[0:00] senior capstone courseHello, The guest today is Marian Krasny, class of 74. She is a professor at Cornell in Environment and Sustainability. So hi Marianne, what do you teach at Cornell? Tony Yeah, I'm part of the new Ashley School of Environment and Sustainability. And that school just got going couple months ago and it combines 2 departments, 1 is global development and the other is natural resources in the environment where I am. And so I teach a course called Climate Solutions. It's a senior capstone course. So what that means is it's like students are supposed to take what they've learned throughout their Cornell career and apply it to real world situations. So we have two student projects in the course. The first one is called Network Climate Action and this comes from a book that wrote called In this Together Connecting with your Community to Combat the Climate crisis. A lot of seas there and what network climate action is 2 steps. OK. The first step is you choose some climate action that is meaningful to you, impactful in terms of drawing down greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and that will be fun and it could be a lifestyle action. And I will say most of my students choose a lifestyle action. The most popular is plant rich diet. They also do reducing food waste. But some of them choose advocacy actions like I had a student once who worked on writing letters about the Seattle transportation plan and and trying to influence the transportation plan in the city of Seattle where she was from. OK first step you choose an action. Second step is you influence your close friends and family which we call your close social or tight social network to take the action alongside you. So can I give 2 examples? Yeah, what's an example of like an action? OK, so let's say I'm a student. I choose plant rich diet. OK, I'm just going to tell you one student that did it. So then you have to choose your network. And so I had one student this year, her name is Z. She chose a plant rich diet and the Azure network. She chose her boyfriend's fraternity. So I thought they don't sound like your friends, They sound like somebody else's close friends. But she said she was really close with all the brothers at the fraternity. So she brought or cooked over there like plant rich meals for the brothers in the fraternity. And the idea is that if they get to taste her tasty meals, then they may be more likely to adopt A plant rich diet. And that's good for the environment because not all meats, but especially like beef and lamb, they emit a lot of climate emissions in the form of methane. So that was her. Plants. They emit less, so if you eat more plants then it's less. Yeah, yeah. So people call it reducing meat, but I like to think of plant rich because there's a lot creative things that students can do with cooking with, you know, they learn different recipes and some and they share with their friends. And the whole idea is that this behavior spreads through their group of friends. So after she cooked the meal, does she have to write the paper on it? Like what would the paper include? Yeah, the paper, yeah. So what they do is each class session they read about different ways that people are influenced or that you can influence friends and family to adopt a new behavior essentially of climate behavior. So she might like one week we might do efficacy and that means do a believing that I am able to do this. And so they'll read some papers about efficacy. They'll watch a short video because it's videos are pre recorded. We'll do some kind of, you know, activity about efficacy in the class and then her assignment for that session would be to write about how efficacy, how she's using it or applying it in this plant rich diet activity fraternity. Gotcha. So it's like each week it'll be a different one and then you can see how it's applied to that project. Yeah. So efficacy, identity, different

[4:05] action knowledge and system knowledgetypes of knowledge, like action knowledge, how to do something versus system knowledge, which is just about something like, you know, how many system knowledge would be like how much emissions come from the livestock sector, but action knowledge would be how to cook a plant based meal or, you know, even Yeah. So that so so they those are the kinds of things they look at, learn about and then apply to this network climate action. Gotcha. Can I give you another example? Yeah, yeah, more examples.

[4:37] project example, reducing food wasteOK, this is a short 1 I think, but it's just a different action. It's a totally different network. So this action, the student chose reducing food waste. The student is Chinese. So he worked, he chose as his network his family in China, in Shenzhen and so and he, I think his family was, I don't think he had any siblings. So it's his mother and his dad. So basically, his family throughout about half the food that they had for dinner every night. And wow, throwing out food waste is, you know, bad for your pocketbook. It's also bad for the environment. And So what he found out was that his dad often went out to eat with colleagues after work, but he neglected to tell his mom when he wasn't coming home for dinner. So his mom every night cooked for the three of them or, you know, now that he's at Cornell, the two of them. But half the time his dad doesn't come home. So they throw out that food. So they did something that's just called, it's really what you would call choice architecture as the strategy. He just changed kind of the situation. And he had he convinced his dad to tell his mom whether he's coming home for dinner and then she cooked less when he wasn't coming home for dinner. So they pretty much stopped all their food waste. Well, that's so great, that's a simple solution. Yeah, but kind of a cute example, yeah. Gotcha. Huh. Interesting. So so these are all like real life things that really happened in the world, not just in the classroom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, they they have to, you know, do a real life action. And, and I should just mention the other project is a team project. So four students get together on a team and and they work with some sort of organization outside of Cornell. So and they'll produce. So let's give you an example. So I'm a volunteer with Elders Climate Action. It's a national group that focuses on, you know, trying to mitigate climate change. And the students in that team last year, one of the students, she had worked as an intern for Congressman Jared Huffman and in the Bay Area. Thanks, California. And so the project that the team

