve the lives of individuals and benefit the environment.

Since the first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, the modern environmental movement has taken shape. Over the past four decades, ideas about conservation, energy efficiency, and sustainability have come to the forefront of innovation.

In honor of Earth Day 2012, the Blum Center recognizes the vast array of green ideas that have been realized at UC Berkeley over the years, with the support of the center and other partners—from energy efficient stoves in Darfur, Tanzania and Ghana to a local bike share program, to solar energy projects and a proposal to “green” Berkeley’s campus.

This year, we have a whole new group of student contestants for Big Ideas@Berkeley. The contest winners will be announced on May 1, so stay tuned. For more information on this or any of the projects listed to the right, visit our website: http://blumcenter.berkeley.edu

Author:
Luis Flores

“We’re doing research in reverse,” explained student researcher Stephanie Ullrich. “We’re going from practice to theory.”

This semester, the Blum Center for Developing Economies welcomed five students from the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP) to assist Professor Ananya Roy and research fellow Emma Shaw Crane in the development of a book on the recently held Territories of Poverty conference. These student researchers are not motivated by an imperative to publish, nor are they seeking a key to the gates of the academy; rather, these young scholars embody a paradigmatic shift that is at the core of the Global Poverty and Practice (GPP) minor. Their research approach is informed by the contextual understandings developed in lecture halls and reading rooms but cedes formative authority to the inhabitants of the territories of poverty.

Stephaine Ullrich, a senior pursuing degrees in Peace and Conflict Studies and Media Studies, will work along with Anh-Thi Le, Aviya McGuire, Somaya Abdelgany, and Rebecca Peters, on the development of a book to be published next semester. In addition to a deep interest in global citizenship, Ullrich and her student colleagues share a new outlook on development practice and research.

Ullrich, who has worked on a variety of initiatives in Spain, Guatemala, northern India, and Uganda, has entered academic research after a great deal of in-the-field experience. While in India, Ullrich worked for Tata, one of the largest companies in India. During her time there, she conducted research aimed to increase the role of women in the management of water wells. She then completed her GPP practice experience in Uganda, where she worked with the Uganda Village Project on its “Healthy Villages” project. Ullrich worked with community-based organizations on efforts to increase virus awareness.

Student research assistant Rebecca Peters, a senior in International Development & Economics, shares Ullrich’s community-oriented approach. “I didn’t say, ‘I’m here to help you,’ but instead said, ‘let’s have a conversation,’” explained Peters, recounting her research approach in Cochabamba, Bolivia. During the summer of 2012, Peters conducted interviews and surveys in Bolivia to document rural access to water and sanitation services. She chose to work with Agua Para el Pueblo (water for the village), largely because of the value this NGO places on community relationships and participation. This commitment to listen rather than impose is among the transformative innovations of the GPP experience.

The cautiousness displayed by Peters and Ullrich results from exposure to the multitude of failed systems that together create conditions of poverty. The fear of inadvertently reinforcing these structures through their fieldwork is itself an attribute of the new generation of poverty scholars. Yet Peters and Ullrich do not allow consciousness to become disabling.

“Not becoming paralyzed is something that the minor really helps you with,” explained Peters. She reasoned that the GPP minor’s coursework on the ethics and morality of fieldwork allowed her to gather research while challenging north-south development paradigms.

In addition to their research with Professor Roy, Peters and Ullrich co-teach a student-led deCal course on water and international human rights. In their second semester of teaching, Peters and Ullrich expose 30 students to international discourses of human rights and water and their relationship to public policy, anthropology, sociology, economics, and even philosophy. In addition to examining case studies, Ullrich and Peter’s course bring in guest lecturers, and concludes with capstone group presentations.

The new generation of poverty scholars is bound neither by disciplinary borders, linear development theories, nor dichotomous understandings of poverty. Perhaps, more than progressing from practice to theory, this young group of scholars is forcing theory and practice to develop not as a binary, but together as one.

