April 2022 green talks

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watch this year's video

Green Talks aims to engage and promote the importance of being environmentally conscious through one’s actions. On April 28, 2022 six speakers presented 15 minutes each followed by a speaker panel Q&A session in Price Center Theater Lobby.

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EDCO Disposal

Director of Recycling

Topic Summary: EDCO on the Road to Zero Waste: a complete overview of EDCO’s efforts as it pertains to diverting items from the landfill. All items diverted are captured in EDCO processing facilities and shipped to end users, and material is made into new products. Several years ago most of this material was landfilled.

Speaker Biography: Bob Hill was born and raised in Pittsburgh PA, and shortly after joining the Navy in 1982 he was stationed in San Diego, and remained stationed in San Diego throughout his entire Navy career. After serving in the Navy for 22 years Bob joined the EDCO team in January of 2005, as Director of Recycling. As Director of Recycling and Marketing, Bob establishes outlets for all of the material processed in EDCO facilities. In addition to establishing outlets for the typical blue recycle bin items Bob also finds end users for construction demolition debris, which includes wood, metal, concrete, and drywall. Bob also works to ensure we are diverting all the organics we collect in residential and commercial routes. Bob is a member of several boards in San Diego County, which include: Citizens Advisory Committee, San Diego Military Advisory Committee, and San Diego Earth Fair Coordination Committee. Bob currently resides in Ramona CA with his wife of 34 years. Bob also has 2 grown children who also live in San Diego.

Environmental Health Coalition

Climate Justice Director

Topic Summary: San Diego’s current transit system doesn’t work for our families, economy, health, or environment. It makes it hard for working families to access job opportunities, visit the doctor, and get groceries. It contributes to the climate crisis, and pollutes the air we breathe. EHC and a coalition of community members and partner organizations are fighting for a transit system that reduces greenhouse gas emissions, decreases lung-damaging air pollution, and meets the needs of the low-income communities of color, who depend on it the most. Join the movement.

Speaker Biography: Carolina Martinez, Climate Justice Director at Environmental Health Coalition, works together with residents in low-income communities of color to advocate for climate and land use policies that respect their priorities, improve health, and are consistent with environmental justice principles. Currently, she is working on a community-led effort to transform San Diego’s transit system into one that feeds the region’s livelihoods, reduces air pollution, and threads communities together via the San Diego Transportation Equity Working Group and the 10 Transit Lifelines.

UC San Diego, Auxiliary Services

Executive Director

Topic Summary: The proposed Voigt Electric Mobility Hub (VEMH) will electrify Triton Transit’s last-mile connections to regional Light Rail Transit, free up valuable land by consolidating parking supply, and more than double UC San Diego’s capacity for EV charging.

Speaker Biography: Josh Kavanagh is the Executive Director for Auxiliary Services the University of California, San Diego, where he oversees a variety of self-sustaining enterprises including a highly integrated parking, transit, and transportation demand management program. He has held transportation leadership roles with the University of California, University of Washington, University of New Mexico, and Amazon.com and industry leadership roles with the Association for Commuter Transportation, the International Parking and Mobility Institute, and a host of regional mobility organizations. He led the University of Washington to the highest organizational honors in both the parking and transportation demand management industries and was individually recognized as IPMI’s 2014 Parking Professional of the Year. Most recently, his professional focus has been on first/last-mile mobility and the electrification of public transit, fleet operations and personal transportation.

LJ Crafted Wines

Owner

Topic Summary: With the production and distribution of single-use bottles making up about half of the wine industry’s greenhouse gas emissions, our goal is to establish a successful high-quality wine business with all wine sold in reusable bottles. To achieve this, we make our wine in Napa Valley and when it’s matured, ship the full barrels to La Jolla. Using our patented equipment, we serve the wines direct out the barrel by the glass or into reusable bottles. Since opening 6 years ago, this zero-waste practice has avoided 129,000 single-use wine bottles from production and disposal.

Speaker Biography: For a new adventure, my wife, I and our 4 kids relocated from Cape Town to La Jolla 10 years ago after our family vineyard Klein Constantia was sold. I was 4th generation in the South African Wine Industry. After qualifying as a Chartered Accountant and working as an auditor in the 1980’s, I was a visiting student at UC Davis studying winemaking and then worked at Robert Mondavi Winery in Napa Valley. That experience sewed a seed in me about the spirit of entrepreneurship in CA.
The enormous environmental unfriendliness of the traditional wine bottle has always irritated me – the energy-sapping furnace at production and later the heavy long distance transport to the winery for filling. In the US, 70% of wine bottles are imported from China.
On arrival in San Diego, I noticed re-suable bottles in the local beer world and the idea of our little one-of-a-kind growler-only winery, LJ Crafted Wines, was born.

Factory Farming Awareness Coalition (FFAC)

Classroom Program Manager

Topic Summary: Industrialized animal agriculture has a massive impact on our planet and our climate. The organic waste produced by the nearly 80 billion land animals that we raise for food every year has to go somewhere. Where does it all go? We'll look at how the industry is and isn't dealing with this issue and much more.

Speaker Biography: Over the past decade, Rowdy has fulfilled a diverse range of positions in the nonprofit world, co-founding a cigarette recycling organization in Asheville, NC, coordinating community outreach for one of the largest no-kill animal shelters in the Southeast US, and organizing for Dogwood Alliance to protect Southern forests. Rowdy loves making music and is a heck of a drummer.

UC San Diego, Urban Studies & Planning

Associate Teaching Professor

Topic Summary: Climate anxiety has become part of our mental health crisis. Psychologists have even generated a new name for the feeling of loss of our environment and ecosystems: Solastalgia. This feeling of loss and anxiety can actually be counterproductive, as we all feel the numbness that leads to inaction. I will talk about this feeling and how engaging with our living systems, and in community, is central to combat our anxieties and environmental change.

Speaker Biography: I am from a very diverse and urban part of Los Angeles, where I was drawn to studying the environment to escape the urban jungle. But along my path I also realized that if people were the problem, people had to be part of the solution. The human diversity of my hometown is just like the biodiversity of our ecosystems and generates greater adaptation and resilience to environmental change. I sought interdisciplinary degrees in Human Biology, Environmental Studies, and Human Geography, while working many years in ecotourism and garden, farm, and wilderness education programs. I now find myself in the intersection of socio-environmental systems: I'm a full-time professor, part-time farmer.

EMCEEING

Biography: I graduated from UC Berkeley with undergraduate degrees in Environmental and Atmospheric Sciences in 2015, then moved to Munich, Germany for a Masters program in Meteorology. In 2018 I came to UCSD to pursue a PhD in Climate Science at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I now study air quality implications of limiting greenhouse gas emissions and I am involved in multiple campus committees on climate and transportation.