The Education of an Engineer

In Episode 22, we are talking with John Sagebiel. John received his Ph.D. at UC Davis in environmental chemistry and has spent a career really understanding the engineering behind clean environments and specifically how to create and maintain more sustainably built environments.  An important event in the development of his career was the design, and building, and ultimately living in a sustainable home. His education in this new world had quite an impact on the spreadsheets in his head!  

Transcript

John Sagebiel, Ph.D. The Education of an Engineer, Oct. 13, 2021

Susan Clark: [00:00:00] Well, welcome to the art of Dynamic Competence, John.

John Sagebiel: [00:00:03] Thank you,  Susan. It's really great to be here.

Susan Clark: [00:00:06] I'd like to start by kind of getting some background from you and really sharing with the audience some of your history as you've developed as a scientist.

John Sagebiel: [00:00:16] So I got an undergraduate degree in environmental toxicology from UC Davis, and I actually like toxicology a lot, when I was there. The program I was in was a very uniquely interdisciplinary program and that it presented both the physiologic toxicological side of environmental toxicology, and environmental toxicology is essentially pollution toxicology, really. But it presented not only the physiology and the biology side, but also the environmental chemistry side of things. And I liked it, and I actually applied for got into a PhD program at UC Davis in Toxicology. Now at Davis like and a lot of universities, the toxicology graduate program is actually a farm tox, pharmacology toxicology. Because as we used to like to joke, pharmacologists are just sublethal toxicologists, you'll understand that one. I didn't really like it, and I realized what I liked more out of the program that I had been in was the environmental chemistry side of it. And so I switched into a program that at UC Davis that is called environmental chemistry and had a lot more chemistry focus. And I got involved in some work on wood burning and the fate and transport of some of the compounds that come from wood. That was really interesting. I then got a postdoc here where I still am the University of Nevada, Reno. And it was sort of part split between here at Reno and the Desert Research Institute. And then after a year of postdoc, I got a faculty job at the Desert Research Institute. I spent 14, I think, years there, primarily doing motor vehicle emissions, although we did one other really big study on wood smoke. That was super interesting because it was much, much more tightly controlled, actually looking at the direct emissions from wood combustion in an incredibly controlled environment where we had a wood stove sitting on a scale so we could literally measure the rate of combustion in kilograms per hour. And yeah, the whole thing was up through a ceiling with rollers on the flue pipes or the flue pipe could move. It was a neat setup. I mean, it was a really, really interesting experiment. But the bulk of my work was in motor vehicles, and that actually kind of led me into looking at alternative fuels. We looked at biodiesel as we looked at fisher tropes diesels. We looked at all kinds of in fact, at the time was that was, you know, sort of late 90s or early 2000s were getting the ultra low sulfur diesels and catalytic converter equipped diesel engines and particle trap equipped diesel engines. And we studied all of those, both on the road and on dynamomometers, essentially, treadmills for vehicles. And the combination of that, my sort of deepening understanding of the impacts of vehicles and generally of petroleum of fossil fuel use and combustion really led me down a broader path in sustainability. One of the main reasons I left the Desert Research Institute to come back to the university here was to be able to pursue more of that kind of work.

Susan Clark: [00:03:30] So, John, from that work, how is it that you were defining sustainability at that point?

John Sagebiel: [00:03:36] Oh, that's a great question. I mean, despite the fact that I, as I said, I really enjoyed toxicology and biology and physiology. And in fact, the other part of my career that I didn't mention was during most of my undergraduate and part of my graduate school. I was also a firefighter paramedic. And, you know, so I understood a reasonable amount of physiology to do at least emergency medicine level stuff or pre-hospital care, whatever they call it now. Despite that, I really actually am probably more of an engineer than a biologist. And so if you had asked me in the late 90s or very early 2000s when I was doing all that work on combustion sources, particularly internal combustion sources, but we did some others as well. I would have defined it as carbon dioxide emissions; got to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. I defined it as efficiency, saving energy. I think by that point, Amory Lovins of RMI had coined the term megawatts, which it turns out I heard him talk one time, that was a typo, which I think is just hilarious. But so a negawatt is the sort of phonetic equivalent of a megawatt and megawatts, a large unit of electricity. And so a negawatt was the energy not generated. So if we can save energy, we end up with negawatts, which apparently, like I said, that was. He confessed that they didn't coin that term, it was a typo in some draft version, and they went way, that's brilliant.