Author:
Christina Gossmann

Abby Van Muijen graduated from UC Berkeley in 2012 with a major in urban design. Now she works at the Blum Center as a Visual Communication Specialist, developing a new learning tool for the Global Poverty and Practice (GPP) minor and teaching a class on visual notetaking.

What is visual notetaking? Regardless of whether you’re putting a box around a word, improving your handwriting or sketching out entire pages, visual notetaking is all about breaking away from the conventional structure of notetaking that we’ve all fallen so helplessly into. We’re imagining alternatives to the spiral bound notebooks we all have–the ones filled with nothing but lines and lines of words that we will undoubtedly throw away at the end of the semester.

How did you start visual note-taking? I actually started visual notetaking while I was studying abroad. I was listening to guest lectures, working on projects, visiting sites and being given a lot of information, but the structure of the program made me feel like I didn’t need to remember everything. So I only wrote down the things I really wanted to remember. I would write words really bold or draw boxes around them and spent a lot of time doodling, drawing and listening. At the end of the trip, I had a sketchbook full of just the things I wanted to remember. But more than just having pages that sparked a lot of interest aesthetically, I felt like I was learning much more efficiently. I didn’t have to re-teach myself everything I had copied down in lecture anymore. I could look back at the visuals I had made and remember what I was thinking when I made them and studying felt more like reading a comic book than painfully trying to cram information into my brain.

What is The GPP coloring book? It is a compilation of all of my visual notes from Ananya Roy’s GPP 115 course from last fall when I took the class. This fall, students have been experimenting with it as a learning tool. Half of the book provides a visual outline of the lecture material so that students can sit in lecture and focus on understanding the main concepts, rather than worry about copying down every detail. The other half of the book consists of pages designed for students to fill in their own thoughts, questions, opinions and any other details that they feel are significant–the things they want to remember. The goal of the coloring book is not to get students to start bringing crayons to class, but rather to go beyond the black and white information they are presented with and add a bit of “color” of their own.

You teach a class on visual note-taking at Berkeley. Who takes this class and how do you go about teaching? I took my first drawing class my sophomore year in college. On the first day, they told us to spend 15 minutes drawing whatever we wanted. I drew a tree that looked like a stick of cotton candy with a small, slightly ill-looking stick figure that I initially intended to be myself, but out of embarrassment, put a top hat on and labeled as Abraham Lincoln. Needless to say, it was an incredibly unimpressive effort. That was two years ago. I wasn’t magically bestowed with the ability to take notes the way I do. It was something I practiced every day, and taught myself how to do. I started Visual Notetaking 101 because I realized that this is a skill that people can learn. Visual notetaking can revolutionize your entire outlook on your education, as it did for me. Seeing your thoughts and ideas and opinions come to life, even if just on paper, is empowering. Rather than feeling sleepy and confused at the end of a lecture and having gained nothing more than a headache and a few pieces of binder paper that I won’t look at until the midterm. I now walk out of lecture feeling brilliant, creative and accomplished every day, holding on to a few pages of paper that I might cry if I lost. And that’s what I came to UC Berkeley to do, to be inspired each and every day not just by my professors, but my myself and my classmates.

How does the class work? Visual Notetaking 101 is designed so that everyone can participate. We have about 150 students from all different majors, ages, drawing abilities and walks of life. We meet every week for an hour and a half to take on a new element of visual learning beyond just visual notetaking, everything from fonts and page layouts to engaging presentation slides and résumé design. Each class starts off with a review, a quick lecture, a series of workshop activities, and for homework, we practice more. For the final review at the end of the semester students must come up with a project that is visual, academic and awesome. Last year’s projects were absolutely phenomenal–I’d encourage anyone interested to come check them out this year.

The Final Review for Visual Notetaking 101 will take place on December 4th in the Blum Center classrooms.

Author:
Javier Kordi

Twitter has played a critical role in helping oppressed citizens challenge totalitarian regimes around the globe. Being able to transmit messages to a global audience within seconds, the site has led to a phenomenon that social scientists call “ambient awareness:” the notion that we can possess omnipresent knowledge of the whereabouts of friends, celebrities, organizations, and most recently, the course of history—all through 140-character blurbs of information known as “tweets.”

