Michael Gillenwater, Executive Director, Co-founder, Dean
The quick answer to this question is that I must be crazy. I would factor to guess that anyone who has founded a non-profit organization — let alone in the middle of the worst economic conditions in generations — probably has a crazy, or at least overly idealistic, side to their personality. (Although, I should not speak so quickly for my fellow co-founders.)
The slightly deeper answer to this question is that the Institute is something that needed to be done, yet no one else was doing it. I now know from experience why: it is difficult; but most things worth doing are. I have blogged on some of problems the Institute was designed to address here, and more is on the Institute’s mission is separately available on the GHGMI website here. But this is supposed to be about me and why I’m here, not an explanation of the role of the Institute.
I have a personal passion for building things. And by things, I include not just objects, but institutions, systems, and ideas. It is the recovering engineer in me. I think of the Institute as an especially ambitious building project, something bigger than myself that then can serve a unique and needed function in the world. My goal, which I share with my colleagues, is to build something sustainable and transformative. A friend called it the curse of being a social entrepreneur…all of the challenges and risks of entrepreneurship without much of the upside (e.g., selling your company for millions).
This is the biggest building project I have ever attempted, so it is taking some time. But luckily, the Institute has some of the most incredibly committed people working for it that I have ever met. This point goes back to my observation on craziness. The people working for the Institute are passionately committed to our mission.
As I have blogged about previously, climate change is the mother of all problems: it’s global, it’s long-term, it involves deep uncertainty, and it calls for complex collective action solutions. Basically, it is exactly the type of problem that human beings have no evolved ability to solve or even clearly conceptualize. It works against all our instincts. Which means we need solutions that counteract those instincts, ideally by using other instincts to overcome them. One of the key tools society has repeatedly used is the creation of professional classes and norms of behavior to address large social challenges. Take the protection of social contracts (lawyers), public health (doctors), justice (law enforcement officers), safety (emergency responders), etc. It is not the text of the law that makes society work. The law is preserved, advanced, and shepherded by a professional class of people who have developed common norms, ethics, rules, and standards of competency that make the whole system work. Doesn’t something as big and important as the maintenance of the Earth’s atmosphere demand similar attention? Cultivating a class of professionals who oversee the work of monitoring and managing society’s greenhouse gas emissions is an essential step towards treating climate change with appropriate severity.
The idea is bold, but it is not out-of-step with the size of the problem we are facing. (If anything it is still dramatically undersized, but it is an important start.) Policy is important, a critical driver of change, but it is also essential to realistically look at and address the challenges that systemically face implementation. (Read here for my broader thoughts on the kind of social infrastructure needed to meet the challenge of climate change.).
If there are others that feel as passionately about our mission as we do, please come join us. Apparently you have to be a little crazy nowadays to think we can really build the kind of global social infrastructure that will be needed to solve this problem. But crazy or no, the cold serious truth is that somebody has to do it.
