After promoting “green” technologies at UMF, Ryan Moore ’03 takes a grass-roots approach to sustainability at home and abroad

Story and photos by Marc Glass (Spring 2008 issue)

The last time Farmington First caught up with Ryan Moore ’03, he was doing just as the title of the fall 2002 article indicated: “Student Takes Leading Role in Promoting ‘Green’ Campus.”

Ground had yet to be broken on the new Education Center, and the senior environmental science major was investigating myriad energy- and cost-saving “green” building practices with Gore-like zeal. Already a member of the Green Campus Coalition, Moore had a seat at the table with key Education Center planners, including President Theo Kalikow; his academic advisor, Drew Barton, associate professor of biology; Ralph Granger, professor of education; Bob Lawrence, director of facilities management; Valerie Huebner, executive assistant to the president; and Roger Spear, then vice president for administration.

Objectively detailing both costs and benefits, Moore wrote white papers and delivered PowerPoint presentations to the building committee on the various green building technologies he researched. During the vetting of architectural design firms, President Kalikow would inevitably elbow Moore and say, “OK, Ryan. Ask them a tough question.” Once PDT Architects got the nod, Moore and principal architect Alan Kuniholm took a road trip to see how other Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified buildings incorporate green building design, practices and technology.

With its geothermal heating and cooling system and daylight harvesting lighting system that automatically adjusts to sunlight streaming through double insulated windows, UMF’s Education Center uses 70 percent less energy than its equal-size counterpart, Roberts Learning Center. Not surprisingly, campus planners are investigating how to go Moore green, as it were, by retrofitting existing buildings with the energy saving technologies he researched for the Education Center.

Moore said he had never taken—or been given—such a leadership role before coming to UMF. And the experience fueled a desire to replicate the research-based, grass-roots approach to changing environmental policy in his post-UMF life.

“The way in which the staff and faculty opened doors for me can’t be overstated,” he said. “The entire process was valid. How we worked together is a model for how I’ve worked with people on environmental issues ever since.”

Moore’s next bout of committee work would take him to the other side of the world. Shortly after graduation, he joined the Peace Corps to work with a Nepal-based environmental non-governmental organization focused on helping people living on an endangered stretch of forest find eco-sustainable livelihoods. To make sure he heard all the good ideas, he learned enough Nepali to carry a conversation and even managed to correspond with locals in the Devanagari script.

An intensifying civil war in the Himalayan kingdom cut short his Peace Corps tour, but after a brief stint in the States, Moore was back at it in Uzbekistan, helping residents near the Aral Sea cope with what Moore calls “one of the world’s worst environmental disasters based on human health and social impact.” Once the world’s fourth largest lake, the Aral was parched by Soviet-era irrigation practices that diverted tributary water to cotton farms in surrounding Central Asian republics. As the lake dried, fish disappeared, and the remaining wind-driven minerals and salts poisoned soils—adding to the malnutrition crisis.

“We were focused on educational awareness to change farming practices and water usage and trying to get local scientists to take an active interest in solving the problem,” he said. “We tried not to step on too many toes, but wider political issues in the region put an end to our work. We all lost our visas.”

Moore regrouped by spending winter 2006 as a sled-dog musher with Sourdough Outfitters in Bettles, Alaska, pop. 40. In between guiding clients on week-long trips into the Brooks Range, some 170 miles north of Fairbanks, Moore filled out graduate-school applications with the hope of studying international environmental policy.

“I realized that in all my work, the road blocks to environmental change were political,” he said. “That’s why I became interested in policy solutions.”

Moore stayed on with Sourdough through July 2006 and then joined classmate Annie Cox ’03 for the final 45 days of her Peace Corps tour in Zambia. The pair then relocated to the University of Denver, where Moore recently completed a master’s degree in international studies with a focus on international environmental policy.

Now at the Institute for Environmental Solutions, a Denver-based non-profit focused on complex environmental issues, Moore is investigating the full impact of Mayor John Hickenlooper’s plan to have one million new trees planted in the metropolitan Denver area by the year 2025. The project is getting the same methodical treatment Moore brought to bear on considering green features for the Education Center. And his work with the building committee informs his thinking—about the science and the human factor in making environmental policy change.

“Dr. Barton would be pleased. I’ve been doing a lot of independent research on a water use study,” said Moore, who is considering possible microclimate changes associated with introducing that many trees to the Colorado Front Range, an arid region that doesn’t naturally support dense tree population. “I think about Theo a lot when I’m working with our big group of Denver stakeholders who sometimes have competing interests. I compare and contrast people I work with to the people I know at Farmington. The integrity of the process at UMF made me realize that the choice of questions people ask about environmental policy change affects the quality of the outcome. That’s why my approach has been, ‘Let’s take a minute and think this through.’”