The micro-blogging service helped overthrow Mubarak in Egypt and challenge information blackouts in China, but in Ananya Roy’s Global Poverty and Practice class, it took on quite a different hue. While the sight of 700 students using their gadgets during class may resemble anarchy for some, a new sort of classroom community was being fostered through the use of Twitter.

Professor Roy described her mission as establishing “a democratic means of communication, [to] change how we learn and how we interact.” No longer restrained by the convention of hand-raising or one’s shyness, students were given the opportunity to have their ideas heard. In the realm of Twitter, students are free to exchange ideas, challenge others, and even alter the course of the lecture.

As Professor Roy delivered her lecture on Jeffery Sachs and William Easterly, a live Twitter feed was projected on the screen behind her. Grouped under the hash-tag #GlobalPov, a mosaic of ideas and commentary materialized behind Professor Roy, back dropping her lecture and adding a new dimension of interaction.

Tara Graham, the architect of this project, explains how it seeks to “encourage a many-to-many lecture”, where “the feed becomes the focal point” of the classroom. Chipping away at the tradition of hierarchical education, the Twitter project restructures social relations within the classroom.

While most professors have chosen to outright ban social networking during class, the approach undertaken by Professors Roy and Graham reflects a new ideology. Tara argues that “the idea in pedagogy is figuring out how to reach the ‘millennial generation’. Instead of complaining about these tools, the faculty needs to start confronting the tools.” This is particularly relevant in the context of the Global Poverty and Practice curriculum, where students are being trained to be active members in the public debates surrounding development. Being a public medium, Twitter allows anyone to join the conversation, but also forces Berkeley students to think of themselves as public scholars— everything they post falls under the scrutiny of the global community.

This is certainly uncharted territory. In the digital age, student’s engagement with scholars shouldn’t be limited to black-and-white texts on the tables of Doe Library. While students discussed the debate between Sachs and Easterly on the #GlobalPov Twitter feed, they were a mere “@” symbol away from sending their messages directly to these scholars’ personal Twitter accounts. Professor Graham concludes: “It can do for academia what it has done for celebrity culture… how people feel like they have a direct connection with the celebrity. Academics don’t have to be so distant… there can be more of a connection.”

Ultimately, Twitter has the ability to disintegrate barriers and foster a new academic community where all voices are heard—even those thousands of miles away from Wheeler Hall.

Author:
Christina Gossmann

“When people ask me what I do and I tell them that I work on poverty, I get one of two responses,” Emma Shaw Crane told a room full of attendees during her closing remarks at the Territories of Poverty conference. “One answer is ‘Oh my God, I love KIVA [a non-profit microfinance institution]! I actually have this woman that I’m lending five dollars to every month’ or I get the raised eyebrows and ‘Oh, how is that going?’”

 The audience chuckled, and Shaw Crane continued to explain that these common reactions represented the often limited scope of thought about poverty scholarship.

The interdisciplinary, intergenerational two-day conference took place on the 14th and 15th of September and was hosted by the Blum Center for Developing Economies and the Department of City and Regional Planning. In two panels on Friday and one panel on Saturday morning, 12 academics from different disciplines, each with a unique set of experiences and opinions, worked on expanding the definition of poverty scholarship. The discussion was built around three major themes: new paradigms of the welfare state, the ethics of encounter and geographies of penality and risk.

Working at the intersection of these three themes, Shaw Crane was not afraid to challenge traditional poverty scholarship and the scholars who had influenced her throughout her academic and professional career. As an undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley, she was surprised to learn that “experts on poverty” had often learned about poverty in an elite environment, a trend that Shaw Crane felt necessary to change. Instead of staying in the classroom, theory should dare leave academia to enter the field; in essence, theory should “ride the bus,” Shaw Crane suggested, borrowing the metaphor from poet Ruth Forman. Shaw Crane decided to pursue the minor in Global Poverty and Practice (GPP) because it undermined the hierarchy of top-down poverty scholarship.

