I love that term.

Woman of carbon.

It just struck a chord.

A deep chord that I hadn't articulated in that way.

And how do you take those people and that passion and you and uniformly harness it for a power that's bigger than them for good, to help make real systemic change that's much bigger than any one person.

To bring these systems together in a way that moves things forward.

What has taught me this is a good one.

We are an ecosystem, whether it's talking about us as humans or just the natural environment in general.

We need each other.

The Earth is telling us that we're doing everything we can to make it habitable for us.

But if we fail there, it's going to be fine.

It will heal itself and actually take a little bit of solace in that.

In the construction sector.

Historically, it has bee a very male dominated industry.

But I think as a woman in that space, the way I've been able to break through is just know that it doesn't matter if I'm a man or a woman, it matters what my intentions are and my will to actually achieve those things.

The mass timber industr and community is really filled with some incredible badass women.

They are interested in having different kind of conversation.

Why are you so committed?

I'm.

I'm committe because I have a real stubborn optimism about me.

I think that anything is possible and know is exactly when I start to get excited.

I share my work with my daughter.

I've realized how much of an impact we can make, even at such a young age, on the coming generations, and how much they can value that.

It's really hard to balance work and family life.

And I'd be lyin if I said I did it beautifully and I could do everything perfectly.

Sometimes I feel like I completely suck as a, you know, a teammate.

And I completely suck as a parent.

When I was a kid, I lived in Northern Nigeria for a couple of years.

You know, on the edge of the Sahara desert.

I saw a lot of issues with water, lack of water or lack of resources.

So that kind of was an early impression on, you know, the link between humans and the environment.

There was a massive wildfire and I couldn't have been more than ten.

And I remembe just looking out from our deck on hills that were burning.

Oh, what's going on?

Why are we experiencing this?

Why is this happening within our culture?

We don't take more than we need and we always give back.

Every year and throughout the year, we honor the relationship with our Earth.

So in order to build for our future, we really need to pass these teachings on to our children to ensure that our children are going to come up here and they're going to take these jobs, that they're going to be abl to fill our shoes in the future when it comes to protecting our resources.

When I was a little girl in Colombia, I was following the space program.

That wa when man went to the moon and, you know, to me to see something like that.

And I wanted to be an astronaut.

But then I realized, you know, I'm not in love wit the idea of being an astronaut.

I'm in love with the fact that you can solve massive problems through science.

So I became a scientist.

Cities serve as dynamic canvases shaping our lives.

Tapestries of our experiences.

They're not just physical structures.

They're narratives influencing our dreams and desires.

These spaces serve as the arenas where we work, play, love, and find solace.

Yet how much do we truly understand about these environments?

The structures, the infrastructure, the materials they consist of, and their profound effects on our well-being?

The reason I'm not afraid to fly.

Oh, I. We just have, this feeling of urgency that we have to care for our environment.

But.

We don't take action.

Our whole world that we know right now is going to change so dramaticall that we won't be able to enjoy, you know, summers at the beach.

This is our home.

This is where we live.

This is where we play.

This is where we source our food.

It's our source of life.

It's our habitat.

I have, many friends that I've grown up with that have made the choice to to not bring life into the world as the state that it's in.

Carbon is all around us and essential for life.

Yet excessive amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere intensify the greenhouse effect.

This can lead to rising global temperatures detrimental to the planet and human health.

An invisible, silent threat harming our future.

In a time when change was forged by fire and steel.

The Industrial Revolutio ignited a revolution of its own, sparkin visionary city transformations.

But progress came at a price.

Pollution, waste and toxic gases seeped into the air from fossil fuels and human activities, disrupting the delicate balance of our carbon cycle.

Today, the construction industry add 40% to carbon dioxide emissions.

It's now or never, really.

I mean, I think we're at it.

We're at a point where we hav to decide to make this change.

And if we don't, we're just moving down that slope where it's going to be harde and harder to rewind the clock and go back to the planet as we knew it.

Innovative women are seeking solutions.

Reshaping our carbon footprint in the built environment.

Our technological advances are allowing us to fix these in real time.

We're discovering the problem, and we're also discovering the solution.

And, we're really evolving and adapting so rapidly.

It's a really fun time to be to be a scientist and to be a human.

Frankly, I never thought actually I would be a woman of carbon.

I always dreamed of, you know, big bridges and towers, only to realize is that in the future, we're not going to be building any bigger bridges or towers unless we embrace this challenge of carbon, you know, all around us.

We just need to figure out how to use that carbon in a very different way than we have been today.