John Sagebiel: [00:05:06] And the focus was very much on the quantifiable and I'm really comfortable with numbers. I love to be able to put things in a spreadsheet and I could do that very, very well then and we could look at, well if we could roll out a diesel fleet that was 10 percent, 20 percent, something biodiesel. You know what would be the net impact on carbon emissions? Those kinds of things were easy in a lot of ways to come up with because they're pretty indisputable. You can you could do the math. So I liked that aspect of it, and that was very much, you know, the focus it was on bringing the right, as far as I was concerned, answer to the question in terms of, you know, how do we solve this problem? Well, a lot of it was a technological solution. It was either changing fuels, but I mean, there was a strong push at the time for what we talked about. Then there was something like a I can't remember the exact phrasing, but it was like a pour in the tank solution. It was a technology solution where we don't replace the motor on the vehicle. We pour something different in the tank and the same motor than, you know, can consume that fuel but not have the negative emissions that we associate with petroleum products. So a lot of those kinds of things was very technology focused.

Susan Clark: [00:06:28] So as you were finishing up at DRI and coming to UNR, you began to engage in this process of creating a sustainable home. Do you want to talk about that?

John Sagebiel: [00:06:39] Yes, I'd love to talk about that process of starting and finishing, designing and building this home. What it was was I started very much with the idea of what I had been talking about, efficiency and minimizing fuel consumption and maximizing renewable or alternative sources of energy. And that was really my focus. There was an interesting process that I went through to find an architect because quite frankly, there wasn't. We're talking late 2001, early 2002. There weren't a lot of people. I mean, that was 20 years ago now, but there weren't a lot of people really engaging with that word sustainability or with solar or with passive solar designers and these other sorts of things. And I ended up finding Don Clark, who is your husband. And Don immediately said, Oh yeah, let's go. You want something? Let's go do this. And just that attitude of, you know, even if he didn't at the moment able to sell me, oh, he'll here's exactly what I would do for you. It's like, No, no, we're just going to go and we're going to figure this out as we as we go along. Obviously, he had a ton to bring to the process and to bring to the table of of what we were doing. That was, I think, the beginning of my education in this broadening of the definition of sustainability. That was really where I came to him and I said, OK, here I found this company that I want to get their solar hot water storage tank from because they've got super insulation on it. Here's what we're going to do at the time in 2002. You know, solar photovoltaic was still really expensive and there wasn't any kind of a rebate or even formal net metering process in Nevada. So we said, OK, we're just going to pre wire for a bunch of stuff for solar. So there were all these things that, you know, I, solar photovoltaic, I should say all these things I wanted to bring in and make sure we got into this; designing for a place on the roof for the solar hot water panels because they should be as close to the building of, electricity as easy to move, wires are easy, water's a lot harder to move around. And then Don started talking about shape and about color and about materials and about engaging with the environment that the house is going to live in. The house is going to be in. And my initial reaction to this was, yeah, OK, but I'm talking about zero net energy. I'm talking about low water resource use. But you know, I understood this as part of this process. We have to pick colors, we have to pick shapes. I mean, these are part of the design elements that go into that. What I didn't realize at the moment was how important those really were to the overall finished product.

Susan Clark: [00:09:37] What do you mean by that?