[6:44] project example, writing impactful letters to congressdid, and she was kind of leader because she had experience working in a congressional office, was to try to develop guidelines for our partner Elders Climate Action on how you can write impactful letters to your congressperson. And the way they did that was that they, through LinkedIn, found twelve other Cornell students that had interned in different congressional offices in states across country. And they all shared like what happens to the letters when it reaches the congressional office, Like, and through that they kind of developed a report on, you know, what's the most efficient way, given that these officers are receiving lots and lots of letters and, you know, how they look at them, how they sort them, that kind of so. So the action knowledge would be like how to write a letter and the system's knowledge is what happens after they receive the letter. That that act. That's a good question. The action knowledge is how to write a letter. The system's knowledge would be just what you're writing a letter about South. Let's say I know, I know that Ev's, you know, I figured out like how many, how much emissions they save. I know that, but that doesn't make me do something. So the action knowledge would have to be put that into a letter to Congress. Does that make sense that? Makes sense? Yeah, although we don't really, you know, the the action knowledge and the identity FCC, we've applied more to the first projects and the second projects, more interactions with your partner and it's kind of like doing a big report. Yeah, for like the nonprofit where the. Yeah. Yeah. Nonprofit. Yeah. Like what? What happens after the class is over? Do these like continue onwards or is the idea that the knowledge that they have in their head, it'll feed into a future project?

[8:27] what happens after the courseYeah, good question. I haven't really surveyed people. Some of my students have continued with an independent study. I had a student who her team project was with an organization called Coffee Watch and they're trying to promote sustainable coffee growing and she just really enjoyed working with them. So the next semester she did an independent study. Like I was the advisor, but she was working directly with Coffee Watch. You know, as in an independent study. So continue the outwards. Yeah, not I'm, you know, I think probably with plant rich diet and and reducing food waste, they probably just continue doing it. But I can't be sure because I haven't served it because, you know, they kind of get really invested in it when they're trying to convince other people to do it. Their network climate action. Does that make sense? Yeah. So when you're designing this senior capstone project like the class, like, how did you figure out what topics to cover? What are important things to to have every week? Yeah. Well, the team, the next, excuse me, the network climate action projects, just our model after the book I wrote on this, which

[9:30] her book In This Togetheris in this together, as I mentioned, just in this together, Krasny, if you want to search for it. So, you know, at the time I was really interested in how you can scale up your individual actions. For example, if I'm going to, I mean, I use plant rich diet a lot and reducing food waste. But let's just take the example of smoking because that a lot of the research was done on smoking and the research was done how if I quit smoking, like what's the impact on my friends and their friends, friends And the authors of this research determined that if I quit smoking, yeah, it's good for my own health, but I'm also like my friends and even the friends of my friends are also more likely to quit smoking. So you haven't, your actions cannot really haven't can spread through people you know or two people you know. So the idea is that you know you can have more influence than just reducing your own, like meat consumption or stopping smoking. What's? The mechanism of action for that, is it like peer pressure or is it like if he did I can do it too? What's the mechanism? For that good question, I think it's all of those. But if you had to summarize it, the way I like to think about it is multiple messages. OK, So I have to hear the message. Like if you just said to me, hey, you know, I'm only eating beef once a week and I used to eat it five times a week, I go cool, Tony. But if I heard that message, let's say over a period of six months, he said, I reduced, you know, my beef consumption. And I also did this very cool, tried out this very cool recipe, you know, with garbanzo and bean and rice Curry, for example. And so then I've heard that message again in a different form. And then let's say you invited me over to your house for this garbanzo bean rice Curry you cooked and you had a bunch of friends over there. And so we're, it's not just we're hearing multiple messages, but we're hearing it from multiple messengers. Like some of your friends, they came over because they already have reduced their meat consumption, right? So I'm kind of hearing that message from them too because likely your friends I'm connected to too. So I just summarizes multiple messages from multiple messengers. That makes sense. So, so this is different from like logos, pathos, ethos, like for debate, it's more like a structural like over many months, like how people learn. Yeah, yeah. And they have a How behavior spread, huh? Interesting, are these mostly on the individual level where they're also like like government organizational levels as well where like the organization if they want to do like marketing for a new plant rich diet, like how does it scale up on the organization side?

