JENNA OUTCALT
Staff Writer
Tamara Brown knows corporate sustainability doesn’t always sound like fun. However, she wants to bridge the gap between corporate sustainability and community engagement in her lecture today.
“As I started to work through this speech and think about it, I thought the last thing people want to hear about is what corporate folks do — at least, that’s what it seems like,” Brown said. “So what I really hope to do is to intersperse a little bit of fun.”
Brown will speak at 3:30 p.m. today in the Alumni Hall Ballroom about lessons from her time in corporate sustainability for the Chautauqua Climate Change Initiative.
Brown recently retired from leading the sustainability program at Linde, a multinational engineering and industrial gases company. However, her background was originally in technology development, which she said was crucial as climate goals and the need for decisive action became more prominent.
“I found that that engineering background and that technology background really helped, because a lot of what we see as the next frontier of sustainability really is dependent upon technology,” Brown said.
She emphasized that technology itself is not the only piece of the puzzle when it comes to sustainability, though.
“In order to make any of those technologies practically work in the future, we have to not only bring communities along, we have to bring communities’ input in, and we have to make sure that communities are comfortable with the technology, can use those technologies and can participate in the benefits from those technologies,” Brown explained.
She said she plans to share anecdotes from not only the corporate side of her work, but also the community interaction side.
“I have some really fun stories that are real stories of how people’s lives have changed and how some of the work that we do through sustainability helps that,” Brown said. “I’ll also have some … anecdotes about traditional community and working on green projects or social projects and things like that that I think people will love.”
Brown explained that when it comes to any kind of sustainability, whether corporate or personal, it “starts off with values.” She also said that the issue of climate change doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so people and corporations have to think about the choices they make.
“Climate change doesn’t proliferate, it doesn’t get further and further, without people,” Brown said. “And you also aren’t going to reverse this climate change or limit climate change without people.”
Brown said she has spent more than 20 years in western New York and loves Chautauqua Institution. She said she appreciated the encouragement of open dialogue and engagement.
“What I hope that people will do is not just sort of think about those values and think about that interdependence, but actually leave and act on them,” Brown said.
She said she wants her talk to help Chautauquans apply the knowledge they’ve gained this summer.
“In the end, I really want people to really think about all the really great things that they’ve learned and started to think about from Chautauqua over this week or over the past weeks,” Brown said. “What do you do about that?”