John Sagebiel: [00:09:39] Well, that's where it gets a little harder to put it into my spreadsheet, even the spreadsheet in my head. What I mean is that you can build a really efficient building that will be really out of place, and that doesn't; it doesn't engage with the space that you are in. I think nowadays with solar photovoltaics being so cheap, there's sort of this other conversation which is saying, Hey, you know, it's not a good idea just to build a really crappy building and then slap a bunch of solar on it and call it green. What Don pushed me to think about and pushed as a good word for it, I mean the design of a house, and this is something else I didn't really consider when I started I didn't know, I'd never done a house before. It's really a conversation. It's a dialog. It's an engagement between what's possible and what you want to do and what's practical and what you want to do. And Don brought in so many things that I think, you know, even just laying out the shape of the house, which actually unfolds from west to east like a Nautilus shell. You have to be in a drone or a helicopter above it to see this, but the shapes there. And there's this wonderful little feature on the very east end of the house, which is a stucco wall that sticks out from the structure, and it serves no purpose other than to extend that line of the curve if you were looking at it from the top, to to make the shape fit properly, to make everything fit correctly together, which I just think is wonderful.

John Sagebiel: [00:11:14] I mean, that's just like, OK, you know, it's probably not even five feet in length, but that's the kind of thing that Don said, Yeah, we're just going to do this because we can and kind of because we should. And then, you know, situating the house in the landscape. So we actually the house is dug in on the west side, not very far, a few feet below grade below the exterior grade, but that's part of kind of resting the house into the environment and then the colors and the exterior of the house. And I say colors, because they're there are actually four major colors on the exterior of the house, are reflective of the environment, and that doesn't change the thermal efficiency of the walls, which are very highly thermally insulated because the color doesn't actually have any relationship to that. It does, though, allow me to have that conversation with people and say, Oh yeah, by the way, this is kind of like that color, and this is kind of like that color, and this is the lowest part of the house and it's kind of into the Earth. So this is where we did this. And those conversations engage people, bring people in, who might not want to talk about, you know, the R value of the wall or why a blown in cellulose based insulation was used versus, you know, bats of fiberglass.

Susan Clark: [00:12:39] And we should probably note that you use this house and show this house as an example of how to build sustainably to a wide range of people that are always coming and visiting your house.

John Sagebiel: [00:12:51] Initially, when we first built it, there was a lot of interest, and I think people were just kind of like, Oh, I'll tell you one of my favorite stories of this. We actually had a couple of local television crews come out and this house is gorgeous. There are, you know, huge beams in this timber frame structure and the beams were recovered from other buildings and they're, you know, they were milled over 100 years ago. And this is just, you know, it has history in the beams long before this house was ever even conceived of and all these wonderful elements. And you know, Don and I, we would talk about this as a green home or a sustainably designed and implemented home. And I think people had really distorted views of what that meant because this one television crew showed up. And you gotta understand, they got, They got to walk through and everything. And here's this amazing, like beautiful structure with these two story tall windows looking out towards Mount Rose and Slide Mountain and the video that ended up, you know they cut these down to about 15 seconds after they've been there for 45 minutes from filming. The video that ended up was of a stainless steel dishwasher in the kitchen because this guy was so blown away by the fact that a green home can have a dishwasher, that that was the video that ended up on the television program. And I just to this day, cannot get over how he could have come up with that as, you know, the little clip to include, but it is about changing minds like that. It is about people understanding that, yeah, you can have a dishwasher. It's it's OK. Yes, you can have finished floors. In this case, our floors are finished concrete, so that allows the heat to come up from the thermal system for heating the house. Those kinds of conversations are really important to getting people to break away from their preconceived notions of what a sustainable home is, what sustainability is. And I think getting that change in mindset is, you know, that's as important as anything.

Susan Clark: [00:14:54] And we had podcasts recently from the Land Art Generator Initiative, LAGI, who did some of the work at Burning Man for their new site out at Fly Ranch, and they also talked about the fact that the component of art is so important and engaging people in this process, and that it's through art, through participatory art that you begin to get people to see things differently. Did you find that was the case in terms of that participation and on your behalf?

