Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Ryan Delaney: My name is Ryan Delaney and I am co-director of the Carbon Roots International, and a recent graduate from ASU’s School of Sustainability.

I guess, ultimately, the reason I chose to come back to school to go to the School of Sustainability was that I spent some time working for a copper mining company in South America. And I realized while working in the Andes, I want to say the injustices, but how destructive the mining industry was and not just environmentally, socially in a lot of ways. And I realized that I wanted to be able to do something about that, to do something to change that. So while I was a student at the School of Sustainability, while I was getting my master’s degree here a colleague of mine asked me if I knew about biochar. And I said no, I have no clue what that is. He told me about it and I learned that it was a way of making soil produce a lot more, improving the health of soil by mixing charcoal in with it essentially. And we decided we wanted to do something with that, it seemed like a great opportunity. So we founded a company, we founded Carbon Roots International which is a nonprofit and we used this simple technology to address food security, deforestation, and poverty in the developing world. So right now we have some projects in Haiti to test biochar, test our feasibility to determine whether or not it is going to scale as a business and we hope that it will. And I’ve been going to Haiti on and off for the past year now, I did my master’s degree through the School of Sustainability working in Haiti. It’s a very difficult place to work, but very rewarding. It’s hard to see poverty at that level every day, to live in poverty like that is very difficult to watch. But it’s a really great experience to spend time there and do what we can to help hopefully.

My experience at ASU really gave me an opportunity to talk with likeminded people and bounce ideas off them and learn from them and really helped kind of germinate the basic idea of this company of Carbon Roots and make it better, through the support and ideas of other students and colleagues and professors at the School of Sustainability. Specifically my experience doing my master’s thesis gave me the knowledge and tools that really allowed me to work with the community in Haiti which is one of the very important aspects of Carbon Roots work to ensure the participation of the individual villagers and make sure that they have a say in what we’re doing and can help guide us in our work in Haiti. They can help us help them essentially.

We’ve developed an internship program with the School of Sustainability which will be starting next spring. Starting with one internship, we have some projects that they can work on in Haiti and hopefully it will result in a trip for the intern, the undergraduate, to Haiti and it really gives them the opportunity within the context of Carbon Roots and our work in Haiti to put into practice everything they learn at the School of Sustainability and really apply it in the real world, which I think is really exciting.

One thing that I think is really important about sustainability work is that it needs to be applied in the real world. I think that the School of Sustainability really provides a fantastic stepping point to take ideas that you have as a student here – to make them reality in the real world. In the developing world, in the developed world – whatever it may be to really apply sustainable concepts and I think that’s really important that people don’t forget that. That they don’t get turned off by maybe too many reading assignments and remember that they’re here to actually do something in the real world.

It’s really exciting to be part of ASU’s School of Sustainability which is the first in the country and the best in the country. You go around the country and people recognize the name and they’re impressed and its really fun to be a part of something new but that’s defining its own discipline. It’s a great experience.

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The above transcript provided by Landmark Associates.