“The minor is a project of dislocation,” Shaw Crane said. “Because it sends undergraduates, me included, into the field to engage in the messy and contradictory and complex work of poverty alleviation and the work of building power with community organizations and government institutions.”

Shaw Crane’s own path since graduating from UC Berkeley can be seen as a testament to this interdisciplinary approach of theory and practice. After receiving the University Medal, an award given to the student with the most outstanding academic record, Shaw Crane researched the impact of the new healthcare system in the lives of families living with HIV in Bogotá, Colombia as a Fulbright fellow. She returned to the Bay Area to work in a community health clinic and organizing project in Oakland, until she joined the Blum Center as a research fellow earlier this year. Together with Professor Ananya Roy, Shaw Crane co-directed the Territories of Poverty conference, a get-together of her “intellectual dream team, an inter-generational, inter-disciplinary wish-list,” as she jokingly referred to the panelists.

According to Shaw Crane, the conference is also a project of dislocation, from studying “the bodies and places and behaviors and choices of the often pathologized poor” to examining and challenging institutions that manage and govern poverty. Poverty then, explained Shaw Crane, is no longer a problem of specific people, “for whom the rest of us can choose to engage with, with benevolence and often tremendous self-importance,” but poverty is a larger process that reflects how capitalism works, how inequality is produced, spatialized and governed and how the middle-class makes and unmakes itself.

In her closing remarks, Shaw Crane brought attention to another inspirational piece within this new paradigm of poverty scholarship that was introduced by Michael Katz, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Not only do the conference and GPP minor provide specific implementation strategies, but they show that the gap between theory and implementation is filled with power, “very serious and constructive and problematic and complex, but nonetheless, power,” Shaw Crane said.

“That is something I need to write on a Post-It note and carry around with me for the rest of my life!” With these words, she looked into the audience of practicing poverty scholars and poverty scholars to be. Many heads nodded in agreement and numerous hands took the note down, to make sure not to forget.

It is building awareness around the notion of power and possibility—through this conference and the minor—that enables new frontiers in poverty scholarship.

Author:
Luis Flores

On a rainy Wednesday evening, 23 UC Berkeley students from a broad range of disciplines gathered for class in a seminar room in the imposing University Hall—each taking a seat around a mysterious “Hello Kitty” stuffed doll. After a few minutes, the table was filled with seemingly unrelated products: cartoon toothpaste and toothbrush sets, a doggy-bag dispenser and a manicure set.

The lesson of the week was the potential of “bundling” products and services in public health. Creatively integrated with a colorful first-aid kit, the “Hello Kitty” emergency stuffed doll illustrated a way to incentivize the adoption of responsible health practices using cultural tastes. It is no surprise that a course focused on developing innovative solutions is taught creatively as well.

Often described as one of the most innovative courses on campus, Designing Innovative Public Health Solutions, a course sponsored by Blum Center, gives students an invaluable opportunity to engage with real clients in developing cutting edge solutions to real public health problems. “There are a lot of opportunities to do things much better,” explained course instructor Jaspal Sandhu, who holds degrees from MIT and UC Berkeley.

He said the course was designed to address a “need for applied skills” in approaches to public health. The course imparts the innovative approach of understanding problems, not from a theoretical perspective, but from the perspective of practitioners and recipients of public health. “We often design a good fix to the wrong problem,” lamented Jaspal.

Course co-instructor Nap Hosang, lecturer of Community Health and Human Development, advises students on their projects.
Andrea Spillmann, who recently received her MPH, was among the first group of students to enroll in Jaspal’s course. “Most of our other courses teach you what’s been done and why and how,” Andrea remarked, “either teaching you how to replicate that or why you should not replicate that.” While Andrea finds those skill sets helpful, the course on Designing Innovative Public Health Solutions helped her critically approach the root of problems and to reframe both problems and solutions in unconventional ways. Andrea’s project reflects this critical approach.