John Sagebiel: [00:15:26] Oh, very much so. Even to the design of one of my favorite features of the house, which is something called a Trombe wall, which is Trombe with, I think, a little accent mark. It's the it's a it's a person's name. It's it's an engineer's name. He was French or he was French. If he's still alive, that came up with this idea of a vertical thermal mass. Commonly in homes that you're trying to maintain steady temperatures as you use a heavy, massive floor because that's, you know, it's easy to support. It's where you put the mass. So the house is slab on grade. It's a little extra thick slab. But Trombe's idea was you could put some of that mass vertical and so they would use...there was all kinds of designs that were done in the 70s with this, including like giant culvert pipes like what they use in roadway culverts that they set vertically and sealed and then filled with water and painted black so that they would absorb heat; water as a high thermal mass, thermal capacity, so it would hold that heat and then steady the temperature of things. Since then, a lot of people went to poured cast in place or vertical thermal mass walls. So they were concrete, typically because concrete has a pretty good thermal mass, too. It's not quite as high as water, but you also don't get leaks.

John Sagebiel: [00:16:40] I think that was one of the issues with those pipes, especially they rust. And then, you know, you got two hundred gallons of water. Anyway, what Don did is he actually put two Trombe walls in the house parallel to each other north and south, which so south is where you put everything that you want to have impact the sun. And in between these two walls is the stairs. So two level house and the southern of the two walls is actually just above the height of the stairs. So it's it's low down. The other wall goes up quite a bit higher, and it's a really neat feature because people stop and then look at that and say, Oh, that's kind of neat. There's this double concrete walls with a staircase going between them. That's kind of interesting. They say, Oh, wait a minute, that's actually part of the thermal design of the house. And here's how that works. And I had heard of Trombe Walls before, but I'd never seen a design like this, and I was like, OK, sure, we're going to go for it. But of course, as soon as the walls were cast in place, I was setting thermisters, temperature probes, into the walls so I could run those back into my data acquisition system and measure.

Susan Clark: [00:17:43] You couldn't resist.

John Sagebiel: [00:17:44] Yeah, of course, one of these things actually doing what's actually happening here, and it was wonderful to see those, you know, rise and drop in in the temperature changes of the walls day to night. So I think those are the kind of innovative designs that then sort of serve so many purposes because of course, they serve the house, which is what the intent was in the first place to put a vertical thermal mass volume. But it also serves as the staircase, so it's functional within the house. But then it also serves as this talking point to get people to look at things a little bit differently. The other great feature that Don worked on, and created the shape for, is the climbing wall. So there's a climbing wall in the house. I love rock climbing. And if you go to a gym, a climbing gym, the walls are typically plywood with these plastic holds on them that you then work your way and they can move and reposition the holes. Well, we made a climbing wall out of granite. It's about 25 feet tall in the living room, and it's about 7500 pounds of rock. So it actually adds to the thermal mass of the house. But it's also this thing where people see it and they say, Wow, that's really neat.

John Sagebiel: [00:18:54] You know, it's got this this this interesting kind of shape as it goes up where one side set into a corner. So it's vertical. But the other side is this very freeform shape that was designed to look like kind of a rock slide or a Talis skree slope or something like that. And so it was designed to look very natural. And people often don't see the rope. There's a top rope. They see this wall and they say, I say, Oh yeah, you want to climb it. There's a top rope there, set up to climb it. So those are the things. It's amazing how many people like until you go over and pointed out, the ropes, blue hanging against a gray granite wall, you know, it's like you should think somebody would see that, but they get so fixated on the wall that's there. It's like, Oh, yeah, well, it's you know, you can climb it. Oh, and by the way, it adds to the thermal mass of the house. Oh, and by the way, it's really interesting and really unique. So those are the kinds of things that bring people into the conversation who might not otherwise want to talk about how many BTU is the storage system in a hot water tank?

Susan Clark: [00:19:57] So John, I feel like Don and, really the whole team at Cathexes Architecture, has really done an interesting job in relating and communicating to clients on these intangibles. And I keep hearing you kind of talking about that, but can we talk a little more directly? What were some of the intangibles that you really begin to see differently from your numbers in your spreadsheets as you were going through this process?

