Redesigning Our Future

By Serena Musselwhite The amount of energy, the amount and type of each energy, and what the energies are used  for vary widely worldwide (Smith, p.180). For example, even though highly industrialized countries use most of the world's energy while less industrialized countries use much less, countries with the same level of development vary in the amount of energy they use and how they use those energies. There are three types of energy use, residential and commercial, industrial, and transportation energy use. Industrialized nations use the three energies fairly equally while less developed nations focus more on residential energy. Developing nations use much of their energy to develop their industrial base. Energy consumption and industrialization are strongly interrelated (Smith, p.180). According to Enger Smith, "From a historical point of view, it is possible to plot changes in energy consumption. Economics, politics, public attitudes, and many other factors ...

Campers Learned Many New Skills at RMI Programs at Environmental Camp Today, with the Rocky Mountain Institute, students learned how to have nice dialogue skills with others when having a disagreement. They were told not to just talk; listen to others. Give reasons why you think your idea is better, and then hear the other person out. These were just a few tips the Rocky Mountain Institute gave to the campers. The students were then thrown into to simulations of a disagreement and were told to use the skills they had just learned about. The first simulation was that two people were members of a council and they had to decide where to spend their  pretend one-hundred thousand dollar grant. Different groups decided on different ways to spend the money. The second simulation was that two people were stakeholders around a lake. Different stakeholders wanted different things from the lake, and the six different stakeholders had to compromise on what to do with the lake and h...

National Environmental Campers Learn from RMI ENV Leaders  By Annabelle Nagy One of the featured speakers at the Summit happened to be a large company that deals with saving energy for the environment. They are the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), located in Colorado. Recently RMI has been working with China to help them reduce the energy they use. The job with China started after the book Reinventing Fire came out. When they came to the National Environment Summit for high school students, they spoke about how they want to reduce energy in the future.  They wish to help create and see more walking and public transportation and also more community efforts to help reduce the amount of energy used (and wasted). RMI introduced to us the ways to help "saving energy" can be introduced. The ways are: lifestyle (how you live your life), education (educating the people on how to save energy), grassroots (local movements to conserve energy), political (getting politician...

By Alia Dahlan Effective Communication and Collaboration Using clips from television shows, volunteers from the Rocky Mountain Institute taught us about how communication can be used to solve complex "wicked" problems. We learned a few communication terms: Downloading- not listening to others Debating- arguing one side with a strong view Dialoging- having a bias, but listening to the other side of the argument for new information Presencing- having no personal bias and focusing on the problem Grant Funding Activity We decided where to allocate $100k worth of grants at Catawba College . Dragon Fly Lake   We used a role-playing game to decide how to utilize a fictional lake and the area around it.