The End of Sustainability with Stratis Giannakouros
28m
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Art at the End of the World Class
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THE WORLD IS ENDING! Again. Doomsdayers and apocalyptic prophets have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists.
This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise.
Art at the End of the World is a hybrid class and public program series supported by the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art and the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History, and taught by Associate Curator of Special Projects, Vero Rose Smith.
Today’s guest is Stratis Giannakouros, Director of the Office of Sustainability and the Environment at the University of Iowa.
Music was written, performed, and produced by Gabi Vanek.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
[Vero Rose Smith]: The world is ending. Again. Doomsayersand apocalyptic profits have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists. This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise. I'm Vero Rose Smith your host, and this is Art at the End of the World. Today we welcome Stratis Giannakouros,the director of the Office of Sustainability and the Environment at the University of Iowa. Before coming to Iowa, Stratis served as a project manager and program director for the Julie Ann Brinkley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Before that he was assistant director at the center for sustainable communities seven for college and the sustainability outreach coordinator at Colorado State University. Stratis has a bachelor's degree in economics from Loras College and a master's degree in environmental politics and policy from Colorado State University. Our conversation was recorded on Wednesday, March 25, 2020.
[VRS]: So if you could just introduce yourself and tell us about your current role.
[Stratis Giannakouros]: So my name is Stratis Giannakourosand I direct the Office of Sustainability and the Environment at the University of Iowa. My role is essentially on the academic side so I'm part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and issupported by the College of Business and the College of Public Health, and our office is designed to promote the scholarship and research around sustainability and also to think of the campus as a living laboratory for sustainability. What that means is moving from thinking about problemitizing sustainability to thinking about what are the solutions our students, faculty, and staff can engage in across campus.
[VRS]: Thank you, great. And how did you get interested in this work?
[SG]: Well I started out as more of just an environmentalist back in the day and as I became more engaged in thinking about saving the environment, I realized that modern environmental thought is really - has an absence, or a missing a gap, and thinking about how societies are impacted,how individuals are impacted, and broadly thinking about the social pieces that go into why we have an environmental crisis on our hands. And so what sustainability does is it allows us to think more broadly about unequal exchange in trans-boundary impacts and how harms and benefits are unevenly distributed across the world and allow the solution to come up with the kids and allows a more human approach to thinking about why we conserve the environment what the best ways to do that so just a comprehensive view of what it means to save the environment and what it means to be part of the world in order to solve the biggest environmental crises we face.
[VRS]: That's a lot! So how did that become a professional trajectory for you? You started as an environmentalist with seems like a pretty personal orientation to this work, so describe that path for us.
[SG]: Well actually in college I was an econ major, because I thought at the time that was going to be the best way to get a job - yeah, is majoring in economics and it's like math other things - I actually didn't study [environmental issues] a lot. I didn't take a single environmental course I when I was in college, but I spent all my time outdoors in the woods on the Mississippi River doing things that I wanted to do outside of that, so my personal interests were diverging from my education because I felt that going to college at that time meant that you should do something that's gonna get you a job and what you're interested in what you're passionate about should be separate from that. I got out I worked for a year in finance and I realized that that was a non-starter for me and I was not going to be happy sitting in a cube and kind of thinking about these esoteric problems of finance and I really wanted to be engaged in the stuff that I loved to do and so I quit my job and I went and I found an organization in Greece called Medicet. What they were doing at the time was trying to preserve the Caretta caretta loggerhead turtle of the Eastern Mediterranean. A lot of nesting beaches - some of the most important nesting beaches in the world - are located in just a few spots in the Greek islands and they were being encroached upon by development and tourism and all these things are going on that were really going to severely the impact these turtles. And so I said "Hey, I'll volunteer for a year to come there." I saved some money