Grist 50 2018

Nothing that Heslop does is small-scale. She likes big systems, huge companies, and complex problems. After majoring in environmental engineering in college, she was a sustainable strategy consultant for major corporations like GE and Nike. In that role, she was part of a team that helped a chemical company assess which of its products were most dangerous and develop corporate guidelines for selecting less hazardous compounds to produce in the future. With GE, her team basically served as internal green fact-checkers, verifying that environmental claims that the company wanted to make about its products were true.

Next, Heslop advised the New York City Department of Environmental Protection on how to decrease the agency’s carbon footprint. In the process, she sheared $100 million off of its budget. “I like to say I’ve spent these years trying to transform organizations to think more green,” she says.

Heslop is now at MIT in a dual-degree program for an MBA and a master’s in civil and environmental engineering. Many of her classmates are focused on sustainability and business for social good, which gives her hope for when they’ll be the ones running things: “If I’m among the future leaders of business, then I feel good about where we are.”

Manning wants your energy. Not in a creepy, Matrix-y way. He wants to harness the energy flows you create in your home.

Every time you microwave leftovers or flip on a light, the result is a tiny surge of energy. Across a neighborhood or a city, add up everyone’s switch-flipping in the morning when we wake up and in the evening when it gets dark, and you get a massive flow that must be met with an instantaneous surge of electricity across the grid. That’s a problem for wind and solar, because they produce electricity when nature decides, not when we want to use it.

Manning is working to turn that bug into a feature. By installing home batteries, solar panels, smart switches (that can start and stop appliances), and tons of really smart software, his company, ElectrIQ, aims to even out those surges in demand. Houses can store energy, powering one another and everything else, by spilling electricity onto the grid when needed. “We’re looking to create the largest distributed power plant in the world,” he says.

For decades, people have floated ideas about ways to better coordinate supply and demand of residential electricity. ElectrIQ is actually doing it. The three-year-old company has installed systems in some 1,200 houses, collecting $16 million in the process. It is now launching its series-A funding round. Or for the 90 percent of us who don’t speak startup, that means they are trying to get bigger fast.

This year, Cave’s startup is planning its first product launch. In the tech-crazy Bay Area, it’ll be just one of thousands — except that this product uses electricity to chemically convert carbon dioxide into organic chemicals that can be used to make plastics or fuel.

After her doctoral research in engineering at Stanford University, which focused on transforming CO2 into something with economic value, Cave cofounded Opus 12 to bring her research into the real world. The company’s first product will be a small reactor, about the size of a dishwasher, that can be used to capture carbon dioxide at the source and generate valuable carbon-based chemicals. (A bit like a tree, but easier to pick up and move.)

For now, the process requires too much energy to be a practical solution for reducing the world’s carbon loads. But the firm hopes that its prototypes will show how the technology could eventually scale. “These emissions are going to be around for awhile,” Cave says. “This will be a way to recycle and refuel.”

Pratt isn’t one for an elevator pitch. When asked what his nonprofit is doing with four city blocks on Chicago’s South Side, he responds: “Come out here and see for yourself.”

When pressed, though, he starts with the farm, which is also how his project — the Perry Ave Commons — got started, as Sweet Water Foundation’s flagship site. Urban farming became a gateway to community development, job training, civic arts, and economic revitalization. Next came a workshop where high school students learned carpentry and sold custom furniture. Then, they built an aquaponics lab out of a donated shipping container and hosted food demonstrations for local families.

“Our goal is stitching and reconstructing the urban fabric,” Pratt says. After raising a reclaimed barn this summer, the Commons also has a community center. They partnered with the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum for an exhibit, “Radical [Re]constructions,” using parts of an abandoned house for an installation.

From a place some see as barren, Pratt summoned abundance. “There grows the neighborhood,” is Sweet Water’s tagline. It’s a nod at their ultimate ambition: Don’t just feed people; give them ground to grow.

In the last year, Popple traveled from Honolulu to Park City to Shreveport to launch electric, zero-emission bus fleets. For many passengers, it’ll be the first time they’ve ever ridden electric.

An early Tesla employee, Popple took over Proterra four years ago, when the startup was working with only six cities. Today, the company is working with 60 transit authorities across the U.S. and has a backlog of bus orders.