And as soon as we figure out how not to waste carbon, we'll solve the problem.

Buildings have so many opportunities to be part of the climate solution.

Building materials, the materials that we put into making them have incredible potential, both in terms of reducing the impact of conventional materials like steel and concrete, but also innovative new materials where we can store carbon in the materials that we're building our buildings out of them and store them.

For a long time, we will be addin in New York City to the planet every 30 days for the next 40 plus years.

We can use that as a mechanis to continue to harm the climate, or we can all use it as a mechanism to heal it.

What we have to do in order to decarbonize building materials and the built environment is that we have to reinvent these tools of the Industrial revolution.

Cement is the most used manmade material on the planet.

Pioneering startups are developing sustainable cement alternatives fre from fossil fuels and limestone.

There's a misconception that in order to continue building at the rate that we are used to and need to in order to sustain society, that is necessary to go through the route of making Portland cement.

We think this is a much better way.

We're now developing an electrochemical system for making cement.

So I like to say this is the electric vehicle of cement making.

So cement is made in these giant fossil fuel kilns.

And what we're doing is replacing high temperature combustion and fossil fuels with a system that works electric chemically at ambient temperature, can b powered by renewable electricity to avoid all of the CO emissions that come from cement making, which amount to about 8% of global CO2 emissions.

Really, the magi happens at the material scale.

If we want to have an impact on a building scale, it really all starts with the chemistry, the biology of how we make materials.

So we're really laser focused on learning from nature and applying nature's fabrication methods to the way we make building materials today.

What this living material is, is a vision that we can use bacteria, algae to produce a different type of binder that doesn't create CO2, but instead sequesters carbon into the material.

If you drive around town, you might have noticed once or twice that our infrastructure, the roads, the bridges, buildings around us that are made of concrete, that crack they break.

We spend billions of taxpayer dollars to repair them every year.

Having a material that actually repairs itself when it is damaged would be ideal.

Our bodies do that.

We want to mimic more of a living system in the materials around us.

And so the idea of this technology is that we would put it on the surface, and since it grows, it will grow down and find the damage and then start living inside the concrete, really keep our existing concret infrastructure alive for decades where we would have ha to tear it down and rebuild it on our earth.

Many things happened in a cycle and I see materials is also being made.

Therefore, eventually they need they need to die and they need to disintegrate.

The more we fight that, the more we'll end up with materials that require a lot of energy to manufacture, resulting a lot of emissions create bonds that won't fall apart and that, in the end, is not working with the Earth because we are fighting this cycle of creation and degradation with time.

If we embrace the fact that a system that can naturally deteriorate and that we are willing to repair and maintain is part of a cycle more, then we will be able to work with materials around us that are better for our environment.

There are organisms all over the planet that take CO2, reacted with a metal like calcium and magnesium, and fix it in mineral form.

If we look at that as a starting solution to make materials, we're already starting in the negative with carbon.

There's basically no one els doing it in the way that we are.

Where using carbon negative limestone that's produced by living organisms through bio mineralization to make cement and concret more carbon negative materials.

For us in the United States, thinking about buildings i a circular manner is critical.

We have tons of existing buildings, and those buildings can be reused and the materials in them can be reused.

And how we build now should be thinking about 100, 200, 300 years from now, how people are going to take these materials and reuse them for the future of materials is circular.

It makes absolutely no sense.

It's not possible for us to continue with an extract and throw away model, because we're running out of things to extract.

I think there's an understanding that this problem is urgent and important, and an understanding of of the massive role that cement has to play in, you know, the development of the human species.

As the world's population grows between now and 2050, it's expected the floor space on Earth is going to double.

We need cement now more than ever.

We just need a different way of making cement.

Can we design a building prototype that no longer lowers?

Of course it lowers, but it goes beyond that and actually absorbs carbon from the atmosphere.

The carbon it absorbs is more than the carbon it would emit during the construction process.

Can you imagine a world where every building absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, rather than emits carbon into the air?

Urban Sequoia incorporate a couple of innovative concepts.

Of course.

It tries to reduce carbon emissions of building as a whole.

However, it also uses nature based solutions such as bio brick, for example, bio cement.

It uses innovative technologies such as direct air capture systems that absorb carbon directly from the atmosphere.

One of our colleagues actually introduced this idea, presented this idea to his children.

So he explained to the children that this is a building that acts like a tree.

It absorbs carbon from the atmosphere.

And the children's reaction was, wait a minute, don' the buildings already do that?

So intuitive, so right, s amazing, so beautiful in a way, I think one of the first lessons that I want to teach her son is that he isn't immune to his surroundings.