to volunteer for free for a year to come down and help. They wanted me to do communications. I spoke good English and also spoke good Greek and so as communications officer, I hosted different groups that came in. The BBC even did a documentary with us. We talked to the European Commission. We talked to different groups around Greece and I worked there for about eight months and finally got burned out. I ran out of money and I was very frustrated with the pace of change in Greece at that time. The Greek government was not interested in designating a marine park or diverting funds that were earmark for good work in other things and I kind of saw first hand the complexity of of what environmentalism needs and by that I guess I mean that when I went down there I had a lot of Greeks who were in these areas we were trying to protect - they called me a traitor. They said you know you're a traitor, all I have is this field or this plot of land and why shouldn't I be allowed to develop it? My kids need to eat and get an education and I need to thrive and you know you are an American who is coming down here tell me what to do and we don't listen to you so we're gonna develope anyway and no one wants you around here. And I just I just look at the trade offs in the complexity of people trying to make a living respecting barman how this stuff works and what the drivers of these problems were and when I left I was burned out but I decided that I really had to go and study this more. So I came back and for a couple years anyway I worked with that new - we started our own NGO my brother and I started a non-profit called Green Dubuque. We were working directly on impacts of climate change and got involved in sustainability from that angle. I worked on some programs at Stanford and Berkeley and then at Babson in New York City at Pace University teaching cleantech entrepreneurship. Trying to take a more expansive view of business I did a lot of work in that field. And finally I went to grad school at Colorado State University and there I went to study non environmental policy and environmental politics. And when I was there I got really heavily involved in sustainability. I worked for the School of Global Environment and Sustainability and then that kind of set me on this on this career trajectory where I started working inside universities on sustainability select from there to Luther College after I graduated. I taught for two and a half years. I taught environmental studies and then worked as the director -assistant director of the Center for Sustainable Communities.
From there, I went to Arizona State University and I worked at a little start up that was a twenty six million dollar venture from the Walton Family Foundation that was earmarked for thinking about how universities could take the research they were doing and translate it into environmental or sustainability outcomes. The argument was that often good research is done in universities but there's not a really good mechanism for translating that research into solutions. So I worked as a project manager and program manager for for that outfit for three years. We worked in Albania and Lebanon and Jordan, we tried to spin up projects in Vietnam, and we did start here in the U. S.
I was always trying to find ways where we could take the research in university, take either a government or private partner, and figure out a way to get a project going that would make a difference for sustainability. When I was down there also started twenty different what I would call almost like like intervention programs where we would go with faculty and students to different countries around the world and try to do things like put solar panels or work on social policy. I ran them in Nepal, in Brazil, in Hong Kong, in Costa Rica, and Greece - all over the world. It was an opportunity for students to take what they learned in the classroom and translate it into these
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--BEGIN FULL TRANSCRIPT--
VRS: The world is ending again. Doomsayers and apocalyptic prophets have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists. This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise. I’m Vero Rose Smith, your host, and this is Art at the End of the World. Today we welcome Sarah Ziegenhorn, founder and executive director of Iowa Harm Reduction Coalition. Sarah holds an undergraduate degree in geography and biology from Macalester College and has many years of experience in public policy and community organizing. In addition to her advocacy work and nonprofit leadership, Sarah is currently pursuing a medical degree at the University of Iowa. Our conversation was recorded on Wednesday, April 8th 2020.
VRS: So thank you so much for taking time to do this interview and could you introduce yourself and a little bit about your current role?
SZ: Sure, so my name is Sarah Ziegenhorn, I’m the founding executive director of the Iowa Harm Reduction Coalition. Um, for short we go by IHRC commonly and we’re a statewide nonprofit that does advocacy, technical assistance, training, education, and direct services for people who use drugs. So all of our work is really focused on protecting and promoting the health, rights, and dignity of people who use drugs in the state of Iowa.
VRS: Amazing, and how did you get interested in this work?