John Sagebiel: [00:20:26] I think probably the top ones were this idea that's really hard to explain in a lot of ways of building the house in relationship to where it is making it, of place, and of place can mean so many different things. It is shape. It is position, you know, relative to the Sun. It is color. It is exterior and interior. I mean, the house has like nine interior colors or something. And I'm not that brave with color, but Don has a box of probably 5000 colored chips, and he just came out and went through these. And what? Oh, that one for that wall was like, OK. And that placement of all those different elements? It is cliché to say it. It's where the total becomes greater than the sum of the parts that each part individually, you can sort of say, Oh, well, that's an interesting feature. Oh, well, that's kind of neat how you pick that color to represent the native plants of the area or the non-native invasive plants of the area that are pretty much native at this point. When it comes together into an integral piece like this, then it it all kind of ties together and it all touches each of those elements.

John Sagebiel: [00:21:50] I mean, we could talk about the energy systems of the house, but the energy systems of the house are related to the Trombe wall, which is this interesting stairwell and they're related to the climbing wall and they're related to the shape and position of the House. And so all these pieces, you can catch people where they're interested, I think is a big part of it. You can say, Oh, you see how this fits into that. When it really becomes that bigger conversation that you see that the larger solution, the larger finished product, if it were, I think although they're never finished, I mean, I was just having a conversation with Don a few weeks ago, and he said something funny to me, like because I've made a couple of minor changes to the house. He said, Oh yeah, we fully expect that when when you move in, that's the beginning of the process, not the end. That's not, that's not where things in, that's where things start. And so I think that's also part of it. We learn through our living with it. And living with the house, I've learned just so much about it and how it interacts with its environment and when to do something or something else and how to optimize that.

John Sagebiel: [00:22:59] I do have the Solar Thermal Solar Hot Water System providing hot water for domestic use showers and whatnot and space heat. It's what provides the space heat. So it goes through the floors downstairs and there's some baseboard radiators upstairs and the, you know, now I'm going to get into into numbers a little bit, but it's the house is 3600 square feet and it sits up almost 5500 feet on Mt Rose highway and it consumes, I always joke I fill a propane tank once a year, whether I need it or not. It's typically, you know, in this like 90 to 100 gallons of propane a year, a year. And I've told this to people. In fact, my favorite one, I told this to a guy who was doing some construction work on the house, and he looked at me and he said I put more than a hundred gallons of propane in my travel trailer a year. And I said, You know, yeah, that's part of the point. On a thermal basis, on an energy basis, it's, the calculation is it's about four percent of what a typical home would consume neither propane or natural gas on an annual basis.

Susan Clark: [00:24:06] Well, it seems like these intangibles that you've experienced during the building of your house has had a lot of impact on you. How has it changed, really your definitions of sustainability or how you view what sustainability is, now that you've gone through this process and you come back and you put your engineer hat on? What has it done to you?

John Sagebiel: [00:24:31] It has really changed so much of the way I think about this, and it's interesting because the university where I work and one of my roles here at the university is for lack of a better term sort of sustainability coordinator for the campus. And the campus actually does quite a bit in terms of trying to be energy efficient and use renewable energy and do some of these other pieces. And so I get to kind of report on that and talk about it to the broader public, but we have worked with the organization called AASHE, which is the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, and they have a rating system called STARS, which is Sustainability Tracking Assessment, Rating System, I guess, is what their acronym is. And it was really interesting to me because SATRS and AASHE grew out of an organization that started in probably 2007, 2008, right after I came to UNR that was called the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, and that organization got either morphed into AASHE or it got absorbed into AASHE. I don't know which of those actually was the case, but it no longer exists. And UNR was actually one of the founding signatories of that organization, and it was basically a commitment to some tangible first steps. And then, you know, some next movements and then heading toward climate neutrality was the eventual goal of it. And the president's climate commitment, as it became called, was very much focused on greenhouse gas emissions.

