Green Energy: A Polymath

When I was a little girl, my dad came home with a cardboard box of books - there must have been 30 in it. The women at the local church pantry gave it to my dad for us kids.

I decided I would read every single one of them. During summer vacation I laid out on the grass, in the trees or on the couch inside the house and flipped through them. A flashlight, at night, in bed, covers over my head.

By the time I was in seventh grade, I bought a single subject notebook. It was blue. My friend Kristy dressed like Betty Page and Marylyn Monroe - without the overt sexuality - and I sat on her bed, my back against a wall, and I told her that I was going to be a writer.

As a young woman first going to college, the idea to study literature was a path paved that continued on with meaningful and rich voices - but whose critics and literary theory were of a more profound and higher form. Who really were these incredible writers I spent my youth discovering as they, page after page, made it their livelihood to describe wondrous things? What was going on here? How did it shape society? How did it shape a life? How could I join that community? What would I learn?

Besides the requisite skills of learning how to write, I began to understand what I intuited as a child; those voices lifting off of the page as tendrils and wisps of knowledge were representations of larger ideas, questions, commentary. Writing paper after paper lead our classrooms to understand we were examining things that went far beyond the book and into the public realm. We were examining history and the stories that bound us; piecing them together into a personal narrative we could create a social thesis from. My gaze deepened into my books, and, when I looked up, broadened outward. Who was I in relation to the whole? What could my voice bring? How could I understand how best to use my talents and contributions? At the time, I started dating my daughter's father, a 27 closeted genius, I would later learn, obsessed with NPR. We would spend the next years up late discussing society, ideas and world events, together.

I wanted to move from literature, or more specifically, fiction, to a space where all these social, cultural, and even political questions were being discussed, matter of fact. I had questions, and, as such, I was meeting with my own inner Socrates. I joined the philosophy circles on campus, began to intern for public radio, and eventually moderated a discussion group for the community and the local NPR station called the Socrates Exchange. All the while, I was writing feverishly - poems, novellas, and philosophical and critical essays. This went on for three years. I met US Poet Laureates, famous writers, thinkers, political leaders, and I even learned to produce some radio stories and publish for NPR, myself.

Having grown up working poor, to make money I was working full time at a greenhouse. Questions big and small constantly filled my mind from the times I spent at the radio station and during public discussion groups I designed or joined. While tending tomatoes bursting red or yellow, lifting buckets of water to give hibiscus and geranium a drink, pondering seedlings about to burst open, tending flowers, I was listening, inward. Being in that state of solitude, near the peace of plants and soil, I was grounded.

Working with plants was my cure for everything that needed peace and quiet. When I wasn't busy raising my beautiful child, running groups or writing, I was spending my free time hiking through trails that brought me face to face with the deepest questions that hang on us. What does it mean to live? How shall we live? What is meaning and does God exist? Shall we feel apathy and despair - become nihilists - if God doesn't exist? Why care?

Going through the icy chill of an existential crisis is one of the most difficult and deep experiences I can barely describe. When you jolt awake at night - stunned into your being - wondering how it could be, at all?

I knew I wanted to be a writer - but, my questions were consuming me. It was in the sunlight of the greenhouse where I sought relief and light. Why are we alive? What does it mean to live well? My increasingly serious and long social and political journey, this grounded love of plants and nature, me lifting a water bucket up into the sunlight to water a hanging pot of flowers.

I thought about light. Leaves. Nature. How was it that all of life was sustained by a ball of light 93 million miles away whose rays land on a leaf and turn that into energy? How was it that our climate was changing, dangerously, in the face of my person question: what does it mean to live well? Why were plants so soothing to me.

I thought about my friends and family, I thought about the future, I thought about all the writers and thinkers that I loved, and I thought about wanting to protect all of it. Keep it safe. Nurture it the way I was drawn to nurture plants.

As it happens, one day my philosophical musings landed me directly on the leaf, itself. How lovely that such an organism has tiny machinery inside to convert sunlight from millions of miles away into the energy that everything on the planet uses for life. How was our reality built with tiny atomic puzzle pieces? How odd. How beautiful. But, what's more, how interesting that it uses the CO2 in the atmosphere as a part of it's process, breathing out clean, much needed oxygen.

What if we could design our own machines to place in cars and homes that could mimic this amazing process? What if, like the catalytic converter underneath a car, we had our own technology that could breath in the CO2 from the air, use sunlight, and convert it back into energy? How would this help us nationally, environmentally, socially, economically? Philosophically, I was stunned into a moment of, ahem, enlightenment. Could I learn math? Could I learn science? Would that make me a Renaissance student? How would I explain that to my friends? What would it be like to be a polymath?

From creative arts to philosophy, with a bigger desire to understand the world, I stepped toward a new research project.

