Meet the Forum Team: Owen Curtin

What drew you to study anthropology and environmental studies together? 

I think the intersection of anthropology and environmental studies, especially at Yale, can be quite difficult to find just because both programs lean so heavily into their respective theoretical nature. In the Anthropology program, it’s very much wrestling with questions such as: “What can you define as culture?” and “How do people identify with themselves?” or even “How do people identify with the world around them?”  

The Environmental Studies program deals with how people navigate different definitions of the environment. Questions include: “What is pollution to one person?” “What is success - solving climate change, energy sovereignty, pollution regulation?” 

All these different questions feel very abstract and theoretical, which can be hard to navigate. But I find it's easiest to merge them into: “How do people relate to other people where they relate to them?” 

Often when we think of communities, we think of them as place based. But specifically in academia, we rarely interact with conceptions of community where people are interacting with one another. This is specifically in a site or in a location that often is either obscured or that becomes the focus, like place studies or racial studies. The different interactions of the people and their relationships with plants and nature and ecology and agriculture become lost. So I think, for me, it's just exploring where people live, why they live there and who they live near.   

How did you become interested in clean energy?  

What got me into clean energy is the possibility of new technologies, specifically, the combination of renewable energy and desalination. Desalination is something that I’m really interested in both intellectually and also just as a way to reduce water scarcity. But, it’s a very energy intensive process. Combining new energy processes with desalination makes addressing this issue easier.

How does your involvement with the Forum and your work with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication help you to answer questions and explore your interests?   

The Yale Clean Energy Forum gives me a really cool outlet to specifically research different forms of clean energy. Energy sovereignty is something that I'm very into. Conceptually, I have yet to explore it just because of all the different ways I engage with environmentalism writ large.  

Right now, I focus mostly on water management and water scarcity. I think often when you talk about water, you can't talk about it without talking about energy, whether that's in terms of getting water from where it exists to where people need it, conserving it or cleaning it. All of that requires energy.  

I think that's what has really drawn me to CBEY. I also see it fitting into a larger piece around if we are to be leaders in environmentalism moving forward two decades from now, we need to have at least some sort of understanding of how utilities work and how energy markets operate. Water utilities are different from electric utilities and from natural gas utilities. Yeah, I know a lot about water utilities, but I know nothing about electricity utilities. I'm assuming they follow similar regime regulations and structures, but that might not be true. 

Are water utilities also very monopolized? 

Yes. Either it’s run by a county government where it's a private company that has the blessing of the county to sort of have this de facto monopoly. Or, and I think it's also similar with energy, the idea was in the neoliberal revolution of the seventies and eighties to basically create open markets for different utilities to compete with one another. 

In the Eastern United States, this led to unofficial boundaries of which utility covered which area and now water utilities no longer compete with one another but have a monopoly on price and access. That's less true for the Western United States just because there's much more competition for water resources and so the states themselves are much more involved in the regulation and distribution of water. There are definitely important differences between how water utilities and energy utilities work and I hope to figure them out.  

What else do you look forward to exploring as a Forum writer? 

One topic I really hope to investigate while I am working with CBEY is desalination, specifically the combination of desalination with renewable energy. Desalination famously is a very energy intensive process. Many of the water issues out in the Western United States are related to water scarcity. 

If we could just add more water to the system, literally by taking it from the ocean, that might theoretically resolve the issue. But then we run into an energy issue.  And so that is something that I hope to explore.