[12:13] scaling up to organizationsNo, that's a great question. I haven't really thought about it, but if I was an organization, I mean, the multiple messages is great, but I'd really think about how you can get groups together that are going to share these meals because I really think you need that, you know, whether it's peer pressure or example or just having fun, because This is why I love the plant rich Texas students find it very fun because they're trying new foods. And sometimes I go to a restaurant and try new foods. It doesn't, it's not always cooking and that's fun too. So I, you know, if I had a website, I was trying to, I would maybe think about, well, how can I create little nodes of people that are sharing and doing this? So I have the messages, but also the the groups like, you know, kind of like the meetups if you've ever used meet up. Yeah. That are getting together to do these activities. Gotcha, gotcha. What are the ways to measure like how effective these these messaging is? Like like you can measure like if how many packs of smokes do you have each other? No, definitely There are in another Cornell person, Robert F

[13:16] measuring impactFrank, I'm pretty sure you can look that up, but he is a economist. I think he's he's a Cornell economist. I think he's retired now, but he's also he did a lot of the research about this. I'm just applying the research in my classes. And so I'm not doing an evaluation of, you know, like how many CO2 equivalents did they say by doing the plant with giant. But I do ask the students to choose their own evaluation method and a lot of times they'll try to do for their own project. So it's at a very, you know, it's just their own project. And I haven't aggregated across the class or anything, but they will, you know, sort of look at if they've been eating the way they ate. It's not, it's not scientific really, you know, because it's just them doing their little evaluations as best they could in, in one class. But it's and then because, you know, maybe they ate, they ate these this many fewer of those beef based meals. How many emissions, how many emissions did they save? Students will do little calculations like that. Or sometimes they'll just do surveys with their friends and say like, you know, what has your diet change, for example? Gotcha interesting there's a lot of like barriers to taking action. Like 1 barrier might be like imposter syndrome, like what barriers students come into your class facing but then you help them overcome those barriers. Right, well, for students who are interested in this, I think

[14:42] scaling up impactthey're just want to know how they can scale up. So the barrier might be well, what difference does it make in my only, you know, if I'm only myself? And I think that's why the network climate action and also the team project makes them feel a little bit more empowered. And then like often students will their go to is recycling, which isn't really that impactful as a climate action. And so it's pretty easy to find like sites like down.org where you, they rank the impactfulness of different climate actions. And the reason I often introduce them to the food actions, food waste and and plant rich diet are because they're, they're pretty high. They used to be at the top. I was just looking today now more the solar and you know, the renewable energy actions are at the top. So that would be pretty hard for my students to do, but they could, for example, write letters and then get their friends to write letters to their representatives about renewable energy issues. So that'd be another possible action they could take if they wanted to choose an action that's at least according to drawdown, looks more impactful right now than. But Pointer Diet and reducing food waste are still in their top 10. That makes sense. Well, what was your path like towards figuring out what the most impactful thing you could do? Well, in terms of the specific actions using the website drawdown.org and then used to have a table of what they called solutions like 100 solutions and they were ranked. So I just look at the top ones and, and you know, as I said, food related food waste not reached out, we're near the top. So like for me, because I was already interested in climate and environment, once I found