As humans, we have a tendency to think that we are removed from the environment around us.

But I think something I want to instill very early on is that he is actually a part of the ecosystem that surrounds him.

I'm really excited about younger people getting involved in their communities, because I think younger people are much more aware of their footprint.

They're much more aware of waste, and they're much more creative in ways to use products over and over and over in different ways.

And it's not about upcycling or recycling.

It's about extending the useful life of a product.

For hundreds of years, we've been really exploiting natural resources and using chemistry with a very heavy hand in a way that' resulted in a lot of pollution.

And we're starting to understand really how that affects all these different ecosystems.

How we look after the environment is by taking pollution, taking waste and turning it into something useful.

And, and in that sense, we're kind of cleaning, cleaning house for everybody.

We're helping big companies clean up after themselves.

We're helping people who make thing think about how they make them.

Fermentation is something we all know, when we think about wine and beer, gas fermentation, you don't use a sugar, you use a gas.

And the gas can be something like carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide, with some hydrogen.

And so we have a living organism, much like yeast, that consumes carbon in gases instead of sugars.

And it consumes these and grows.

And it makes stuff stuff that we need to make, things that we use every day.

The thing that's lost in all of thi is that we are really applying nature to solve a problem that we face today.

These are truly natural processes.

Biology has always had the ability to consume gases like carbon dioxide and hydrogen, and convert those gases into products.

In our case, we're harnessin that technology, leveraging that technology to directly produce sustainable fuels.

And that's in the form of, for example, ethanol and a range of chemicals.

Where does this gas come from is a really important aspect.

And one of the places that we realized early on was in industry, industry, like the steel industry, making things that we use every day.

A lot of times we don't think about steel as playing a big part of our lives, but think about homes and infrastructure, buildings, cars and so on.

We all need steel, and for renewables we need windmills, turbines, it'll it'll comes from steel, but all the steel makes, carbon emissions just throug the chemistry of steel making.

And so we thought, why don't we capture the emissions from that steel making chemistry and make something else?

Carpet is such a strange material to be talking about in terms of being a solution to reversing global warming.

We believe that if we can show the world that it's possible to make products that actually store carbon instead of emit it in the process of making them, that we'll be able to chang the world the way that we did.

That is through 25 years of first reducing the carbon footprint in general.

So the recycled materials lower the carbon footprint because we're not creating virgin petroleum based materials.

But then the bio based materials are what really allow us to get to carbon storing or as an overall ne calculation of carbon negative.

So if we use those plant based materials and create a carpet tile out of them, we've no permanently stored that carbon, we can still sell a beautiful product that maintains color clarity while also being carbon negative.

That's a pretty big breakthrough.

When we can have a relationship with carbon, we can make better products and we can collectively reduce the carbon from the atmospher and put them into the products.

So it makes carbon a tool for us and not an enemy.

If you think about burning fossil fuels, that releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that is waste carbon, we can now take tha waste carbon and think of kind of the circular economy of carbon in the atmosphere and use that to store in our products.

So our products are overall made of waste.

America's leading steel producer is forging towards a greener revolution and sustainable technologies.

So the steel industry is redefining carbon because they're looking at i in a way they never have before.

So using recycled scra they stock material to make new steel is not new but it's very proven technology.

We're also looking at ways to add in bio carbon or substitutes for charged carbon, a variety of new technologies to further reduce the carbon, the embodied carbon within steel, but also the carbo that's created in making steel.

Where is the carbon in our process?

We're continually improving, and we want to find ways to reduce our scope to which is our electricity that we're using this mill is also run purely by onshore wind, and energy is one of the highest pieces of our carbon story here at our facility.

But we can take that nearly to zero.

The more we use renewable energy, steel that we make actually is helpin to reduce the amount of steel.

So if we can minimize steel in buildings, we're reducing the carbon.

So as is a high strength steel that we're producing in steel beams and plates that will allow us to even use 20% less steel in the columns for high rise buildings.

It's us challenging our competitors and the other World Steel players to be more accountable to their decarbonization and be demanding that they actually improve their processes and making steel.

It's so important that we develop talent and regrow talent and retain talent, and a lot of that is how do we diversify and grow the women and make them feel comfortable.

And I think many of us have had a career where we felt that, you know what, they're not looking out for my best interest, or there's not advocates or peers that I can go to.

And what about facilitating a more formalized community?

And really what it is, is having an opportunity to talk through challenges whether it's parenting issues, workforce challenges, but knowin My entire career, I've worked with all men, and I'll tell you that every once in a while, I walk into a professional environment where the room is filled with women, and then I take a deep breath because I realized I can let my guard down.