John Sagebiel: [00:26:12] Do a greenhouse gas inventory. Do these tangible steps to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions You know, right after my heart, right, I was, I knew how to do this stuff. We do greenhouse gas inventories. Those are done in spreadsheets. It's wonderful. When AASHE took that over and integrated it into STARS, which is now in version 2.0, I think that part of it became what I believe is called Operations, and Operations is one of five elements in STARS. And STARS has an element in academics. Are you teaching this stuff? Is the generation of students coming out of, next generation of students coming out of university going to know what this is about? Is your research related to this available outside of paywalls? You know, so much academic research is, you know, I don't want to criticize academic publishers because they have expenses and whatnot, but they end up behind paywalls. There have been several proposals at various times. I don't think it's ever made it fully that any federally funded research should be available outside of paywalls because everybody paid federally-funded. We should get to see that. So one element is academics. One element is essentially internal relations. Are you communicating with your, your students, faculty, staff, whatever about your campus work and sustainability? One is essentially external relations. Are you communicating with your community? Do you engage with your community? Are you in your community doing some of these things? 

John Sagebiel: [00:27:48] Service learning ideas are included in that. There's a segment on administration, you know, do you have policies that support these kinds of things? And then there's I think that maybe the finance one may be under administration. Are you investing? You know, most universities have endowments or something. Are you investing in a climate positive way? I think the news just came out this week. Maybe it was earlier this week that Harvard University finally agreed to fully divest from any petroleum investments. And we have one of the biggest endowments in the world. That's a huge move, and there's a lot of other smaller universities have done that in the past. I have tried to get us to do that. I don't know how many times, and the answer I keep getting back is, well, we don't actually control our own investments. It's all invested at the system level. It's not UNR, its Nevada System of Higher Education. So I've talked to the regents and while still we're not at that point, you know, and there's even sort of an intermediate step you can take before that, which is no new investments in anything that's that's petroleum based. Frankly, I think it's at this point, it's probably a good economic decision. It's kind of a do you practice what you preach question? Are you really walking the walk.

Susan Clark: [00:29:01] Going through this exercise with your house? How is that impacted how you're engaging STARS on campus? Has it had an effect?

John Sagebiel: [00:29:09] Oh, yeah, it was. I mean, it was really the reason I came back here to campus. They essentially gave me that job to do and to come onto campus and do those things. And it gave me a lot of tangible examples to pull on, even if I wasn't using that, because it's very different trying to design a, you know, 3,600 square foot house versus, a what are these six and a half million square foot campus that sits on 220 acres? But this was something else that, you know, [00:29:40] in the house process I think we didn't talk about was I got this education in not just what we ended up with, but the process of getting there, going through that process. I don't know. It reinforces it really firms up the education like now when you look back on it, I can see those steps. Very, very concretely and very tangibly, because I have an actual like, have a house to point to the example of it, but I mean, I know the steps that went through to get through those things, and that was kind of interesting because it was just shortly about the time we were finishing the house, finishing, moving into the house, the [00:30:20] construction level sustainability standard known as LEED, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design that was produced by the U.S. Green Building Council came out. In fact, I think LEED was 2002...Late 2005 came out with version 2.0 and I bought the book. I mean, it was, you know, it's just paperback guide to it. And I sat down, I went through it and I was like, Yeah, I get this stuff. This is, I see those tangible steps. I went through them in building my house. And then I challenged the exam; at the time, you didn't have to actually have a job in construction or something to do that. So I challenged exam and I passed it in the first try, which, and there's a bunch of elements to the exam. Some of them are sort of the engineering type questions, and those were easy for me. [00:31:07] But then a lot of them were these design kind of questions and it's like, OK, I'm not a designer and I don't have any formal training in design, but I know where those pieces fit together and I know where they fit in. [00:31:17]

Susan Clark: [00:31:17] And so because of your experiences?