[16:21] benefits of plant rich dietwhat the impactful actions were, it's pretty easy for me to reduce meat in my diet. And dairy, dairy is important too, because it's it's, you know, cows are the biggest issues, right? And so chicken and fish, I mean, there's a lot of reasons people might not want to eat them if they're concerned about animal welfare. But in terms of climate, dairy is probably more important than chicken and fish, especially cheese and some of the concentrated Dairy Milk less so because there's a lot of water. The reason cheese is because you use a lot of milk and each kilogram of milk produces a lot of cow emissions. So cheese has like, you know, a lot of milk because all that a lot of the liquid is is no longer there, right, but milk. Yeah, a lot of milk to make a little bit of. Cheese, yeah, yeah, exactly. But milk itself is like, produces fewer emissions because you're eating the product with all that water in it, basically. That makes sense. So I'm talking about emissions. Yeah, that makes sense. Per unit of food. Whereas the cows, they eat a lot of food to make a little bit of meat. It's more what are called the enteric emissions, which means they're stomach emissions. So cows, goats and sheep are what are called ruminants, like razors on grass, and they have these microbes in their gut that emits methane. So chickens really don't have that and pigs don't really either. And so that's why the focus is on beef and dairy because methane is a really strong greenhouse gas, at least over 12 years or so. So the idea is if we could reduce methane now by reducing meat consumption, then we would have some, you know, it's important like to reduce our emissions right away as fast as we can. CO2 is much weaker in terms of how much it warms the atmosphere, but it stays in the atmosphere for like 1000 years. So CO2 is really important too, but nothing in the short term is going to produce a lot more warming than the equivalent amount of CO2. So. The whole beef, the whole thing while white people are concerned about beef is because of these enteric emissions also manure is another issue that you know manure also has a strong. Gotcha. The Cal cause methane and there's also CO2 and they both cause the warming over time. Yeah, yeah. But at different rates. They 'cause it at different rates, and they 'cause it for a different number of years, if that makes sense. Methane will degrade in the atmosphere, but CO2 really doesn't. It just stays there. And eating plants are good because plants decrease the CO2 over time. Well, they do absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and photosynthesis, but it's basically because they don't have these methane emissions. So the methane are the big thing with food emissions, Manure second. Well, land use is the other thing, but also if you're eating plants like you're to get an equivalent amount of calories or protein, you're using a lot less land because you're not liking having acres and acres of corn that's then fed to cows. So if you're just eating the corn directly, it's true you're not getting the prote, the same protein quality of meat. So you can't just eat the corn. You need the soybeans and you know, other sources of protein. But essentially, you're using less land and you're not having those methane, those outsides methane emissions. Gotcha, that makes sense. Interesting, so you have the sub stack on this too right? My sub stack is called food farms and climate and if you

[19:44] her substack Food, Farms, and Climatewant to get some of the science and actions you can take for example, like why do people climate activists not like beef? I have an article on I just posted an article this week on food rescue and food recovery because food waste as I mentioned. It's also bad for the climate for several reasons. One is all that land that's growing food and we waste 30 to 40% of the food that's grown in this country. So it's huge amount. So it's a huge also, you know, economic issue. But you know, that land, if it wasn't being used to waste to grow food that we're going to waste anyways, it could be used, say let's just say to replant trees to absorb carbon or maybe, you know, wasn't even converted into farms beforehand. So there was native grasslands and native forests that had a lot of court carbon stored in them. So there's a land use issue with food waste. The other issue is food waste when it goes to the landfill and there's AI think food waste is the most common item in landfills. It the conditions in the landfill are anaerobic. So without oxygen and when organic waste decompose anaerobically, they produce methane. So again, we have that strong greenhouse gas that's being emitted from these landfills. Sometimes it's flared off if you're ever driven by a landfill and has like a eternal flame there and they're burning off the methane. Sometimes it can be captured to use for energy. But yeah, a lot of it's just, you know, escaping into the atmosphere where it is a strong warming or greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. So anyways, yeah, so I you know, when we think about food waste, like if I said, Tony, you need to reduce your food waste or the

