Earthwatch at UAA

Lynn Barrett is a board member for the Cascadia Region Green Building Council, and represents our Alaska Branch. She is the owner of Paragon Design Interiors and is a local representative for the DIRTT (Doing It Right This Time) Wall Systems. She is also a teacher at UAA, teaching their “Sustainability in the Built Environment” class. And, to top of the list, she is a friend of mine.

She invited me to give an Earthwatch presentation to her class, which prompted the whole computer fiasco as noted in my previous blog posting.

Computer problems aside, the presentation went quite well. I was nervous, but that’s pretty much standard operating procedure for me: no matter how many times I do this, I just can’t seem to shake the nerves (pun intended).

Part of the problem was that Lynn was not there. She was in Seattle, which I think had something to do with why she wanted me to give a presentation on that day. It negated any need for her to get a sub!

The students in the class were all about my own age, which made it rather fun. They were also predominately male, which is typical for my profession. There was one girl in the room, but something tells me she was only there to use a computer and wasn’t part of the class. She paid no attention whatsoever, coming and going at will throughout the presentation. I just ignored her.

The presentation I gave was one I had created just for her class. My contacts at the Earthwatch home base gave me a prototype to use that went over the basics (who Earthwatch is, how they do what they do, and some of the statistics from over the years) - I simply added a few slides to the program highlighting my own expeditions. They had also sent me a bunch of brochures, catalogs, and post cards to hand out – most of which got distributed to the class.

All in all, it was a good evening. I even ran into an old friend from years ago. He didn’t recognize me, though – not until I spoke to him.