I can act myself.

It feels like comfort and home.

And then it makes you think, like, why can't I feel that way all the time?

How do I find ways to bring more people like me to have a seat at the table so that you know you can be unguarded more?

Is.

What I always used to worry about was energy, democracy.

How do you get power to all the people that don't have access to it?

Power is essential.

You can't even read a book at night.

You can't learn, you can't study.

And so I was very focused on energy.

And then I started to discover that if we didn't provide clean energy, then we were dooming ourselves to a different fate, that it couldn't just be energy.

We had to strive for clean energy.

And so I started to realize that we needed to fundamentally change our energy system, our carbon system, so that we could get everybody to the same level so that we could achieve justice, but also achieve climate justice.

We just have to go up a notch because we have to go much, much faster.

We approach the project as the sensory experience of walking in the forest.

And so when you're in the fores and you come through some tree cover, there's light that falls even on a dark, cloudy day.

And being able to experience that light, that feeling of being in the forest, in inside a building was really incredible.

So the port had set, really high sustainability goals and high goals around carbon.

And this is where we believed that there was an avenue for wood.

By being able to track that wood back to the forest, we're not only addressing carbon in multiple ways, but understanding the embodied carbon from the actual wood being used.

Growing a forest is a really long term and stable way to store carbon dioxide.

But when we harvest a forest, it's converted into a bunch of other different things.

So if it ends up in pul and paper, the carbon ends up in pulp and paper, it gets remitted relatively quickly.

Whereas something like the PDX airport is around for a really long term.

And so for u to have the wood in a building that's going to be there in 50 or 100 years, it's a very stable place for it to go.

And then also articulate a story of a different kind of forestry, a kind of forestry that's mor focused on habitat and climate.

We were a part of that story, and one of the number one contributors to the nine acre roof.

And a lot of way we are connected to these trees, and we are similar to them through all of the trials and tribulations.

We're all still here.

We're still standing amongst these trees and, still feeling those, those deep connections to the roots that are tha are here to come here and, meet us Yakima people and how we, are managing our resources.

And to take that back to Portland and to share it with the world, which I think is pretty meaningful as a child learning about these indigenous ways of living with the land, it always made so much sense to me.

There was this hope that these very simple but very deep, ancient way of living, passive strategies, if you will, in the built world, that that's something that we couldn't have as a modern approach.

We are taking a tree that is specific to a region and turning it into a high tech building product.

That is amazing to me, and I think it creates this opportunity for people who occup and inhabit these buildings to reconnect with th natural environment around them.

So one of the big challenges that we face at the Portland International Airport was how to match this undulating geometry of the roof, right?

It curves in two directions with 3D modeling and CNC machines.

We are able to fabricate each component of the roof, and there are tens of thousands of components that go into that roof structure.

We are able to fabricate each component to millimeter precision.

I think a thing that's reall remarkable, and it's being done right with the airport, is that they shifted from the standard view of people who are using wood, which is I don't know where the wood comes from.

I don't care where it comes from.

Just keep it coming and keep it cheap.

And the airport project is sending exactly the opposite message, which is we do care, we insist on knowing and we want to have a fair relationship with this landscape.

And so we're getting our product.

But treating the land well and helping things get better in our region, wood as a whole, needs to be part of the 21st century's building materials and it does have positive carbon implications.

The mass timber industry is really a special community, and a large part of that is because it attracts people who care deeply about not just the construction itself, but the impact of the construction.

We're not just drawing something on a paper, passing it to someone else and saying, here, build this.

But we're saying, hey, I want to make sure that everything that I've envisioned here is delivered in such a way that does as little harm as possible to both people and planet.

Yet we must act.

We have to do something.

And so it's it's just a willingness to continually evaluate what we're doing, understand it deeper, understand how far it connects to things around us.

How can our buildings, how can our structures, how can our economic investment actually help all communities and not just some?

The climate issues are justice issue, right?

And what we cannot afford to do is leave anybody behind.

I think one of the real unfortunate aspects of climate change is that while it affects all of us and will continue to affect all of us, it really impacts the underserved in a disproportionate way, which in some ways, to me makes it all the more clear why those of us who are in a position to drive change and to make an impact have an even bigger responsibility.

I think this in some ways creates an opportunity because investment needed to face this climate crisis is lik the next industrial revolution.

For those who are willing to invest.

Portland's historic Albina neighborhood is on a new trajectory overcoming social, racial, and economic injustices so the Maya memorial trust building, I think is, definitely a unique projec in the United States of America right now because it really focuses on the intersection between environmental sustainable and social equity.