[21:29] reducing food waste, different uses of food wasteUS needs to, what would be the first thing that would come to your mind on what you would do? That's not totally really oh, because it but how do? What's the connection you see between food waste and plant rich diet? You eat more plants than the animals don't have to eat the plants, so so then you eat the plants. Directly, that's kind of that's interesting because that's not really what we're talking about with food waste, but it is, it is a good idea. So with food waste, we're really talking about what you left on your plate this morning. OK, so this morning you had some breakfast. I ate that district Taco in DC. It's I was about Cornelian. I ate a burrito bowl. I ate the whole bowl. You did not waste any food, OK? It's so good, it's the Cornelian founded restaurant. Great. OK, well, let's say you went to a restaurant that was, you know, started by somebody from Yale University and the burrito bowl tasted like really bad. And so you put and finish it. So what would what would happen to that half of the burrito bowl that you left on your plate? Well, I would throw it in the trash. You'd throw it on the trash. So probably then it's going to go to a landfill. OK, but if you have you been to the Cornell cafeterias and then seeing what they like the student cafeterias, seeing what they do with their. Yeah, you put the in the in the cart that moves over and then on the side there's a compost. Put the compost, Either the students or I think now mostly the cafeteria workers, they put in the combo, it goes out. I don't know if you remember Turkey Hill Rd. but Cornell has a composting facility a little bit out of off campus and some of their agricultural lands. And it's composted and, and like I actually buy it every year for my garden. So they use it, I think compost. Yeah, from Cornell composting. Yeah. So you can use it on gardens. I'm sure they use it on campus for landscaping. And so that's one one thing you can do with food waste. But let's just say, OK, so with your burrito bowl, it's already on your plate. So probably the best use. So there's different uses of food waste, right? The best use would probably be animal feed because then it's kind of being used for a higher value to feed animals that people then eat than it is for compost. Compost is great. It's better than landfill. But if we were, there's a hierarchy, EPA has a hierarchy or what they call the food waste or wasted food scale. So, but let's just say you're back in the cafeteria and and we'll go back to Cornell again because they're going to do best practices for sure. So they made enough burrito bowls for 100 people, but today they only had 75 people come. So they have 25 burrito bowls left and you know, they can throw it in the trash. Or maybe if you're in DC, they have sometimes they have, you know, some cities have food waste pick up or food waste drop off and that'll go to composting most likely. OK, but if they were using an app too good to go, I think it's called, they can host on this app that they have 25 burrito bowls left and you can come and get them for a dollar each or maybe they're $0.50, you know, maybe they're free or whatever. So everybody that's on this app who's nearby, they can come and get that food and then they eat it themselves. And that's food recovery or food rescue. So a more common example would be grocery stores. Like I once volunteered for Friendship Donations Network in in Ithaca and my job was to go to Wagon, the loading dock and they put out boxes and boxes of fresh produce and prepared meals like their sushi or whatever, because it might be a day old, right? And so they can't really sell. It doesn't look that nice. And so we would put these boxes into our cars and then take it over to a friendship donations network, which is a little warehouse. They do fortunately have a walk in refrigerator in Ithaca and then say like a church in Dryden might come and pick it up and then they serve it to food insecure or hungry people in Dryden. Also individuals can come and pick it up. Like if I'm can get there and I don't have enough money to buy food, I can come there and get it. So the point is this is food recovery or you might call food rescue. This is the highest use of the highest waste that hasn't been touched, you know, that you haven't already eaten half of because then we have our issues with, you know, like germ spreading or whatever. Yeah. So they're uneaten and then? They are not emanated by somebody else's fork, essentially. And you know, so it might be a fraternity. There's a organization, it's called Food Recovery Food. I think it's Food Recovery Network. It's a national organization of student chapters where students will pick up food from the campus dining facilities of the fraternities or sororities that has not been served and then they can take it down to friendship donation network where they can redistribute it. Anyway. So that's what I wrote my sub stack article on today, but I have a lot of other topics related to food and farms and climbing. I think I read 1 recently about regenerative agriculture. I posted one on regenerative agriculture and I, I really try

[26:35] regenerative agriculture and other articles on her substackto apply the science and like, for example, a lot of people think regenerative agriculture is the solution to everything, but I try to be quite balanced. I mean, and so I point out, you know, the benefits and some of the challenges with regenerative agriculture compared to conventional like we might call industrial agriculture. And then at the end of each article, I have some actions you can take, like writing letters to Congress or my Food Recovery 1. You know, maybe volunteer at a local food because, you know, most of these you're in, they're going to have probably, if it's a big city, a lot of these organizations, you know, they might be food banks, soup kitchens. And it's usually pretty fun to volunteer there because it's social and yeah, and you feel like you're doing something good. And then I think the other thing is a lot of people volunteer. They, they might not care anything about the environment or climate, but they care about that. There's hungry people in my neighborhood or my city. And so they're volunteering for for those altruistic reasons. That's a great issue because it helps people and the environment. Very cool. Like like on the advocacy side. So there's the Congress. Are there other things on the state level and the local level that you could advocate for as well? Yeah. So right now you may have noticed that Congress is and with the president, we're unlikely to get through much climate friendly legislation right now.

