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Fellow Profile
Gideon Burdick
Warren Wilson College, NC

The NWF Campus Fellowship will enable a team of students at Warren Wilson College to design and implement Real Time Energy Monitoring in the many small residential dorms on campus. Our goal is to find the best way to provide web based feedback to encourage behavioral changes in electricity, water and natural gas consumption. By displaying this information we aim to better educate students around how their choices carry environmental, social justice and economic repercussions. One of the challenges that any small institution faces in gathering utility information is the relatively high cost of the needed hardware. We’re able to use the expertise of, John Moon, a visiting electrical engineer to develop the initial hardware design. In addition, because Warren Wilson College is one of seven members of the work college consortium, all residential students are required to work a certain amount of hours per week for the school. It is our hope to create a student work crew that would be responsible for constructing, installing and wiring the utility monitoring units. The implementation of this project at Warren Wilson is twofold. First we aim to empower students by closing the feedback loop and showing that everyday decisions can have a drastic environmental impact. Second, we aim to use Warren Wilson as test site to show that this technology is effective. Once we can demonstrate that our custom designed hardware works and that feedback is effective in generating a positive response it is our hope that students can then market our product to other small colleges and universities at cost. It is our hope that these partnerships will further intercollegiate communication in the measurement and sharing of information around effective measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and conserve natural resources.

About the Fellow

Project coordinator Gideon Burdick is a junior at Warren Wilson College majoring in Sustainable Economic Development. Hailing from Cleveland Heights, OH he is a proud graduate of the public school system and values the experiences it afforded him. Gideon grew up playing the violin for the schools symphony orchestra in addition to participating in a quartet that led to many non-productive Saturday afternoons. Classically trained he continues to seek out ways to bring Bach, Mozart and Haydn to a college dominated by bluegrass and old time music. During high school his interest in politics was born. Influenced by current events he began to assist in organizing his peers and community around the Iraq war and school funding issues, his first exposure to grassroots organizing came while canvassing for the Ohio Public Interest Research Group. His passion and concern for the environment was probably born while growing up as a result of family camping trips and regular vacations to Rhode Island during which he and his family would stay in “cabins” with no running water or electricity for several weeks during the summer. While in RI he and his family would enjoy swimming in the mill pond or hiking in the seemingly endless expanse of woods that surrounded them. Back in Ohio Gideon and his family made it a point to regularly be outdoors, as evidenced through canoeing trips down the Cuyahoga and Grand River, participating in regular orienteering events and going on annual Mother’s Day bird watching trip. During high school Gideon continued to explore the environment by volunteering with two Student Conservation Association trail crews, spending time performing trail work in Cumberland Gap National Historic Park in Virginia and Theodore Roosevelt NP in North Dakota. These experiences brought him up close and personal with Buffalo and poison ivy and taught him how to have even more fun in the woods. Recently Gideon has continued to explore his environmental surroundings by working as a wildland firefighter in North Carolina and by fighting fires during the pervious two summers in rural Western Montana. Gideon remains active at Warren Wilson College as one of the schools three elected student body representatives, organizing Focus the Nation events and as a member of the colleges Greenhouse Gas Reductions Task Force. When not worrying about the environment Gideon enjoys cooking with friends, juggling, hiking around the college’s forest and trying to figure out what bird is fluttering around in the trees.

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