In the spring 2010 issue of the Northeast Sun, we will publish an article/compilation of interviews with 13 young NESEA members, exploring what they find valuable about NESEA, and how we can make the organization relevant to those under 40. Space constraints prevented us from publishing each interview in full, but the content from these interviews was so rich that we wanted you to be able to read them. What follows is the full interview with Luke Falk, who will be chairing Track 1 on Climate Change Policy at the BuildingEnergy 10 Conference, to be held March 9-11 at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston.
Luke Falk, 30, is a project manager in NYSERDA’s New York City office. In that role his responsibilities include development, design and deployment of energy efficient and green building programs for multifamily buildings, also a large part of NYSERDA’s intergovernmental coordination in the downstate New York region, and work relating to the development of various new energy initiatives, whether it be development of technical standards or financial products or formal legislative rulemaking.
How did you become involved in NESEA and what inspired you to become involved?
Andy Padian introduced me to NESEA. I was in a grad school class at NYU and Andy was brought in as a visiting professor. He engaged the class in a frank conversation on practical approaches to reduce energy consumption in buildings. His no-nonsense, real world solutions-orientation was a nice counterpoint to a lot of the theory in academia that was going around at the time. I struck up a friendship with Andy and he told me I should go to NESESA and I did. A few years later I was deeply involved in planning the conference.
I heard about NESEA in about 2005, but wasn’t able to afford to go to the BE Conference until 2007, because my internships wouldn’t pay for it, and my student loans were not big enough to support it (although, damn, they seem pretty big now). I went as an attendee in 2007, chaired a few sessions in 2008, and chaired the full conference in 2009.
I’ve attended the events of GreenHome NYC, a NESEA affiliate, every now and again since 2004 and 2005.
How are you currently involved with NESEA?
I am Chairing Track 1 on Climate Change and Policy, together with Ev Hyde. I’ll also be doing a session in someone else’s track about real world results from the largest ratepayer funded energy efficiency program for Multifaimly Buildings in the country – the Multifamily Performance Program.
Are you currently active in one of the NESEA chapters? Which one and how?
I’m somewhat active in GreenHomes NYC, although I don’t have any sort of leadership role within that chapter. I attend events a couple times a year, and when NYSERDA is able to lend support to an activity being headed up by GreenHomes NYC, I always try to facilitate that.
What do you value most about NESEA?
I think that the conference is great! It provides a platform for professionals to meet and learn from regional experts in a way that few other conferences I’ve been to do. Beyond that, the conference is the centerpiece of what NESEA does. I think that there’s a lot of opportunity for NESEA to bolster its nonconference related activities. It’s almost like there’s nothing else to it.
The GreenHome chapter is active and does good events. NESEA itself doesn’t seem to have much involvement beyond what the local chapter is doing.
What other professional and/or networking organizations do you belong to? Are there things NESEA can learn about the way they operate? Any examples?
I am a member of USGBC, although I am not a member of the local chapter.
Also the InternationalBuilding Performance and Simulation Association. I occasionally attend their meetings.
I am also involved with NYU alumni activities.
I teach a course at the Cooper Union in their Department of Continuing Education about green buildings in New York City.
The groups that have the most presence in my sphere are advocacy groups, political parties or groups with certifications or processes. NESEA doesn’t fall into any of those categories, so their models may not be applicable (ex. Center for Working Families, Sierra Club. Both of these organizations really keep people in the loop as advocacy organizations.) Organizations like USGBC, with its LEED products and AEE with its CEM certifications are also different animals. People flock to them for those performance indicators. NESEA doesn’t really have that kind of advocacy position, or a certification, or a product, so in that regard these organizations are not necessarily analogous. Maybe Alex Wilson’s publication sort of approximates what NESEA aspires to become – a clearinghouse of information.
What things, specifically, should NESEA be doing to cultivate emerging leaders in sustainability and the built environment?
There seems to be a tension between the close-knit group that formed the organization a few decades ago and the new people who want to come in.
NESEA values its superstars. My question is whether people feel like everybody else involved can carry the torch. How do you create the spirit of camaraderie and trust without the intimacy of the circumstances under which NESEA was initially created?