Working with Tal Amiel, an MPP candidate, Andrea began working with Tekla Labs to develop cheaply and readily available blueprints for lab equipment in Nicaragua. However, after traveling to Nicaragua for a pilot program, Andrea and Tal noticed problems overlooked by their clients. “We noticed a drawer full of pipettes, unused because no one knew how to calibrate them,” recounted Andrea. It became apparent that health labs in Nicaragua did not need more equipment but needed to maintain and fix the equipment they already had.

Andrea and Tal then redirected their efforts at a more pressing problem, proposing the development of videos, plans, and a hotline to connect labs in Nicaragua with experts elsewhere who could give them advice on how to maintain equipment.

Photo Credit: Jaspal Sandhu
This semester in Jaspal’s class, students are working in groups on seven different projects, ranging from the development of a prototype investment module for drinking water franchises in rural Mexico to an initiative to increase MediCal enrollment in California’s Santa Clara Valley.

Taking about an hour of the three-hour class, guest lectures who are innovators in different industries introduce students to creative practitioners in different fields. Guests have included Chris McCarthy, a Kaiser Permanente innovation specialist who is behind the popular KP MedRite sash—which reduces medical errors in hospitals by creating “no-interruption” wear to minimize distractions in the administrating of medication.

Another inspiring lecture by a New York Times author showed the success for channeling youth rebellion away from smoking. By showing how tobacco companies work to manipulate the youth, a pioneering campaign to promote youth rebellion against tobacco companies became highly effective in reducing teenage smoking.

If the past is any indicator, students will continue to be drawn to the course, which “turns traditional analysis completely inside out,” as Ruco Van Der Merwe, a current student in the course, explained. Perhaps just as important, the course will help develop a new community of professional practitioners in public health who are unafraid to critically engage with traditional paradigms and who are poised to innovate for the public good.

 Author:
Javier Kordi

When set on fire, a sandal made of discarded tire rubber emits eight hours of low grade, dirty light. Although unconventional, in Southern Kenya—where a lack of grid electricity and shortages of kerosene, batteries, and wood cause people to burn whatever is at hand— such extreme measures are not uncommon. One interviewee reported burning about six sandals every year.

Nearly two centuries after Thomas Edison proclaimed that “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles,” 1.6 billion people continue to suffer from light poverty—more than the entire population of the world at the time of Edison’s breakthrough. Having to rely primarily on kerosene—and an odd mix of other sources, including candles, fish oil, yak butter, twigs, diesel fuel, and even footwear— people are constantly exposed to dangerous fumes and fire hazards which contribute to a panoply of health problems and climate change.

In 1995, after witnessing the darkness of rural India, scientist Evan Mills set out to create the LUMINA Project—an initiative based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory committed to combating the light poverty of the developing world. After a decade of laying the groundwork on a shoestring, an investment by the Rosenfeld Fund for Sustainable Development at the Blum Center in 2007 helped the organization to pick up momentum. Today, LBNL and Humboldt State University scientists and engineers are deploying systems for evaluating the quality of systems based on white light-emitting diodes (WLEDs) and conducting important market research and field tests—in collaboration with product manufacturers— striving to deliver the promise of sustainability, durability, and affordability. Many students at both universities have been involved.

LEDs are by no means a new technology, but before LUMINA, no systems were in place to consistently test the quality of small off-grid lighting systems. When some lighting manufacturers began introducing low-quality products into the market, LUMINA was ready. With lifespans as low as a few weeks, the only notable outcome produced by low-quality devices was disappointment. Product testing work done previously by LUMINA quickly revealed the consequences of bad design and the potential for better outcomes. ‘Lighting Africa’, an initiative of the World Bank and of other partners inspired by LUMINA, created a system based on LUMINA’s work to test and certify new products. Inspired by a report commissioned from LUMINA in 2011, the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism passed a new methodology for combating light poverty while enabling carbon emissions reductions achieved by new technologies to be valued and traded through the Clean Development Mechanism. Titled “AMS-III-AR”, this international framework sets industry standards for off-grid lighting products receiving carbon-trading credits. These regulations are harmonized with the Lighting Africa standards. Additional “points” are received by products that perform even better. A series of market trials conducted in Africa by LUMINA have proved promising—people are eager to purchase solar-powered LEDs and showed high levels of satisfaction with their quality-assured new lights (the latest trials in Kenya are documented in LUMINA’s Project Technical Report #6). Following the World Bank’s lead, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu launched an initiative on off-grid lighting at the Copenhagen climate conference, and is now supporting LUMINA’s work.