Having manufacturing facilities on both coasts — near Los Angeles and in Greenville, South Carolina — has helped midsized and smaller cities in the middle of the country make the shift from diesel, because Proterra’s focus on local economies helps take politics out of the equation. The company is making waves in the industry, too: Last year, a Proterra bus went 1,100 miles on a single charge — the long-distance record for any electric vehicle.

Currently, only about 1 percent of the 70,000 transit buses in the U.S. are electric. Popple aims to be the death knell of dirty bus fuel, one city at a time: “I’ll keep putting pins in the map until there aren’t any more diesel buses.”

In the New Orleans aquarium’s Gulf of Mexico exhibit, fish and sea turtles swim around a replica of an oil rig — a display that just happens to be sponsored by five oil companies.

The humming oil industry doesn’t just provide thousands of jobs: It’s also taken over the city’s legendary cultural life. “Once you start recognizing it, you can’t unsee it,” says artist-activist Brown. The New Orleans native says it’s greenwashing — corporations using art to improve their public image.

Brown had previously co-founded the artists’ collective Blights Out, which spotlights gentrification through posters, billboards, and videos. Now, she’s organizing the Fossil Free Fest. It invites everyone — artists, funders, even oil industry workers — to converge this spring for art, music, film screenings, and workshops. Its vision is a sustainable, post-petroleum New Orleans.

In her own work, Brown takes poignant photographs of homes abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, which displaced more than a million residents. Rising seas will uproot many more, she says: “We will forever be a post-disaster city, and we will forever be a pre-disaster city.”

The new bugs-as-food projects inspire plenty of half-delighted, half-disgusted reactions: Insectivorism might save the planet, but also … yuck. Emery’s startup, Beta Hatch, avoids the ick-factor by producing bug-based food for the animals people eat, such as fish and chickens.

The rationale is in the numbers: An acre growing insects produces 5,000 times more protein in one year than an acre of soy — a typical component of feed. She can feed her bugs — mealworms — for free with spent grain from ethanol producers. “Insects are nature’s bio-recyclers,” she says. “They turn waste into the high-quality protein that birds and fish need.” At the other end, Beta Hatch can sell the bug poop as high-grade fertilizer.

Right now, the company is focused on building a massive breeding swarm of darkling beetles, the adult form of larval mealworms. Emery, obsessively practical, is determined to figure out how to scale insect production so that it can be competitive: “We want this to be profitable.”

The mission of the Land Institute is simple, says Iutzi: “Revolutionizing agriculture, food, and along with that, human civilization.”

No pressure.

To get there, the Kansas nonprofit aims to replace some of our 91 million acres of annually plowed corn fields with a mix of deep-rooted, carbon-storing multi-year perennials. We already farm lots of perennials — think almond trees and grapevines — but the Land Institute is working to make staple grains like wheat and rice able to survive multiple years. Less plowing means less runoff and pollution. Deeper rooted plants store more carbon. Healthier soils grow food with less irrigation, fertilizer, and pesticides.

If anyone can make that big dream a reality, it’s Iutzi. A sixth-generation farmer and an experienced manager of scientific research, he knows how much agriculture could truly change. “Conventional versus organic — that’s just tinkering,” he says. To achieve sustainability or justice, we need to go much further, shifting to a whole new range of crops.

That future is near: One of those new crops, a perennial wheat called kernza that the Land Institute has been breeding for decades, is now making its way into fields, grocery stores, and mouths. And there are more long-lived plants on the way.

Mosley didn’t set out to build a supermarket — he just wanted to know why people in his part of Minneapolis weren’t taking advantage of the food assistance programs available to them. Because he worked with Pillsbury United Communities, a nonprofit finding ways to help people in the area who could use a leg up, he got the chance to ask. People explained to him how they had to carry groceries home on two buses, or settle for astronomically priced, wilted produce from a corner store.

“This isn’t a food desert,” Mosley says. “A desert is a natural occurrence. This is by design. It’s food apartheid.”

And so he built North Market, which sells fresh, reasonably priced food in the neighborhood. The store stocks more than good-looking produce: Locals can also visit a wellness center set up by North Memorial Health System to talk to a nutritionist, get counseling about an ailment, take a cooking class, or do Zumba.

It’s really a community center in the guise of a market, feeding lots of needs at the same time. “What are the essential indicators of a healthy, thriving community?” Mosley asks. “You need places where people can meet each other, exchange good information, and find healthy food.”