Something I’ve observed is that often times pioneers run the risk of having their influence marginalized when the ideas that they were out ahead of and have been trumpeting all of the sudden take hold in the greater market and the pioneers remain married to notion of being pioneers and steadfast outsiders. Then the opportunity to have the wave of momentum that they helped create be as beneficial as it can be and as finely tuned en masse is abandoned by the pioneers themselves. Many people are advocating for the abandonment of LEED because the LEED Energy and Atmosphere section is based on modeled savings, which don’t necessarily materialize during building operation. Some of NESEA’s most brilliant pioneers think we should destroy LEED because of this. But from my perspective, this isn’t a situation where we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. LEED is the most powerful market transformation tool that green building advocates have ever had (except for maybe ENERGY STAR). But as with any tool (take a hammer, for example), there are geniuses who use it to create masterpieces and morons who use it to create crap. It doesn’t mean the tool should be tossed off. I’m not arguing that there isn’t certainly room for improvement in LEED; of course there is. To continue this silly analogy, if a hammer doesn’t work half the time, it probably needs to be redesigned or fixed, but the task of nailing something into the wall will remain. And I think, if you already have a hammer, even if it’s bent, maybe it’s better to try and fix it rather than toss it off in favor of something else entirely.
One of the things that I’ve noticed is that some of the NESEA luminaries seem to be afraid of the ruling corporatocracy and the money and influence that go along with it, which is totally understandable. But if you’re going to bring things to scale (grow the conference, or develop new technologies), you have to deal with the prevailing reality, which, in this case, is that we live in a capitalist system where big corporations control a lot of money and operate for profit. I don’t think NESEA should be shy about taking sponsorship dollars from corporate actors as long as the organization is able to maintain the integrity of its mission. And I don’t think the green building market should be shy about using tools like LEED and ENERGY STAR to convince market actors who could otherwise care less about sustainability to change their behavior simply as a response to market demand and potential for profits. Just because the economic system may be flawed doesn’t mean we shouldn’t engage it to try to solve problems!
How can we use mentoring?
There’s always going to be a tension between an organization trying to promote mentoring and the fact that real mentoring is a personal experience that a professional has to decide to engage in. I’ve been beyond lucky to have Andy (Padian) play such an active role in my professional development, but I’m not sure exactly how you can work to institute that across a broad group of people. Maybe NESEA can provide money to allow people to do this, through conference scholarships, facilitating free places to stay, having local residents agree to cook a meal during the conference etc. These are all pieces of the puzzle.
My feeling is that young kids aren’t attracted to NESEA because they don’t know about it and if they do, they can’t discern a value proposition in participation in its community beyond a vague notion of professional development. There are other organizations that are more widely known, like NRDC, Clinton Climate Initiative, USGBC, and others. There’s a lot of interest from the young community about getting involved, but NESEA is not identified as being a major player because it does not have a visible and understandable mission. NRDC and CCI are national and global policy advocates and market transformation agents. USGBC, BPI, RESNET, and AEE all have a product or certification to promote. What does NESEA have other than the smartest people in the Northeast? Is that community enough to keep the organization growing in the long term?
Social networking?
The fact that people think this is a central issue shows a lack of understanding about the real issue. The reason social networking is such a phenomenon is because it’s viral and decentralized and its mass adoption required little top-down management. But on our list serve you see dozens of emails debating whether we should encourage the use of it or not. I don’t get it. If someone wants to tweet the NESEA conference, great, they will. Who cares? The whole point is that it doesn’t need coordination, only facilitation.
I think the problem for NESEA is deeper. You won’t attract people mainly by virtue of the means of communication. Social media is just a vehicle for content. It’s the content that’s important, and that drives people to the conference and to NESEA.
If everybody thought that the BuildingEnergy conference was an absolute imperative for working in the fields of energy and sustainability, we’d have 35,000 people coming to it, but as it is, it’s mostly just a great place to network and seek general professional development. In a way, it’s not for all practitioners, it’s more for the professionals who already know that their workproduct is going to be distinguished by its quality. Targeting that audience, the top quartile of professionals, if you will, may serve to limit the conference’s appeal to the average practitioner looking to secure a tangible certification or set of skills.
What kinds of things are you looking for in terms of professional development opportunities?
I like the idea of the traveling road shows that people have done in the past. Marc Rosenbaum did a few, Larry Harmon as well. There are a lot of people who could do topical stuff. However, If NESEA wants to be the clearinghouse for information and a professional connection hub, there may need to be more of an effort to move away from our impulse to highlight only the best and the brightest within the community. If NESEA is seeking to become the glue that unites the field, we need to be not only into the nuts and bolts of building science, but also nuts and bolts of the tools that professionals need to make their businesses work. For example, Jon Straube is doing a session on the conference this year about a computer program called THERM. That session is a perfect union of a brilliant guy teaching a tool that many stakeholders in the field could benefit from learning about. I think that kind of targeted training may be a key to the future of the organization.
About Jennifer M.