With this new technology and framework, the prospect for growth is immense. In 2010, Evan and colleagues conducted a field trial using LEDs in poultry production (where kerosene is the norm). Lighting a large chicken coup (3000 chickens!) with LEDs instead of kerosene cut operating costs dramatically and created a safer environment for farmers and chickens. This year, Berkeley students Tim Gengnagel and Phillipp Wolburg are in Tanzania working with fishermen on Lake Victoria. Every night, about 22,000 fishermen take to the lake with kerosene pressure lamps to attract their catch. In recent years, yields have been plummeting due to climate change and pollution. These night-fishermen spend up to a dollar a day per lantern on kerosene—a huge amount of their income. LEDs could change the economic equation dramatically, and fishermen have indeed been happy with the LED prototypes brought to them by LUMINA.

Nearly two decades in the making, LUMINA has broken new ground in the fight against light poverty. With continued support, the organization and its partners may one day bring light to all. For more information, such as updates, project reports, and photographs, visit the project’s website at: http://light.lbl.gov/field.html or Evan’s blog at http://offgridlighting.posterous.com/.

 Author:
Javier Kordi

When set on fire, a sandal made of discarded tire rubber emits eight hours of low grade, dirty light. Although unconventional, in Southern Kenya—where a lack of grid electricity and shortages of kerosene, batteries, and wood cause people to burn whatever is at hand— such extreme measures are not uncommon. One interviewee reported burning about six sandals every year.

Nearly two centuries after Thomas Edison proclaimed that “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles,” 1.6 billion people continue to suffer from light poverty—more than the entire population of the world at the time of Edison’s breakthrough. Having to rely primarily on kerosene—and an odd mix of other sources, including candles, fish oil, yak butter, twigs, diesel fuel, and even footwear— people are constantly exposed to dangerous fumes and fire hazards which contribute to a panoply of health problems and climate change.

In 1995, after witnessing the darkness of rural India, scientist Evan Mills set out to create the LUMINA Project—an initiative based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory committed to combating the light poverty of the developing world. After a decade of laying the groundwork on a shoestring, an investment by the Rosenfeld Fund for Sustainable Development at the Blum Center in 2007 helped the organization to pick up momentum. Today, LBNL and Humboldt State University scientists and engineers are deploying systems for evaluating the quality of systems based on white light-emitting diodes (WLEDs) and conducting important market research and field tests—in collaboration with product manufacturers— striving to deliver the promise of sustainability, durability, and affordability. Many students at both universities have been involved.

LEDs are by no means a new technology, but before LUMINA, no systems were in place to consistently test the quality of small off-grid lighting systems. When some lighting manufacturers began introducing low-quality products into the market, LUMINA was ready. With lifespans as low as a few weeks, the only notable outcome produced by low-quality devices was disappointment. Product testing work done previously by LUMINA quickly revealed the consequences of bad design and the potential for better outcomes. ‘Lighting Africa’, an initiative of the World Bank and of other partners inspired by LUMINA, created a system based on LUMINA’s work to test and certify new products. Inspired by a report commissioned from LUMINA in 2011, the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism passed a new methodology for combating light poverty while enabling carbon emissions reductions achieved by new technologies to be valued and traded through the Clean Development Mechanism. Titled “AMS-III-AR”, this international framework sets industry standards for off-grid lighting products receiving carbon-trading credits. These regulations are harmonized with the Lighting Africa standards. Additional “points” are received by products that perform even better. A series of market trials conducted in Africa by LUMINA have proved promising—people are eager to purchase solar-powered LEDs and showed high levels of satisfaction with their quality-assured new lights (the latest trials in Kenya are documented in LUMINA’s Project Technical Report #6). Following the World Bank’s lead, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu launched an initiative on off-grid lighting at the Copenhagen climate conference, and is now supporting LUMINA’s work.