Who constructs the project, who do those dollar that go into the project benefit and really how to grow, small and minority owned and women owned businesses?

Within the context of the real estate industry.

Meier cared a lot about, the carbon footprint of this building, but also about the region and its economy.

And another thing they wanted to promote is innovative wood materials.

And so in the spac that we're standing right now, which is the center for great purposes, we've used a new materia in Oregon called mass plywood.

And mass plywood is in the category of a mass timber material.

They really were taking this material that, hasn't yet been seen in these kind of beautiful spaces and really elevating it, here to show off Oregon's wood innovation.

This is workforce housing, which is means 60 to 120% of average medium income.

It's providing places for people that don't have publicly subsidized housing.

But it's that missing middle.

It's people who are working har and want a place to come back.

Safe place, a beautiful place that just happens to smell like the forest when you walk in at the end of a long day.

Mass timber is unique in that it bolster both rural and urban economies, so it's in addition to creating manufacturing opportunities for folks in the US, creating jobs in the forest for folk in rural parts of the country, it's bringing the two together in a meaningful way.

As we're all aware, we're pretty divided, and those divides are ofte based on rural and urban mass.

Timber is a product that brings us all together.

The stories of mass timber building start in the rural parts of our country, and many of those stories conclude in urban settings.

And mass timber is transformin not only the built environment, but is offering all of us who live in homes, who work in buildings, who shop and eat in buildings with an alternative buildin material that is actually good for the climate.

When you have a mass timber building, 50% of the building is stored carbon.

People no longer want only to buy a materia that looks and functions well.

Today, they're thinking about their grandkids and how the material choices they make today will impact future generations.

Mass timber has in some ways become a mas movement, both for us as a firm.

But I think now for the industry more broadly, it's really exciting to see where this movement is going.

So our T-3 project in Minneapolis was our first project.

5400 tons of carbon were avoided in the constructio and operation of the building.

And I think what's so exciting about timber as a material for our tenants is that they really connect with the material in a way yo don't, with steel and concrete.

When we tour tenants through our T-3 projects, they actually walk up and touch and feel the wood, which is not something you see in most office buildings and has proven productivity and wellness benefits to the tenant and occupants of the buildings.

We focus a lot of times in the last century about improving our standard of living, making ourselves more comfortable, but we haven't really thought about the impact and I think that now they're sort of turning a corner in terms of what can we do to lessen our impact while maintaining our standard of living, or improving our standard of living and just having that sort of second thought about what is the impact of this technology that I am developing?

It's very important for scientists to learn how to communicate with people about what they're doing.

You know, we're funded by taxpayers.

We should tell you how we'r spending that money to improve our lives and our society.

All of this activity about embodied carbon, about climate change.

I'm thinking about my family.

I'm thinking about the next generation that follows us.

And in our industry.

It is actually I find the women of our industry that are most attuned there and that are most motivated to act.

And I think that kind of insightful ness that they bring to wh we're doing very mission driven.

They're looking at the future.

They're not stuck in the way it has been.

They're looking at what comes next.

They're looking to be disruptors, the female leaders of the industry that seem to be more concerne about the plight of the planet, the plight of people's healt and the unintended consequences of the way we design and build our buildings.

The climate crisis has been a crisis a lot longer than the urgency that we're feeling about it now, from a larger collection of people.

But we are feeling that urgency because we're actually experiencing impacts much more than we did in the past with the climate events that are happening.

And now the building sector is waking up because of the understandin that we are a huge contributor to the emissions of the pollution that is actually triggering those, those current impacts.

Everything disappeare in the course of an afternoon.

The Dixie fire just took out the town I walked away with from Greenville, with the clothes on my back, the contents of my pockets, and an old pickup truck.

These kind of mega fires never existed before 2000.

In this region, I don't have words to really accurately describe the weight and, the arc, the depth of what we have in front of us to rebuild.

660 homes were lost.

We were approached by thi nonprofit, the Sierra Institute, to help rebuild homes for peopl in those areas who still owned land often, but not always, had insurance settlements and were seeking to rebuild their lives in the city of Greenville, California.

The opportunity to go into tha community gently and carefully and create master permits for a series of modular mass timber homes with these beautiful modular wet cores, which include bathrooms and kitchens that can all be swung into place on a crane on the site, was an extraordinary opportunity for an architect.

This is eighth inch thick plate steel plate steel.

Steel doesn't burn unles you get it really, really hot.

And wildfires don't create that much heat for that long enough to ignite the steel.

