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 ...

By: Julia Vaughan Learning how to tell the difference between types of turtles, as well as male and female turtle differences. Notching the turtle to track it. Robby Cogburn holding a turtle that was caught by A Backbone for Conservation. The beautiful Stanback nature preserve. Beautiful pond in the preserve. Campers enjoyed geocaching in the Stanback Ecological Preserve   Station three in geocaching: Acid filled barked can be used for headaches and injuries. Julia and Makayla reinventing the washing machine. Courtney Fairbrother sharing about a whole system. Ninja! being played by: Mei Lander, Evan Dorsi, Lexie Burns, and  Payden Mitchell. Sincere and Carolyn explain their new inventions on the washing machine. James Dunbar and Evan Dorsi explaining their solution to dirty clothes. Rocky Mountain Institute sharing their projects which address national and international environmental issues.

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: Payton Coleman and Alia Dahlan We started the day off yesterday morning with a beautiful morning hike exploring bio-mimicry in the preserve. Showered in bug spray and sunscreen we explored the 189-acre ecological preserve looking for resourceful clues placed to teach about how we can look to nature for design and engineering solutions. Geocaching in the Fred Stanback, Jr. Ecological Preserve Having Fun in the Preserve Later that day we were visited by the Rocky Mountain Institute , and they taught us about the 5 types of activism which are political, educational,organizational,economic and lifestyle activism. Splitting into groups we talked about  the different types of activism and how we use them in our everyday lives. Followed by a 30 second group discussion with one person from each group sharing their experience with the rest of the group. We then read a story about the side effects of DDT when used to cure malaria in Borneo for the Dayak people. Then...

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.

Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, one of the partner organizations of Redesigning Our Future, proposes his plan for a sustainable energy future.