SZ: Sure, so I uh- about ten years ago I was living in South Africa and um- I had a home stay family that I lived with for about a year during my study abroad as an undergraduate and um- in in the neighborhood where my homestay family lived was fairly low income and there were a number of women who worked in the neighborhood as, um, as street based sex workers and so I got really interested as I developed friendships with people in the neighborhood and with the folks that were engaged in this kind of survival economy. I got interested in sex worker health and rights and so when I came back from my study abroad experience, I did a research project on um- on urban transportation project in the Twin Cities, at time they were starting to build a light rail and in this area that had been notorious for people doing outdoor and street based sex work for many many decades and so I was really curious how the street project which many people saw as gentrification is going to impact the health and well being of people who were working outside on the street where this light rail was meant to be built. And so kind of from there everything else sort of flowed and developed really easily. I moved to Washington D. C. after I finished my undergraduate degree and because I had had these these research experiences and done this work in South Africa and in the Twin Cities, on the first day that I started a new job at a DC think tank during health policy work, I had a friend or colleague come up to me and say what are you doing tonight can you commit to do a forty hour training to be a volunteer at the needle exchange program here in DC? and I just having the CDC was like sure why not? I don't have anything going on and the rest is sort of history from there. So I started working with the needle exchange program in DC, providing overnight outreach on a weekly basis, so driving around the city of DC between 10PM and 7AM providing syringe exchange services to folks who inject drugs and then working with the people who do street-based sex work in the city of DC.
VRS: That's an incredible story and such amazing inspiring work. Can you tell us a little bit more about how your training influenced where you are today? So you mention your first experiences in this world of advocating for people who use drugs and people who engage in sex work as part of your undergraduate studies, could you tell us a little bit more about your course of study and then your professional training before you founded this organization?
SZ: Sure! I completed my undergraduate degree at a private liberal arts college in St Paul Minnesota called Macalester and Macalester is a small school with a number of unique opportunities for individualized study and soI majored in geography which is a really good grounding in social science research methods, especially research methods used in geographyand taking a place based approach to thinking about social problems in the world and because people in public health recognized how important place is to shaping people's health and wellbeing, there's sort of a nice synergy with community health and global health work and so I had an interdisciplinary concentration in community and global health that I completed as well as a second major in Biology. So I got sort of a well rounded training in hard sciences and social sciences and then went to work in DC at a think tank applying some of the conceptual and more theoretical training that I’d received. And I’d worked and done a lot of, a lot of social science research in geography as an undergrad and so moving to DC, the think tank that I was working at was a research one it's called the the Institute of Medicine, and now known as the National Academy, or the National Academy of Medicine and so in that role the work that we did was really focused on synthesizing research so that it could be presented to policymakers and then delivering evidence based strategies for public policy change to folks working on the Hill in DC, so people shaping federal policy. So that has been really really helpful training for the work that they do now with IHRC because it gave me a very practical lens on how to communicate about science and how to engage policy makers and build relationships with individuals who shape policy at many many levels and the work that I had done in in my undergrad and also in the five years that I spent at the think tank and made it very clear to me that a lot of times when we think about advocacy work we focus so intensely on the individual people who are making policies through a legislative decision making process but um- in public health and in federal policy work we we understand and we recognize that everybody has a role to play in making communities healthy places to live and so that has been really foundational for me and thinking about how do we achieve better health for people who use drugs in Iowa, a lot of that is done not just by focusing on advocating to politicians or policymakers but connecting with and building relationships with broad stakeholder groups community.
VRS: And what brought you back to Iowa specifically? And was there more of a need here than other places?
SZ: That's a great question and so I came back to Iowa in 2015 to pursue a medical degree at the University of Iowa and so I have diverged a lot from that path and I plan to finish my medical degree within the next couple of years. But then, I've spent a lot of time working for I. H. R. C. as something I didn't foresee I would do, sort of taking a break in medical school to work it's not very common but when I came- Iowa is my home state where I grew up, I was raised in Iowa city and on farm outside of Muscatine and so when I came back to Iowa I had been living outside of the state for almost a decade but I was really alarmed after about a year of being back, in recognizing what happened during the time that I’d lived elsewhere and so sort of as a teenager I grew up in a part of history in Iowa was rate very common for people especially at youth and adolescents to be using prescription opioids and using pills as something that they did recreationally or at a party with their friends. But by the time in had come back a lot of the people that I knew who had been casually using pills, many of them were dead, many had passed away of overdoses and then many had been incarcerated or many were actively using heroin and so on when I thought about everything I had learned in DC, both working in the needle exchange there and in the federal health policy role that I’d worked in and I knew there was so much great work going on to build community support for people that use drugs and I saw none of it happen