Category: Ann Arbor

Today I had the pleasure of being the emcee for the first ever a2tech360 Sustainable Future Forum. Laura Berarducci and the team at Ann Arbor SPARK put together a great program of talks from sustainability leaders and innovators.

We learned from Sartorius, Toyota North America, Wacker Chemical, and the University of Michigan. We cheered on four innovation highlights: ThermoVerse, Fourth State, 4M Consolidated Brands, and Next Cycle. We celebrated the Ann Arbor Green Business awardees.

My favorite part was meeting other folks committed to sustainability including students, community members, consultants, and entrepreneurs.

Why Sustainability Matters to Me

Here are my Sustainable Future Forum opening remarks interspersed with images from my slides.

First, let me tell you a little of my story. I’m Dunrie Greiling. 

I am a lifelong Michigander and I’ve lived in Ann Arbor for thirty years. 

I love living here – I love the proximity to farmland, both for the open landscape and the fresh high quality food from our local farms. Did you know that Michigan has over 300 agricultural products which puts us with the second most agricultural diversity in the nation, second only to California? 

I love our open spaces, the eskers, the dunes, the forests, the lakes and rivers.

I love the birds and their worms, the insects that sing in the trees, and the frogs that gobble them up. 

I love escaping up north, jumping into cold lake water (makes me feel alive in the best way), I love spending time with friends and family next to a beach bonfire or a fireplace. 

I love the four seasons: the spring flowers: trillium, liverwort, trout lily,

the long summer days,

the gorgeous colors of our fall forests,

and the stillness of the woods after a fresh clean snow.

I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. 

Protecting access to all of that requires healthy farms, healthy forests, clean and safe air, water, and soil, biodiversity, and reducing or reversing our contributions to climate change.

At the same time, I love the dynamism of our college town. I appreciate the growth in town–even though sometimes simply getting across town has been difficult because of all of the construction. We need to build to accommodate our community, we need to build to keep people employed, we need to keep the great ideas that originate in this smart, problem solving community here in our region. 

These are the ingredients of what makes Ann Arbor and this part of Michigan so great: nature, growth, and innovation. And these things need to be balanced. How to do it is not always obvious. 

I have a Ph.D. in plant ecology from the University of Michigan, and I have worked in software startups for the last few decades. The common thread for me has been mission-driven: my latest startup experiences have been focused on access to justice, then access to safe drinking water. Now I’m working on the organizational sustainability of a biodiversity scientific organization, iDigBio. 

My niece has just started at the University of Michigan and I’m spending more time with her, and I’m thrilled one of her interests is environment. I’m inspired by her environmentalism. The world is in front of her and she’s so talented and she is part of a generation who is idealistic and motivated. They make me want to be a better person, set a better example. They make me want to have, to make, a better world for them to inherit.

I heard on the radio recently that Earth Overshoot Day – the day of the year when we’ve consumed more than the earth can generate in a year – already happened this year. It was August 1. That means that every day since the beginning of August humanity has overdrawn our account with the sun, the water, and the organisms on our planet. 

The UN recognizes a triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.

The triple planetary crisis refers to the three main interlinked issues that humanity currently faces: 
climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss. 
Each of these issues has its own causes and effects and each issue needs to be resolved if we are to have a viable future on this planet.

United Nations unfccc.int/news/what-is-the-triple-planetary-crisis

This is a lot, right? We are up against some real challenges. 

We have some choices ahead. Yet not quite the way we might think. We sometimes feel like we have to choose – nature or economy. Housing for people or habitat for plants and animals. This dualistic oppositional thinking is not going to get us where we need to be. It’s not one or the other. We aren’t separate from the world around us. We have to find a way to balance nature and economy, habitat for people, plants and animals, production and protection and preservation, for our shared future.

We need entrepreneurship and innovation to solve complex problems so we as a society can learn to grow with balance. We need each other – both to support each other and hold each other accountable. Maybe most importantly, to do all this we need stories. Stories of success, examples of leadership and creativity to light the way to inspire us to recognize solutions and bring them to life. 

That’s why I’m here today – to hear stories from innovators, leaders, and the community about our shared sustainable future. I trust that is also why you’re here. Thank you for coming and we’re going to have a great day.

My Closing Remarks

So on behalf of everyone here, I’d like to thank you again.

Given the complexity of the challenge we are up against we will need more than just the innovations we heard about today. We will also need the innovations that each of you is dreaming about, and to make that happen, we need to come together, like this today, to hear and celebrate progress, to hold ourselves, our community, and our leadership accountable to our commitments, and we need to do the work of socializing and fundraising to implement these changes. 

What’s our call to action? Make sure to connect with people you met today on LinkedIn, over tea, via text. Let’s keep the stories going, keep them alive. Together we can bring about a Sustainable Future.