The insulation is approximatel this thick rockwool insulation spun basalt rocks don't burn mass.

Timber can be used instead of traditional structural materials, comes in slabs of essentially structural wood pushed together and adheres together.

It goes up very quickly.

Mass timber.

The product itself has been tested in a variety of ways and burn tests, and have gone through two and three hours of burning, and they just chass.

It does not burn through because the layers of timber are such that there is no oxygen or very limited oxygen between those layers.

Unlike standard stack frame home construction, fire gets around a two by six and it will burn, and structurall it will basically disintegrate and mass timber remains in place.

And so it offers a lot of fire protection.

There's nothing fireproof but it is highly fire resistant.

It's durable, it's solid.

It's making use of timber, which would rot otherwise.

And we are surrounded by a million acres of timber just like this that we can harvest and manufacture here locally.

It is the hardened home of the future.

It is the way we get to hardened communities.

And interestingly enough, there's also seismic safety benefits, which means in California there's a lot of other places that will benefit from it.

And we believe we're not building for hurricanes, but they're going to withstand wind and those kinds of pressures.

They've been tested under explosive, forces.

And that stood u better than many people thought they were going to build up, including the experts.

Now, everybody in the world needs to recognize and accept the reality that what has happened to me in Greenville is very likely going to happen to them, and that they need to begin preparing for that reality.

The crisis that we're dealing with now is affecting third world countries.

It's affecting poverty, it's affecting crime, it's affecting peace.

And people think about, you know, the, the climate change is just, you know, a bunch of storms.

But those storms are happenin in every single person's life.

I'm so mad because that's not taking care of our earth.

And the earth is not going to be green and blue.

It cannot be like black and gray everywhere.

It's going to be trashy.

I just feel like that's not rhetoric.

I say we have two ways.

Either we go really down and we destroy everything we love or our environment.

Or actually, I see this like a lot of good happening out of more awareness, consciousness about what's happening and that we actually just have to take it in our own hands.

The journeys of these visionary women were unconventional, characterized by groundbreaking choices and unique perspectives.

You know, I grew u with an Orthodox Jewish rabbi.

As my daddy grew up with asthma.

I was, like very bookish and pale and thin.

And I'd say, like in my early 20s, that changed, when I decided I wanted to be fit.

I wanted to be able to, like, run for a bu and not get totally destroyed.

You know, I've always been a cyclist.

We never had a car.

So a bike was always how I got from A to B, so started to get into cycling, started to really love it.

I decided to cycle across Africa with a group called the tour d'Afrique.

It was about 3030 folks from all around the world.

Famously I wiped out on my bicycle naked and the naked mile crashing is okay.

My father was a physics professor.

He studied chaos, which was very complex.

And then I have, five sisters.

That all went very different directions.

The one thing that w experienced growing up together was spending a lot of time in nature.

And also building our family home from the ground up.

We started out b drawing Adobe blocks in the sun and then building walls every step of the way.

We were all part of it.

We worked on i for over a decade, every summer, camping out on the construction site and spending our days and our evenings, building more walls, working with my hands and being there with my family made me realize that I'm fascinated by the mechanics of construction.

I ended up spending 13 years studying concrete, actually, in structural engineering, partly because I was in not supportive environments.

I went to five different institutions every time I hit a dead end, every time I ended up in a situatio where my work was just ignored.

It wasn't reviewed.

I had advisors who just didn't consider my efforts, and so started over.

But I feel that that ended up making me stronger.

I ended up reworking things for many years, again and again, until I really perfected it.

Maybe a little bit more than my peers.

As I think about the steel industry, I grew up in a construction family.

Grandfather started the business after World War two and from that very young age, having the ability to have someone that empowered me you know, I was the only child from a very young age until my brother was born ten years later.

So side by side, I worked with my dad out in the construction business, and he never once second guessed that I couldn't do the exact same things he was doing.

I never was even shown that.

Maybe you can't do this because you are a female.

I think as a woman particularly, and having met some of those barriers head on in this mostly male dominated profession, at least when I was beginning some 35 years ago it was even a bigger challenge because you were constantly on the outside of dialogs and discussions.

But what really propelled me is that to push forward is to say, wait a minute, there are better ways to do things.

My voice is not being heard.

Bring a whole industry along with me.

That's going to help change things like that.

I really care about like our carbon footprint, like our ability to build in different ways with more biogenic materials to make more humane environments for people to live in.

I grew up in Montana, and my house was righ next to a forest, so the woods and the forest was my playground when I grew up.

It was also the time of don't cut a tree.