[28:00] advocacy on federal, state, local levelsI do focus quite a bit on the farm bill, which is major bill that Congress is working on now. And the climate provisions in that bill are super weak. You know, they're so, I mean, we still try to influence federal legislation, but there's probably more opportunity at state and local levels right now, of course, depending what state you're in. So the letters that I write and they can go to federal, state or local officials, the local, you have to be in the city over I think 100,000 or something because it's a database, right? And depending, so it's, it's through an organization called Climate Action. Now, they have a database. So I put in my address. They know that my congressman, because I'm in Ithaca, NY is Josh Riley. And they know that my state representatives are Leah Webb and Anna Kellis. So I'll go in there and I'll, I'll see like, it looks like a flash card. You can do it on your laptop or on your phone. They have the app works both places and it'll be I write actions for them. So it might be, say support agrovoltaics or solar energy on farms in the farm. You can edit the letters too. If you don't like what you know, there's a lot of volunteers like me and my students do it too that are writing these letters. But and, but you can always read them and edit them too, either on your phone or on the computer. And then if it was a city action, it would be more generic. It'd be something like ask your City Council members or ask your mayor to, you know, ramp up the EV charging network work in my city. And again, you could choose to send it, You could edit it first if you wanted to, or you can just send it. And then you know, you don't have state, but there's a similar thing like there's state legislation or state policies. It'll because you put your address and it goes directly to your representatives. Does that make sense? OK, Yeah, Yeah. That way it's easy to do for everybody. Exactly. So that's what the app does basically it and it's called climate action now. So if it's some of the food and farm actions on there, I've written not all of them, but some, well. What about when like they're drafting the the legislation? Do you like, write letters to them about what the legislation should be? Yeah, so I right now let's take the farm bill example. Yeah, like I I've written a bunch of letters for this app that, you know, other people I send and other people send like for climate action. Now that, you know, please include. I mean, one thing we tried to get in there, although we weren't successful, but it might pass, is that standalone bill is something called the Food, Food Waste Date Labeling Act.

[30:32] food waste date labeling actSo here the idea is that if you went let's Tony. So what would you do if you went to home tonight and you wanted to let's say you have because you're really plant rich now you're. OK. You found some hummus there, You know, hummuses like roundabout. Yeah, I love hummus. And you looked and it said who's by June 30th? What would you do? Because today's June 30th. We got the whole You have to eat the whole hummus today, otherwise it might get wasted. Yeah. Yeah. So you would think that it's going to get bad, but really those labels are just what your hummus. You know, we have Ithaca Hummus Company and I was in Maine over the weekend visiting a friend and there was Ithaca Hummus there. And so you're looking at the Ithaca Hummus thing and it says best used by June 30th. And so then you just say, Oh my God, I have to eat it up. But what if it said best used by June 29th? That was yesterday. You may be going to throw it out. Well, Ithaca Hummus made those labels not because there's any standard that you have to use it. You know that the food has gotten unsafe and this is the same for could have said expired by still, that doesn't mean that there's any federal standard that says this food expires by this. Well, here's the technical definition of what expiration. It's like the food company makes it up and obviously, you know, they're they're good people. It's a hummus, but they want you to eat it when it tastes its very, very best, right? So maybe that food will taste fantastic tomorrow on July 1st, but because that you saw that date, you threw it out. So the food date label, Food Waste Date Labeling Act is going to try to have some federal standard for those expiration dates. And they think it will reduce food based by a whole lot because people don't like me. I would, you know, I'd look at the thing, but I'd probably smell it, see if there's mold growing on it. And if it smells fine, I would just eat it. You know, I haven't gotten food poisoning. People are very nervous about getting sick from food. So anyway, that's, that's an example of a bill that's not passed. But yeah, that that, that we would be trying to. I don't have the technical expertise always to tell them how to draft the bill, but we're supporting the bill. Like like when when you're learning about a new issue, for example, like the food waste they labeling. Like do you like go to food manufacturers? You talk to the food safety researchers at Cornell. What are the different conversations you have to educate yourself? Yeah, no, great question. So I generally use online resources that I think are credible. So with food waste, a great resource is called RE and then capital FED. So it's capital RE small and then capital FED so it's refed. I forget what it stands for, but anyways, they're like a repository of tons of policies and scientific resources about food waste. And there's a group at Harvard, the Harvard Food Policy, and I forget exactly what they're called, but there's a lot of food policy people at Harvard that they have a website as great resources for my food recovery article that I just posted today. That was really fun because, you know, I wish I would talk to more people, but I, it's, it's very time consuming. So I don't always talk to people, but I did in this case because my brother volunteers at 2nd 2nd Servings, which is a food recovery organizations in Houston. And so he knows their director and she was willing to talk to me. So I interviewed her and got a lot of information from her and she really likes the people like that because you're kind of promoting their organization. And then another one where I talked to somebody, I wrote one. Al Gore has a regenerative agriculture farm in Tennessee. And so I was able to visit that farm because I was down there because of some volunteer work I do with Al Gore's Climate Reality organization. And, and I've kept in touch with the farm manager. And so I'll just e-mail him. And now he says he wants me to call him, not e-mail him, because he spends a lot of time driving his tractor and he's bored and he wants to talk to something. So, you know, he's been very helpful in helping me understand their practices at that farm. That makes sense. And that we can collect quotes from them as well in your. Yeah. There isn't. And I'll talk to Cornell scientists too, or sometimes I get to interview them. But I, you know, I try to respect everybody's time. But yeah. There's like academia and then there's like industry, like the real world, like the like, how do you bridge the 2 so. Yeah, so, you know, great

