Earlier this year, I participated in a panel discussion on A Healthier Charlotte, focusing on “Environmental Health in the Queen City,” with Dr. Jessica Braswell from Queens University.  Moderating the panel was a Davidson graduate, Bobby DeMuro, who has organized a great range of discussions on this web TV show, which is hosted on CLTBlog.com.   You can watch the episode here, which begins with a panel with two veterans of the Charlotte environmental scene, and then starts with our panel at 18:54 in the video.

In a separate interview later in the year, I also did a one-on-one interview with Mr. DeMuro, which had the more specific topic of “Climate Change in Charlotte.”  We covered some of the same topics, but also touched on some other ones as well in our 10 minute discussion.  You can access the interview at http://bobbydemuro.com/work/wbt/ — just click on my name under the March 18 show date, which will open to where you can download the mp3 of the interview.

It has been fun getting plugged in more to the Charlotte scene, and learning more about the health and environment issues the city is facing.  Charlotte has been growing rapidly in recent years, which has brought a lot of great benefits to the city, but that growth has also created some complex challenges, such as how to deal with increasing smog levels, decreasing air quality, and greater traffic congestion.  The city’s leaders are working hard to find smart and sustainable ways to tackle these challenges, and I hope that we see the benefits of these efforts in the months and years to come.

We then discussed why academic researchers have had such limited involvement, whether they should be more involved (without losing their credibility and independence), and ways that might facilitate academics to becoming more engaged with these programs in the future.  While there are important pitfalls to avoid in doings, the strong preferences survey participants have for academic involvement suggest that they can very much improve the perceived quality and credibility of existing eco-labels and ratings.

The conference overall was fantastic, and I learned a lot from the diverse sessions that I attended.  Strongly recommended conference for people who research environmental issues, and especially those who teach in interdisciplinary environmental studies and sciences programs.

Our organizing question has been whether or not we can come up with innovative new strategies to make buying more environmentally and socially responsible products easier and more fun.  Some of the ideas we have been testing out have included picking out our own issues we want to research but then meeting monthly to compare notes, sharing our results with each other online, and deciding to research and make a decision on what to do about product category within a specified amount of time.  So far we’ve made some great progress, and our group was recently featured in the Davidson Journal, Davidson College’s alumni magazine (http://davidsonjournal.davidson.edu/?p=2385).  We plan to continue our work this fall — stay tuned and get in touch if you are interested in joining us!

The obvious question that arises is, who watches the watchers of the watchers?  There are two possible ways to end the infinite loop — one is competition and peer review (they watch each other) and the other is public transparency and accountability (we, the public, watch them).  Whether or these mechanisms are effective is a question for another day…

I participated in the rest of the event as well, and very much enjoyed the other speaker’s perspectives on innovation, which came from a wide range of both business and academic backgrounds.  The talk about Galileo and innovation by an astronomy professor was particularly memorable.  SRG is also doing a lot of interesting work itself on understanding the factors that drive consumer demand and society’s evolution, and did a great job of organizing the forum — it was implemented very professionally and creatively.

To learn more about the Forum, visit http://www.bolderinnovation.com/.

Questions ranged from what courses to take to the best ways to find relevant jobs and get into strong graduate programs, and we each provided answers based on our own personal experiences.  I tried to encourage students to take as broad a range of courses they can, from intro anthropology to intro economics, while still focusing on an area that they are really interested in.  While specialization is important and valuable, for undergrads there really is no substitute for a broad-based liberal arts education.

I also did this using a large number of random spot-checks for all of the other codes we used, and compared them to similar codes for potential mistakes and overlap. I also reviewed all of the comments and memos within our coding software MaxQDA that we had generated about these codes during the coding process, and used them to further standardize the identified codes. This rigorous review process, which took the better part of a month, gives me increased confidence in the reliability and validity of my data, and all of my related analyses that will make use of them.

My idea is to try to post something at least once or twice a month (or more depending on what comes up), so feel free to come back and check in on a regular basis.  If you login, you’re welcome to leave comments on any of my posts — it would be great to hear from you!