Cultivating climate masters.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

Climate master: It sounds like a character from an Ursula LeGuin novel, but it's the real-life title 29 people will earn when they've completed 11 weeks of workshops sponsored by the University of Oregon's Climate Leadership Initiative.

The climate master classes will teach people how they can reduce their personal contributions to greenhouse gases - the chief culprit behind planetary warming, the world's scientists say.

The classes will focus on a range of human activities - driving, home heating and energy use, cooking and food purchases, home improvements and recycling - that have an impact on greenhouse gases and the changes people can make in those areas, said Sarah Mazze, neighborhood program manager for the Climate Leadership Initiative.

The initiative is a UO consortium devoted to helping people respond to the challenges posed by global warming. The climate master courses - unique in the nation as far as Mazze knows - are modeled after the Lane County Extension Service's Master Gardener and Master Recycler programs.

The classes are free but participants commit to 30 hours of volunteer service once they've been trained. They will present what they've learned at the West Jefferson and Fairmont neighborhood associations and schools, but their primary effort will be conducting in-home audits.

The audits will help them show people how simple changes can reduce their contribution to the emissions that trap the sun's heat and make the Earth warmer than it would be otherwise.

The climate masters also will work with UO students who are creating assessment tools that will allow them to calculate emission reductions from particular activities.

Those tools will allow the climate masters doing household audits to tally up the reductions achieved, Mazze said.

Local musician Melanie Rios said she signed up for the class because she believes global warming is the world's top crisis.

"We need everyone on deck to figure out what to do," she said. Rios already practices permaculture and grows a lot of her own food. She said she came away from the first session excited by the process.

"I was inspired," she said. "To be in a room full of committed people in your neighborhood, and it was the roll-up-your-sleeves kind of people. ... I'm curious to find out which things we can do to make the most difference."

That also appeals to Sue Jakabosky, co-chair of the Fairmont Neighborhood Association and workshop participant.

"I've been pretty concerned about global warming, and I especially wanted to see what could be done after watching Al Gore's movie. I've known it was a problem, but that was a wake-up call," she said of the former vice president's Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."

A fifth-generation Oregonian, Jakabosky said she grew up with a can-do attitude. "We didn't wait for people to do it, we went out and did it ourselves and then we helped the neighbors," she said.

Jakabosky envisions her neighbors each making small yet cumulative changes. Maybe one person will swap out their incandescent bulbs for more efficient fluorescent lights. Another may decide to ride a bike more frequently rather than drive a car. Still another might opt to install a solar hot water heater. Those small individual efforts can have a big cumulative impact, she said.

"It's our job as climate masters to learn a whole variety of things people can do, train them to make a difference and keep them motivated," she said.

The Climate Leadership Initiative will track the impact of the climate masters. If their home audit efforts yield results, more master classes will be offered, Mazze said.

People interested in signing up for the home audits can call Mazze at 346-0786 or e-mail her at [e-mail].