As the world turns ... a lot!

For once I'm writing while I'm not traveling.

Even though in the past 18 months I've uprooted my entire world and turned it on its head, topsy-turvy and willy-nilly, some things don't change. Almost two years later, I'm still a scientist (who'd a figgered?) and I'm still traveling all the time. My science is so much broader now, focused as it is at the moment on global synthesis rather than fundamentals, that I sometimes wonder if can be really called science. The travel is a reflection of that; I'm working in the trenches of renewable energy development and deployment, at the interfaces between the natural sciences, social sciences, policy and regulation, and global impacts. It's an amazing place to be, an amazing opportunity to have, and almost every day I'm overwhelmed by my good fortune of being in a position to contribute directly to saving the world. How cool is that?

Yes, I love my focused science and I do it when I can; it has not been jettisoned. But right now, at this moment in time, I'm where I'm needed, and so happy to be making a material contribution.

As an aside, I'm also really entertained by my last post before this one - I wonder if that could have been some sort of foreshadowing. Within days of that post I must have begun the preparations to move to, ahem, Cal.