GreenFire Consulting Group, LLCWorking to Integrate Environmental, Economic and Social ConcernsAbout Us |
|
|
About Us Training, Education, Public Speaking
|
|
|
Karyn Moskowitz, MBA “Karyn Moskowitz is seeking to break down barriers between two frequently discordant languages – the language of quantitative economics and the language of communities' valuing a local way of life in a particular landscape.” Karyn Moskowitz has devoted herself for over a decade to consulting, education and research at the interface of economics and the environment. She has worked closely with local grassroots community groups in Appalachia and elsewhere, with some of the major regional coalitions of grassroots organizations working on forestry issues, regional advocacy and educational groups, as well as national environmental nonprofits. Karyn has first hand experience with corporate environmental policy having worked in the biotechnology and semiconductor industries. She is a firm believer in the duty of businesses to utilize programs like Total Quality Environmental Management and the Natural Step to restore the earth. With a BA in Biology and an MBA in Business Administration, she has been repeatedly called in to research, write position papers and consult on difficult policy questions, litigation and controversies over the management of public lands and corporate timber extraction. She has produced dozens of research reports, media interviews, popular articles, invited seminars and presentations in the Southeast and Northwestern USA, while managing to find time to run for the U.S. Senate as the Green Party Candidate from Oregon in 1998. In 2002, she received a Rockefeller Fellowship and completed a cutting edge documentary on the fate of communities that grow at any cost. A “communitarian” by nature, Karyn believes that communities and civic engagement hold the key to many of the world's most pressing problems, including economic disparity, pollution, and access to food and health care. She helped start and serves on the boards of numerous nonprofit organizations, including Protect Our Woods, Community Media Project, and Orange County HomeGrown. Christine Glaser, Ph.D. For over twenty years, Christine Glaser has worked as a researcher, college teacher, consultant and advocate at the intersection of environmental, economic and social issues. Chernobyl served as her wake-up-call, resulting in a search for ways of living that can be sustained by the life support systems of this earth, and that do not threaten the life, health and well-being of any of its inhabitants. After moving from Germany to Bloomington, IN, she became the initiator and founding member of the Bloomington “Center for Sustainable Living”. She served on its Board of Directors and as a project coordinator for over twelve years. As a project coordinator of the Center for Sustainable Living she initiated, co-organized, and promoted many sustainability projects, including the Community Bike Project (collecting and repairing used bikes and training young people in bike repair); the Simply Living Fair (a weekend of workshops about practical ways of lightening our footprint on the earth); the BloomingVision project (a grassroots network addressing city planning issues), and Genethics (raising awareness about genetic engineering of food plants); among others. She was also the initiator of the first Community Supported Agriculture Projects (CSA's) that started in Bloomington, IN almost 18 years ago. She has served on different boards, commissions and councils, including the Citizens Advisory Council of Monroe County, Indiana, Solid Waste Management District; the Certification Committee for OCIA (Organic Crop Improvement Assoication), Indiana Chapter, and the City of Bloomington IN, Traffic Commission. She is currently a co-organizer of the Bloomington Peace Action Coalition, a member of the City of Bloomington's Commission on Sustainability, and a member of the City of Bloomington's Peak Oil Taskforce. Christine has taught college and graduate level courses on environmental economics, environmental science, sustainable agriculture, ecological design, sustainable use of natural resources, trade and environment, environmental regulation, microeconomics and macroeconomics. She received the equivalent of an M.A. in Economics (Diplom-Volkswirt) from Mainz University in Germany and a Ph.D. in Public Affairs from Munich University. She worked for the Research Institute for Economic Policy at Mainz University, Germany, on the deregulation in U.S. environmental policy, on the privatization of public services, and on the worldwide developments in telecommunications policy. In her later research at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis (at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana) she analyzed cooperative and communal institutions for the management of natural resources, especially grazing lands and forests in the Swiss Alps, with regard to their economic and environmental impacts. As a consultant, her research has focused on public lands, on local government tools for environmental regulation, including steep hillside regulations and soil erosion control. She has done consulting and research on issues of rural planning, housing affordability, economic development, infrastructure development, and fiscal