With this new technology and framework, the prospect for growth is immense. In 2010, Evan and colleagues conducted a field trial using LEDs in poultry production (where kerosene is the norm). Lighting a large chicken coup (3000 chickens!) with LEDs instead of kerosene cut operating costs dramatically and created a safer environment for farmers and chickens. This year, Berkeley students Tim Gengnagel and Phillipp Wolburg are in Tanzania working with fishermen on Lake Victoria. Every night, about 22,000 fishermen take to the lake with kerosene pressure lamps to attract their catch. In recent years, yields have been plummeting due to climate change and pollution. These night-fishermen spend up to a dollar a day per lantern on kerosene—a huge amount of their income. LEDs could change the economic equation dramatically, and fishermen have indeed been happy with the LED prototypes brought to them by LUMINA.

Nearly two decades in the making, LUMINA has broken new ground in the fight against light poverty. With continued support, the organization and its partners may one day bring light to all. For more information, such as updates, project reports, and photographs, visit the project’s website at: http://light.lbl.gov/field.html or Evan’s blog at http://offgridlighting.posterous.com/.

UC Berkeley is traveling back in time. The campus is on track to reduce its carbon footprint to 1990 levels in two years, with the long-term goal of achieving carbon neutrality. The drive to accomplish this began in 2005 when a group of graduates, undergraduates and faculty members drafted a letter to the administration seeking to place a cap on campus carbon emissions. The administration replied with a challenge: to put together a practical, measurable feasibility plan.

The result was CalCAP, UC Berkeley’s Climate Action Partnership, a student-led initiative that took up the daunting task of calculating all of the University’s emissions and drafting recommendations to the administration.

“No university at the time had tried to inventory what it’s carbon emission was at that point,” explained Scott Zimmerman, a graduate of Boalt Law School who helped develop CalCAP during his time as a graduate student. “It just made sense that we would try to tap into what is going on in the labs and use the campus as a testing bed for those ideas.”

After taking first prize at the first Big Ideas@Berkeley contest, CalCAP gathered a group of eight students to comprehensively measure the campus’ carbon footprint. Considering everything from faculty and staff commutes, fugitive emissions of refrigeration, and even student’s air travel, the resulting feasibility study of 2007 convinced the administration to accept CalCAP’s proposed targets.

Former CalCAP project manager, Fahmida Ahmed believes the group’s success is due to the genuine passion of the students involved. For students, it was very personal.

“It was important for it to be home-grown,” noted Fahmida, who now works as the Associate Director of Stanford’s Office of Sustainability, “We wanted our institution as a whole to look within and understand where we are and where we want to go from there.”

Seeded from a modest award from Big Ideas, CalCAP has grown immensely. The organization has gone on to inspire other UC campuses to adopt similar emission targets. Yet even with the added responsibilities, students have continued to play an active role in the initiative. Every year, graduate students enrolled in the Sustainability in Action: CalCAP course conduct extensive greenhouse gas emission inventories in order to evaluate the campus’ progress toward its sustainability goals. The latest study found that the UC Berkeley campus is currently exceeding the 2014 target by 42,000 metric tons of carbon emissions.

In addition to policy suggestions, like the switch from coal to natural gas power, CalCAP is actively engaged in developing sustainable habits in the everyday lives of students. On their website, an interactive feature allows students to calculate the carbon impact of their air travel. Moreover, the just-released MyEnergy at Berkeley dashboard, a collaboration between numerous campus organizations, allows students to track energy consumption in 57 buildings on campus day by day, constantly reminding students of the environmental impact.

Environmental initiatives often struggle to garner support for goals that are marginal and difficult to see. But CalCAP’s interdisciplinary approach that strives to consider all stakeholders has ensured widespread support of its carefully chosen reduction targets. While the research of accomplished scientists on campus provides the resources for environmental progress, CalCAP shows that it often takes the drive and passion of students to push for measurable reform.