There was a disconnect for me between why are we not cutting trees but letting them burn.

I think from a very early age the sector, the forestry sector, these folks that were, you know, of the Earth working with the earth, committed to stewardship, it just kind of locked in.

The sector is one that is so close to my actual home that, you know, it just felt like, how do we move into the future in a wa that it isn't us against them, but it's all of us together with the earth.

It is a personal mission of mine to d whatever is in my power to make a difference for generations that I don't know yet.

I've had an incredibly diverse upbringing.

I was born in West German before the end of the Cold War, and my father was a diplomat.

We moved around a lot.

I lived in East Berlin and my parents were an inherently curious people, and they put me in a communist kindergarten and then a primary school in West Berlin.

So I was expose to a lot of different cultures and people, a lot of history from a really young age.

And that curiosity has just been with me my whole life, and that this thirst for learning about how other people live and how they interact with the world is, you know, really a big part of who I am today.

You know, both my children have grown up with me in this organization.

And so they know what we you know, what I do and why it's so important.

And I think it's really helped them figure out who they are because they see, you know, a parent who's really driven and passionate.

What had to be important to me is to stop worrying about the people that told me tha a woman couldn't do this right.

You know, when you're young, it just weighs on you, and then you realize it's just baggage you're carrying.

So to me, the journey was first about realizing that I really didn' care what anybody else thought, and shedding all of those preconceptions and just moving on.

I also think that women, we have more permission from society to be outliers because there is no burden of a certain level of success that has to come like there is for men.

I am a self-declared impact junkie.

I'm excited about building transparency because of the impact that we're already having and helping manufacturers, fabricators of materials, and the architecture, engineering, construction community actually be able to tackl these embodied carbon emissions through data transparency and the access to it.

So EC3 stands for the Embodied Carbon and Construction Calculator.

And really, its purpose is to give trustworthy, verified, credible carbon intensity values for all of the materials that we make and consume for construction in one free open database so that you can compare and contrast products.

Look at concretes and find the lowest carbon option, for instance, and then track how we're decarbonizing the construction sector through the buildings that we build.

My son, during Covid, wa sitting across the table from me when we were doing all this work, and he was hearing my meetings and started asking questions and even actually created a project in the EC3 tool because he wanted to understand how the tool work.

He's already thinking abou how we should have little labels on everything, or QR codes, or you just scan all the materials that we see and understand those carbon emissions that are coming out of them, and we need them to have the time to think of those things an take action the minute they can.

These innovators maximize their social web, recognizing the pivotal role of policymaking and the interconnectedness of their actions.

The Inflation Reduction Ac will create more than 9 million good clea tech jobs over the next decade for clean energy and security is the largest federal investmen in combating the climate crisis.

There are policies being implemented across government and the United States to address these carbon emissions of construction by clean policy is something that California did.

First, it's implemented.

It looks at steel and a couple other materials and sets carbon intensity limits.

We're seeing that now at the federal level with policies like by clean out of the white House and the Inflation Reduction Act, which had the biggest climate funding bill included in it ever to be passed in the United States.

The I.R.A.

has taken policy to a next level because it emphasizes excess rating scale up and commercialization.

We spend too much time developing ideas in the lab, but not helping technology scale and this is an acceptance that we need to help new technology scale.

The new carbon economies about jobs.

I mean, face it, the IRA is just a jobs bill.

I'm super excited because I think the work that we're doing i Georgia is an example of that.

We have a commercial plant that we're building to make sustainable aviatio fuel in the middle of Georgia.

There were no such jobs there before.

Right?

And so creating that ecosystem somewhere unexpected will actually show that this new carbon economy is going to create a more level playing field for workers.

I think as a CEO, I can influence, politicians and and help them see just how much innovation and talent and energy is coming into clean tech.

And I really think this is America's strength.

I think we have some of the smartest, most motivate people who are just focused on on getting things done.

And there's so many eager hands, there's so many hearts and minds here.

And what we really nee is, is policy to help catalyze the the, the development o of Made in America technology.

We also need political pressure around the world to help bend the curve, as they say.

And then, you know, we'll have the technologie to export all around the world, to help, you know, fix this problem because climate change isn't something that's going to hit the U.S., it's going to hit other countries harder.

But I think we're in a really good place to, to get ahead of this and, and really save the world.

And the sooner we do it, the better, because there is a social cost of carbon.

So I love the notion of environmental justice and gender equity.

I would say from a human perspective, there's absolutely no question we need gender equity in every aspect of life.

We need gender equity.

I would also add to that, though for true environmental justice, we need to have equity with non-human species the animals, the bugs, even the forests themselves.