I went back to school for engineering. Hardly able to convince my literary and humanities driven friends that I would come out the same person. I was a poet, a philosopher, and a creative writer who spent most of her life considering the social and political side of life, after all. How could I explain to them that this would simply broaden my perspective, more? It didn't make any sense to them, away from the practical sense of the chance of making more money in higher paying fields. There is an inherent battle in the arts against the sciences--a distrust, if you will. A sense that science creates a kind of disenchantment with the poetry of living. I wrote my college thesis on this ideas. I wanted to bridge the gap in my own mind.

Becoming a polymath is not easy. There were weeks when, honestly, I remember studying math only to frustrate quickly. I was not getting it. My brain, active on the left, was not sinking into the rhythm of this new practice. But, overtime, I did get it. I deepened the connections and deep into chemistry, physics, and cellular mechanics. I honestly began to see that not only is there much beauty and poetry inside the unraveling secrets of nature, there is also such mystery. I started to see how things came together. The mechanics of a cell, the way atoms snap together, how math describes motion and direction. I took to studying long hours in the library. With organic chemistry, for example, I sat for five hours, Tuesdays and Thursdays at the back of a shaded section of the library, meticulously adding to me notes.

Eventually, after becoming confident enough in my skills, I reached out the the US Department of Energy for a research position there. I was accepted into a mini-semester at Brookhaven National Library with lectures from some of the brightest minds on the east coast. From there, I was given a transfer option for an entire summer at one of the national laboratories. I wanted to study photosynthesis and energy production. As it so happens, the US Department of Energy already had the same idea. They were designing solar panels that absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and create energy, like a leaf. I was invited to join a research team for a summer to explore Artificial Photosynthesis in Berkeley, one of the best summers of my academic career.

After enough time in my new field, here's my take away for those considering science: The field of sustainable energy became, for me, all at once the study of hard science and the humanities; my need to understand my life and how to protect and honor it. The journey into science was creative, social, warm, fun, empowering, philosophical, poetic, and yes, scientifically and mathematically rigorous.

And, here's why.

Sustainable energy as science

From the vantage point of sustainable energy, a person carefully studies biological systems and physics - which means they invariably study the laws of nature and the universe. This means the mind is free to ponder deeper questions on the nature of reality and the origins of life. The study of energy brings us to the far reaches of the galaxy down to the inner workings of the cell and further down to the parts and mechanisms of the atom. Studying energy is to study life. To study life is to study the empirical, data driven hard sciences as well as the emergent properties of phemonology and consciousness.

Sustainable energy as social issues

Sustainable energy is the contemplation of society and humanity. It seeks to provide a safe, livable world in which animals, plants, and the daily works and lives of humans can flourish. It's about re-imagining new cities and towns. As such, this field also encompasses issues of concern to the humanities; political, social, historical. Politics develops when one considers how money influences the status quo and the modern mechanisms of production and consumerism. This gives rise to questions about current economic infrastructures and the means of obtaining capital. History comes into focus when wondering about the use of energy and technologies fueling the growth and health of peoples at any given time and the evolution of those societies into the period we find ourselves today.

Present social issues are realized when one looks around at the diminished involvement of the STEM fields, academically and economically. Who is engaged in STEM research nationally and internationally, who has tech jobs, who doesn't? Why? How does this relate to the education provided; to whom is this education presumed, to whom is it out of reach? What issues prevent forward momentum in STEM research? Why do some countries seem to be more involved? Answering these questions in our own country brings up social, economic, and prejudicial questions of concern to human rights scholars and activists.

In addition to the social questions, animal rights are tied up into this field, as the use of energy in the last two hundred years has gravely impacted everything from bees to polar bears. How does our sources of energy impact other living creatures? How does this effect the ecological web and the food chain? Animal food and sustainable energy quickly becomes questions on the cattle industry and factory farming. Moral questions of concern rise in the social sphere as the mistreatment of other species prompt deeper questions about our stewardship of the planet we live on.

Plants are admired for their ability to turn light energy into chemical energy giving way to biomimicry (imitation, the highest form of praise). Machines in plants are responsible for the fuel and food source required for a living planet, such as our own. Therefore, the wilderness, the greenhouse, the garden, the farm are wrapped up into the discussion. How can we use plants to green our cities, to cut CO2 emissions, to make our diets healthier, our planet more sustainable? All social questions.

Sustainable energy as art

Sustainable energy is about the future. It is inherently progressive and innovative. This field encompasses the need humans have to re-imagine and invent a new world. It winks and nods at innovators, creative individuals, artists, gamers, and progressives. The artistic pursuits of these people -- movies, games, designs, novels, paintings, poems, photography -- whose adventuresome aesthetic go on to influence the creative technologies that slowly change our livable spaces. Therefore, not only is sustainable energy about science and the humanities, it is also about the arts.

Multidisciplinary, this field ties together social, economic, and aesthetics concerns into one category, prompting the de-silofication of fields and interests.

I am humbled and grateful that I took this career leap and expanded my knowledge base.