John Sagebiel: [00:31:20] Exactly. [00:31:21] And because of the education that I got from Don and the team at Cathexes, that was really my education in the construction industry, [00:31:28] the design and construction industry, I guess. So when I started into looking at STARS that made that whole initiation of all that so much easier and STARS is one of these things that they always say, it's not something you go through and check a box and throw it on the shelf. Their intent is it something you keep revisiting over and over again and you you look at those things and it does give you a point rating at some level. And it's one of those things where you say, Oh, well, that one, we didn't get a lot of points on that. What can we do there? Because is that low hanging fruit that we can pick up something by bumping our and bump our score up? I mean, if the goal eventually is to bump up the score and make you look better on the rating sheet, OK, that's great. But really, the goal is to improve the campus sustainability broadly and not worry about the rating at the end of the day

Susan Clark: [00:32:18] Well, it's a tool. It is. It's a tool to help you improve if it's used well,

John Sagebiel: [00:32:23] If it's used well, yeah, it does let you kind of look at those pieces and where it's doing well and where there's room for improvement and then giving you a step to take. We pull these these papers out and stick them on a public website, you know, is that within the bounds of the publishing agreement somewhere?

Susan Clark: [00:32:40] And that's a lot of what, as the podcast is called, the Art of Dynamic Competence. Dynamic Competence is really digging down deep and understanding at depth what it is that you're working on, [00:32:51] and it's so fascinating right now. We have to change our culture in ways that allow us to address climate change quickly and effectively. And it's quite hard for people to begin to understand what that means unless they've had this experience. And I think that the work you're doing, talking to people and sharing with that both at your home and at the university is incredibly powerful work because it's that communication of experience that's so necessary to help people make this transition. Do you agree? [00:33:23]

John Sagebiel: [00:33:23] Oh, absolutely. When when [00:33:25] I think about Dynamic Competence in the context of what I do now, a big part of it is that willingness to bring into what I do. Parts of it that, at least to me, may initially seem like: Is that relevant to this? You know, bringing more pieces in creates a larger, I don't know, a larger playing field, a larger bit to get in and engage with. So I do see so much value in those bigger conversations in getting into that slightly broader space and bring it to people where they are in a lot of ways is, I think, an important part of that too. [00:34:08]

Susan Clark: [00:34:08] And it sounds like what you're really talking about is creating context.

John Sagebiel: [00:34:12]  [00:34:12]Oh, very much. And context is all about to me, the understanding. And that's what allows me then to share that. I think it's very challenging, at least for me to really share my experiences and, you know, I tend to get very animated and excited about things that I am excited about. But the context really allows me to gain that deeper level of understanding that allows me to bring that forward to anybody. And I think that's where experiential learning, this kind of experiential learning I went through with my house or with the work I've done here at the university, that is what cements those kind of ideas, I think in me. [00:34:56]

Susan Clark: [00:34:56] Oh, wonderful. It's been great talking to. You about this and to hear a little bit of your story in the transformation of the engineer to begin to learn these greater intangibles and building context within the work that you've done, which has made you such an incredible communicator. It's been really great to talk to you about this.

John Sagebiel: [00:35:16] Thank you. I'll leave you with with my one punch line, which is as I sort of came to redefine sustainability, the one word that I narrowed down to is the word engagement.

Susan Clark: [00:35:31] Say more about that.

John Sagebiel: [00:35:32]  [00:35:32]Sustainability is really the art of engagement, and it's engaging people like we've sort of been talking about, where they are, but it's integrating. It's engaging with people, like I said in STARS, they talk about internal communications and external people. It's engaging with people in your university, engaging with people outside of your university. We can't be an ivory tower on a hill. We've got to show people what we're doing. We've got to talk to people about what we're doing. And I think the word engagement, because sustainability gets bounced around with all kinds of things and there's greenwashing people throwing that word around. And I think when we really start talking about engagement, that to me, that's where the richness lies. [00:36:13]

Susan Clark: [00:36:13] Oh, wonderful. Well, thank you so much for sharing that.

John Sagebiel: [00:36:16] Absolutely. This is this has been really fun.