[35:00] bridging academia and industryquestion. We have been at Cornell for 40 years, since before you were born. Tony, I don't know if you're, if you're our Cornell listeners, remember Fontana's shoes and their advertisement. You know, we've been in college Town since before you were born. So that's my advertisement too anyways. But my appointment is 70% outreach or Cooperative Extension like working with the public basically and education for the public. So my so I have a lot of experience communicating to the public. So I feel like, like when I started my sub stack, I'd already been writing actually for Forbes, new Forbes magazine for a year, as you know, public facing articles for their readers. And but I did hire an editor who's Lauren Chambliss. She was a lecturer in communication at Cornell. And now she has a little editing business. She's retired, but from Cornell. But and she said that I kind of had a lot of the nuts and bolts of writing for the public because my sub stack is public facing. But she offers me, you know, a lot of little writing tips. And also if she sees that the article just the organization just doesn't tell the story, she'll like tell me to move around paragraphs and stuff. So I feel like having an editor also helps to make sure you're reaching the targeted audience. And then the like Forbes would publish. When I was doing for Forbes, I didn't have an editor. And I mean, I had a Forbes editor, but she just said your articles are good and so you can just post it. And she never had it in my articles. I mean, yeah, so. But they have a pretty big pay role. I think the most I ever got was like 5000 people. But, but a lot of times did I say payroll paywall. They probably have a big payroll too. But anyway, but they have a paywall. So a lot of times my articles weren't accessible and my sub stack. I have generally smaller numbers than Forbes. You know, I started in January and kind of trying to build it up. Maybe it was February. And I, I usually like my most popular article, which was on Al Gore's farm because you know, he's famous. I think I got 7. I have 700 or something views. So I, and then a lot of my articles get in like around 400. So, you know, not a lot. It's a pretty small audience and I would love to build it up. So if you have any suggestions or any Cornell alums have suggestions, let me know. Share it with your networks. I I know that there's guidelines for how to scale up your, you know, your audience and, but I'm spending so much time writing, which is a lot more fun than marketing for me, that I haven't spent a lot of time marketing. Yeah, I'll include a link to it in the podcast. Thank you. Description. The food farms and climate. So Subs that super. Yeah. And then do you also do like talks and like, what other ways do you educate the public? OK. That's part of the collaborative extension.

