The gist of what I do: For Getty, success in sustainability means improving our own practices and helping build sustainability across the whole cultural institution sector.
Two words come to mind that describe my role: conductor and matchmaker. The conductor finds opportunities for improvement and helps everyone come together and make better music than they could individually. And a head of sustainability is also very much a matchmaker whose job is to boost connections, collaborations, and partnerships. I’m helping people identify the risks that face us. We have to be mindful that resources and priorities are changing as the climate and biodiversity crises unfold.
I think we also have to be mindful of staying relevant—of being part of our culture’s evolution toward sustainability. We need to do our homework and look at the trends and data. We have a great opportunity to be part of the solutions, because the point of the arts and humanities is to interpret the human condition and help us understand our place in the world.
An early introduction to science and art: My father is a physics professor, and he took my brother and me to the lab with him every Saturday to give my mom a break. When I was young, he was very involved with low-temperature physics—he wanted to understand how material behaves as it approaches absolute zero. He still has an active research program where he’s studying what types of material and element combinations will help build efficient, effective solar cells.
My mother was an artist, cartographer, and graphic designer. I remember from a very early age being given my own art materials so I could create alongside her while she was painting or working on some project. She was always patient in showing me how to tackle something hard and introduced my brother and me to all sorts of art mediums. She was aesthetically driven, which really influenced me. She would also talk about how art and science were so connected and sort of two sides of the same coin.
The summer before third grade, I discovered my passion for the environment. The federal government had many unique programs at the time, and one was this pollution kit that you could order from the EPA, aimed at kids. I guess I spotted it in Highlights magazine. I wrote away to get one and measured the air pollution in my backyard. It was an unsophisticated tool, and I lived in a fairly wooded area, so unsurprisingly, I didn’t detect anything bad.
I think I’ve always been interested in the human relationship with nature. My father and mother also both strongly believed and frequently discussed with my brother and me that you should make the world a better place, so I grew up with the mentality that you need to give back. You need to find a way to make things better, to repair.
From biochemistry to geography: I had a childhood friend whose mother was an incredibly vibrant, superintelligent woman who had multiple sclerosis; it was devastating to know what the disease would bring. So I started college at UT Austin as a biochemistry major with a very specific vision: I would become a genetic engineer, have a research program at Johns Hopkins University, and find a way to cure multiple sclerosis. Between my freshman and sophomore years I worked in two biochemistry labs and discovered that my vision of what would happen as a biochemist was perhaps more romantic than the reality, given that much of a principal investigator's job is focused on managing people and writing grants. I realized that was not quite what I wanted to do. I pivoted out of that into geography, in part because I had a geography professor who had done field research in Iran on the Qashqai tribe. The stories he would tell in class were so exciting and interesting to me that I thought: “This is what I really want to do with my life. I want to be a geographer.”
I came to UCLA to do my graduate work in geography. Then I had an epiphany during one of the Thanksgiving breaks when I realized that academia wasn't the right fit for me, so I decided to terminate at the master’s degree. But when I left my PhD program, I had zero plan of action because I’d always planned to be an academic. I went to a temp agency, and they placed me at the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant in Playa del Rey, where I did things like mark as-builts on construction plans and review invoices. Each day there was tangible evidence of work, which felt so different from grad school to me, and I loved it. After a few months I moved on to an architecture firm, then went out on my own and started a consulting practice. I did that for several years, and then went to work at UC Davis, where I helped grow their sustainability program, right as sustainability was beginning to be thought of in higher education. It’s interesting to see the analogies between the nascence of sustainability in higher ed and what’s happening now in cultural institutions. My attraction to sustainability as my career field is really the weaving together of my interest in the human relationship with the natural world and my desire to help repair and improve things.
The power of museums and sustainability: One of the reasons I was attracted to this new position at Getty is because of Getty’s institutional value and focus on sharing its assets, knowledge, and privilege. I think that’s so important. When you have the kind of privilege that Getty does, you also have a responsibility to use that privilege in a way that helps others. Another reason: two million visitors per year is an incredible sandbox of impact. A museum is one of the few places people voluntarily go where they also get a chance to learn. I was intrigued by the idea of public engagement. Can we invite people to take themselves on a self-guided sustainability tour and learn what Getty is doing and what they can do at home? How can we support them in making sustainable choices when they come for a day at Getty? There are so many exciting things visitors can be a part of without it being preachy. I don’t believe in having sustainability be negative. I also think we can enhance visitors’ experience and add in, where appropriate, content that helps bring them along with us on the journey. For instance, we included some interpretive content in the exhibition On Thin Ice: Dutch Depictions of Extreme Weather that adds understanding to Dutch landscape paintings from the Little Ice Age and shares a bit of what we are doing at Getty.
The state of sustainability at Getty: A number of sustainability measures were already underway when I joined Getty, like moving our fleet to electric—in fact, almost all our groundskeeping equipment is now electric! We’re in the planning process for renovating our central heating plant, with a new facility that will be able to use all electric energy. We've switched our cooling tower operations to save millions of gallons of water annually. These are exciting, big moves.
And, we still have plenty of work to do, not only at Getty, because we can’t solve the challenges in a vacuum by ourselves. We need and want to work with others to find solutions and be resilient. For example, it will take producers, consumers, and innovators working together to move toward a circular economy where we don’t even generate waste because those products are then used for something else.
There’s a lot we can do to help build a sustainability network in the LA basin, with an eye to sharing good practices and helping each other along. We should be figuring out how to care for the world’s cultural heritage in environmentally responsible ways. PST ART: Art & Science Collide drove an initiative to have monthly conversations with a group of the participating institutions to discuss what we’re doing at our museums to advance sustainability. The institutions are choosing a selection of PST exhibitions to run climate impact reports on—not to castigate ourselves for our choices but rather to understand what it took to put on these exhibitions and what their climate footprints look like. Again, this is using our cultural heritage not only to offer us lessons from the past but also insights into how to approach our future.
We also have hundreds of acres in the Santa Monica Mountains—and many pieces in our collection that share artists’ interpretations and observations of nature—so I think we have an amazing and uniquely Getty opportunity to inspire public engagement and citizen art around biodiversity. I am passionate about the potential of this idea.
How I practice sustainability: I get asked this a lot! Or, people apologize for not being green enough around me. So, first, let’s dispel a myth—sustainability officers aren’t perfect green police either! We’ve all thrown away things that should have been recycled or reused, I don’t drive an electric vehicle, and occasionally I catch myself wasting water. So, to me, the goal is improvement, because we can all always improve, right?
But I will share something I do that I think is replicable for most people, that is pretty green, and that can spark joy. I pack my lunch most days, and I reuse tins, jars, and objects that bring happy memories to mind every time I use them. I use a lunch tote from my mother-in-law; a beloved soft, old napkin from my early married days; a re-used jam jar for my plain Greek yogurt; a little tin I used to pack in my daughter’s school lunch (she’s in college now) for my walnuts and dried fruit; and another old tin from a trip to Alcatraz with my parents and daughter for my Akmak crackers; a glass dish for my lunch veggies; and an old silver spoon I picked up at a quirky vintage market in Montpellier when I was staying there. These things all bring me happiness every time I unpack my lunch. I save money, eat healthy, and have some fun!