issues related to urban and rural development. Christine has given numerous public talks, lectures, and workshops, she has delivered public comments during input sessions for state, city and county planning, and has spoken at conferences and universities both in the U.S. and abroad. She is a passionate advocate of nonviolence towards all beings. What Our Clients Say About Us Ben Greenfield Karyn Moskowitz and Christine Glaser provided economic consulting services for my organization, a research non-profit, based in California. Our contract lasted from Summer of 2003 to Spring of 2004, though they also provided some pro-bono time scoping the project prior to inception. Overall, I considered their work to be excellent and recommend them highly. They were very sensitive to the needs of our project, and conscientiously worked with us to develop a clear understanding of the project objectives, their role, the contract arrangement, and deliverables. We hired them to provide technical guidance on a difficult environmental economic issue with relatively inexperienced graduate students. They provided highly constructive feedback, that was well tailored towards the project needs. They did a good job of coordinating with our organization and the University we were collaborating with. The grad students enjoyed working with them and provided very positive reviews as well (see below). They demonstrated both an understanding of the complexity of the topic (economic valuation of environmental impacts) and the strengths and limitations of available methods. Karen and Christine were both professional and personable in their interactions with us. We would be very happy to hire them in the future. Comments from two graduate students (taken from emails): 1. Karen and Christine did a great job helping to advise the PEST project. They had great input for the economic part of the project, which is where we really needed it. They responded to all our questions in a timely matter, and got back our drafts within hours or days. I know that when we had deadlines to meet they made it a point to stay up all night, or get up early to get their comments back to us. Overall I think their input was really helpful. They also were able to refer us to other economic valuation documents/articles/websites after we explained what it was we were trying to do. They always made themselves available for conference calls and were very approachable, despite the medium (teleconference). In addition I don't think we ever felt like we couldn't just shoot them an email if we had a thought or question come up. 2. Karen and Christine were essential to the completion of the PEST group thesis. They aided us in deciding how we should go about valuing environmental damages and the best way to determine where increases from the regulatory costs of aquatic pest management came from. They were very good at explaining why assumptions we made were invalid or should be changed; whenever they disagreed with a method we used they always had insightful comments regarding another approach we could take and where we could find that information. They responded in a timely matter -and enthusiastically- to all of the questions we had. Their ability to take and unedited draft processes it and send back an edited version quickly helped us to meet many deadlines we otherwise would have not. Karen and Christine were a pleasure to work with and made the tedious process of economic valuation enjoyable due to their ability and enthusiasm for their work. * * * * * * * Ted Grosshardt The University of Kentucky Transportation Research Center's "Academy * * * * * * * Perrin de Jong The able natural resource economists at GreenFire provide a rare and vital
David Nickell The multi-media presentation she brought to our students was much more than a viewing of her documentary. She skillfully used the documentary as a platform for a workshop on how everyday citizens may utilize readily available technology and basic economic principles to become actively involved in economic planning and development within their own community. Initially, the students were intimidated by the array of numbers and esoteric sounding equations, but Ms. Moskowitz quickly established a level of comfort in their own ability to access pertinent information and analyze long-term impacts on the quality of their lives. The following year I was involved in evaluating a Forest Management Plan that was being developed by the U.S. Forest Service for the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area in far western Kentucky and Tennessee. I was particularly focused on regional impacts of that Plan proposal, which included economic impacts on private businesses in the surrounding area and socio-cultural impacts on the populations whose heritage is tied to the land in question. I once again contacted Ms. Moskowitz and her partner Christine Glaser at GreenFire for assistance. By the time I contacted them, the deadline for my comments to be submitted was fast approaching and I expected to either be told there was not sufficient time for such analysis, or else receive a superficial analysis based on what little detail I was able to provide. Instead, GreenFire produced a detailed and lucid analysis based upon independent research on her part, which included locating some