And we have such a human centric view of everything.

To be truly equitable, we need to expand it beyond humans.

I think it's really fascinating to find myself now in an industry that is dominated by women.

As a student of engineering 30 years ago, it was the absolute opposite.

Why is that?

Why are there more women leading, decarbonization efforts?

I think that there's two reasons.

One has to do with opportunity and innovation.

So especially in body carbon, there are no experts.

There are nobod who has really been doing this for the last 40 years.

I don't think that women loo farther in the future than men.

I do think that gender influences communication style and collaboration.

Women or female perspective tends to be more open to giving space for lots of different points of view.

There's something about women in the way that we can communicate with each other honestly, that has, I think, pushed the sustainability movement forward in a way.

That' why you're seeing a lot of the, the leaders of these companies, the ones that are innovating around climate change, they are women that collective impact, that collective wisdom that we can share as women, and the way that we can tell those stories to each other just helps push all of us forward.

And that's reall what we need in this movement.

Together with my father, we bring very different perspectives, not only from a gender standpoint, but als from a generational standpoint, which in some ways is almost more impactful.

Guided by maternal wisdom, these trailblazer find solutions in the cycles of life, placing human well-being at the forefront.

The biggest asset that women provide is that we're moms.

And I don't just mean moms to children.

I mean dog moms.

I mean moms to our friends.

Most of the people that I'm working with in sustainability are women, and they all kind of bring thi just this caring, this empathy and this drive to solve this problem.

So when you really look at why are women an important and central and leading aspect of the greater environmental movement and the climate movement, it's because what's happening to the Earth is in many way happening to our bodies as well, because the female holds the offspring as its first home, that we are the protectors of these little offspring.

And I think that we have the power to to save the home.

My biggest fear i that we don't have enough time.

So that's actually true.

I want my son to understand that we have a problem.

First, I think it's importan that we're honest with our kids.

But I also want him to know that he can be part of how we solve that problem.

I want him to know that that action that he's going to take is going to matter and make a difference.

And as a forester, what's your dream about the future as a forester?

My dream is that there still is a forest here in 50 year that with climate headed the way it is, there's significant odds that these won't be forests anymore, that these could transition to other land uses, that the trees that we're used to growing here won't grow here anymore.

And so that we're able to adapt in a way where we still have forest that provide carbo sequestration, adapt to climate that filter water, provide habitat, provide recreational opportunities is my dream.

I know my kids particularly are asking tougher questions than I ever asked.

And that gives you, I think the faith in the next generation and that generation deserve for us to do everything we can to give them the ability to decarbonize.

I think my generation is pretty split.

Half of the people ar just like, you only live once, like I'm going to do what's better for me.

But I think a lot of people like myself and my friends included, they are taking this more seriously because it is affecting our lives more.

So people are being beginning to be like, well this is actually affecting me.

This is actually a problem.

So maybe I should start paying attentio and start taking it seriously.

Learning about these issues is can be very disheartening.

And, you know some people may want to give up because it's like you feel like you're helpless.

There's nothing you can do.

But I'm glad that I have my family to encourage me.

And they supported me when I said I wanted to go to college for environmental science.

You know, what gives me the mos hope is the impatience of youth.

I'm starting to see a whole movement.

They understand that the climate is not going to negotiate with us.

And so they are driving in a very different way than my generation did.

The next generation will be the first generation who throughout their lives have understood the climate crisis, who have been educated about the climate crisi and have grown up in the context of a knowledge that this is a crisis that their generation will face and will have to deal with, and therefore the decisions they make will be quite differen in terms of their motivation and their purpose than the decisions that our generation made.

And to fundamentally change how an industry makes things, how society operates, in order to greatly reduce the CO2 content of our atmosphere.

As of 2023, new climate data unveiled that Earth has experience an historic temperature surge, surpassin the critical threshold of 1.5°C, reaching new frontiers, stretching the resilience of life on our planet to its limits.

The civilization we have is is very fragile.

I think democracy's fragile.

I think our planet is fragile.

I think our supply chains are fragile.

We need the smartest and the best people to work really hard on this.

It's important.

It's urgent.

I think people have to feel it, that in their bones.

I don't think there is one solution to going to carbon net zero carbon negative.

I think there's going to be portfolio solutions.

I think people are convinced that it's hard.

And I think a couple decades ago, the technology seemed so far out there that it just seemed almost unachievable, or we would have to give up our standard of living.

But we're much closer than we used to be, and a lot of the targets that are currently being touted are achievable.

We just have to have the will to do it.