[37:47] public outreach, online courses on environmental educationWe do online courses for public audiences. So this is me and the people, you know, usually their former or current PhD students. And we teach, we've been doing this for like 10 or 12 years. So we have quite a few. They're short certificate only non credit courses. And because I used to work in environmental education, a lot of them are environmental education topics, but I've done one on food farms and climate. We do, but we've, we've done plastics or plastics education, nature and, and, and we have an international audience. So like right now, because I think interest has declined, maybe partly because people are, you know, with AI, like maybe people are learning in different ways, but we still get about four or 500 people to take a course and they're from usually about 50 countries. And a lot of our students are from China. So we've always had Chinese students or former students work with us and they have volunteers in China who, you know, they do a lot of social media with WeChat and they, they help us to, to, to with the content to make sure it's appropriate for a Chinese audience. So yeah, about a third of our students are Chinese. And, and that has been really rewarding to, to work with the Chinese audiences because we do have, even though the course is online and it's like asynchronous. So we have pre recorded lectures and readings and assignments, but we do a couple webinars a week. So that's when it's informal and we get to interact with people. And yeah, you feel like you meet the people. Sometimes they actually come to Cornell and we meet them in person. But yeah. And you make this is about like educating them on how to educate others. About most of our classes are on that, so they might be school teachers or they might work at a Nature Center or even volunteers. A lot of them would be college students. Yeah, that makes sense. So you said that you were at Cornell for 40 years now. How has the climate change education like changed over the years? You know, 40 years ago I wasn't

[39:42] her education work over the 40 yearsdoing climate education. When I first came to Cornell, it was very, very different. The main concerns were about like water quality. So, you know, we're trying to sort of then I was working more with the formal Cornell Cooperative Extension and 4H leaders. And so we did a lot of water stuff. People are very concerned about waste and recycling. We did that and I did some. Sort of, you know, grassroots conservation outreach work, like small scale, we called it civic ecology. So it'd be things like community garden, urban tree planting, like volunteer activities that are largely organized by from the grassroots, by people. So we did that for a while. And I would say, you know, it's only about maybe 10 years that I've been really trying to focus on climb. So over time, like it became bigger problem and then like, yeah, the tools changed too. Now you have social media, whereas 40 years ago you didn't have as much social media. Well, to be honest, Tony, when I first came to Cornell, they wouldn't buy me a computer. They said you didn't need one. Like I could just like type or write it up and somebody, the secretaries would type for me. Finally, after three months, they got me a desktop, which I don't even know if you've ever seen one. And then, you know, then eventually, you know, we went to laptops. But e-mail didn't come till like the, at least for me, till the early 1990s. So we weren't, you know, wow, we were. Like the first phone? Calls. Phone calls. And oh geez. Printed fact sheets and stuff like that, yeah. So is it like easier now to take action now because there's all these tools available to you? Yes, I think I, I definitely think so, yeah. And I think it's more fun too. I just feel like even though people complain about online communication, you know, we're having a good conversation. Like you didn't have to come all the way to Cornell to have this conversation. I mean, I know you were here like a couple months ago, but I feel like the online tools have opened up a lot of, you know, ways to interact. Over the decades as like things change like like the systems knowledge that you build, the action knowledge that you build. Did it like transfer over as the new tech changes? Like what were the things that stayed the same? It's a hard question because every project is different. I mean, when I started, I didn't know about I OK, I think the way to answer that is a lot of people think, and I certainly was of this paradigm when I first got to Cornell. You just give people information. I'll change their behaviors. So if I told you that it was important to reduce, you know, only like 1 steak a week instead of five steaks a week, you would how we know that, you know, there's so many barriers to taking action. Maybe you for the 30 years that you've been alive, you've been eating steaks five times a week. I tell you that that's not good

[42:39] importance of action-based knowledgefor the you're not going to change, right. But maybe because first place, you might not even know how to cook a, you know, vegetable tofu Curry or something like that. So you need that action based knowledge. And I think just realizing that, I mean, that's why am I Substack. I don't just give information. I give people opportunities to take action because I, we really need to all be thinking whatever works for you and it should be meaningful and fun too, right? So, you know, if like, you just really can't change your diet, maybe you want to volunteer at a food kitchen or something like that, or maybe you want to sit in your office and write letters and send them. Yes, the paradigm has always been the same where you had to give them actions and when they have an action that they're able to act on it. Right. I just didn't realize that when I first started. So it's been an evolution from just giving people systems knowledge to giving them action knowledge. For the closing question, I always ask the the guests, well, what's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for you? Wow, Tony, I gotta think for a minute. Well, maybe my mother-in-law accepting me into the family, helping me through some a lot of different issues. Yeah, she's she's been very kind to me.