rather obscure source material and sifting through large volumes of data. They not only provided me with the results of their work, but worked closely with me in the final days to guide me through the intricacies of the numbers and their implications. This involved an untold number of e-mails and many long distance calls, often stretching late into the night. Their tireless efforts proved invaluable for determining the long range impacts of the various options and in recommending modifications of the plan and workable strategies for attaining a more sustainable economy and environment, as well as positive cultural impacts, within our region. Their work has made a real impact in my on-going work regarding the future of Land Between the Lakes. In summary, in my experience Ms. Moskowitz and GreenFire has proven to be not only very capable economists, but passionate in their belief that economics should be a tool available to the average citizen to assist in developing sustainable economies. I have heard it said that while anyone may learn to play piano, only a few can become accomplished pianists. In the same way, I feel that Ms. Moskowitz and Ms. Glaser possess a true gift for making the seemingly arcane world of economics accessible, understandable, and useable for the public. Interaction with GreenFire quickly revealed their deep concern that everyone should have the tools available to them, both technological and conceptual, to make rational choices regarding long-term development issues. Their ability and willingness to guide the perplexed through the maze of economic principles and bureaucratic regulations was truly refreshing. While some skills may be acquired through training, passion for one's vocation must be innate. * * * * * * * Randy Auxier I first became aware of Karyn Moskowitz's work in the late nineties by means of common contacts in the environmental community and first met her in March of 1999. Among the areas I teach and publish in are environmental ethics and the philosophy of ecology, and this is the domain in which I can speak most comfortably. Indeed, I am running my upper level course in ecology this semester and my current teaching has been informed by many things I learned from Moskowitz's latest research. I have revised my course this time around some of the ideas about sustainability she taught me. Over the years I have had many philosophical conversations with her, about everything from deep ecology to independent media, to community development corporations, to the role of religion in society and in life. I am always impressed by her insight and her ability to understand realistically what can be accomplished while maintaining her idealism. I find Moskowitz's practical knowledge and ability to locate and utilize resources to be unsurpassed. I call on her regularly for help in discovering what exists and how to find it, in the way of research, especially about costs, impact studies, and hard data I can use in my own environmental work. During the time I have observed her consulting and research efforts, I have learned that she not only has good ideas, she also knows how to bring them towards concrete application. This requires not only a fine mind, but also something extra, something a little more difficult to find in academia, which is a certain organizational genius. Moskowitz knows that the key to achieving a goal with a group of people is to organize them properly and then let them discover for themselves what they need to do –what she may already know (or perhaps she simply intuits) what will happen when the right people are given the right problem to work on in the right way. For example, in the past two years I have participated in some regional meetings she organized for a diverse constituency of persons who work to prevent reckless road-building and over-development. To name one specific meeting that impressed me, in the fall of 2003 I attended a meeting she organized in which a regional alliance was formed for sharing information and resources. The regional group consisted of activists from Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland, some 80 to 100 persons in all, over three days. Moskowitz showed herself to be a masterful planner and organizer, creating a setting in which tremendously different sorts of people could engage in fruitful exchange and come to embrace common cause. Included were not only academics (for example, there were representatives with whom I had long discussions from the University of Kentucky, Indiana University), but also some very impressive people from the legal community, political leaders, the city planners (especially a well-informed group from Louisville, I recall), old time activists from such organizations as Heartwood, the media, and citizens and naturalists of all sorts – the full political and socio-economic spectrum was there. Having organized many meetings myself, I could see this was a difficult one to do. But Moskowitz knew what her goals for the meeting were, and all of them were in fact accomplished by means of her organizational talent. Her work was largely done before the conference in seeing who she had and who needed to have a conversation with whom, etc., and the follow-up has been excellent. Moskowitz is a talented facilitator. |
|
GreenFire Consulting Group, LLC
| |