Wild Energy Initiative - Science and Action Core Fund

Your support of the Wild Energy Initiative’s Science and Action Core Fund enables impartial research and education on interactions between energy development and Earth, including its systems and species, to address urgent sustainability issues. We study critical environmental processes that make the energy more sustainable. The Wild Energy Initiative is founded and led by Dr. Rebecca R. Hernandez and Dr. Steven M. Grodsky, millennial and optimistic scientists at UC Davis, who are laying a foundation for the new field of energy ecology. The Wild Energy Initiative is a strategic initiative in the John Muir Institute of the Environment.

Dr. Hernandez and Dr. Grodsky, along with four key UC Davis Research Leads, including Dr. Gwen Arnold, Dr. Catherine Brinkley, Dr. Leslie Saul-Gershenz, and Dr. Heiner Leith, are making the Wild Energy Initiative a globally recognized hub for sustainability of and environmental interactions with energy.

This comprehensive fund supports everything from the purchasing of key, environmental sensors to measure changes in the soil near power plants to our summer research program for undergraduates, where students become a part of the research process itself.

The science we produce, in part, seeks to help key decision makers reduce adverse effects of a rapid transition to renewable energy. For example, the investment you make may support a study of potential environmental and economic risks from an emerging renewable energy technology and also ways to mitigate those risks to help push renewables forward. Avoidance of risks can help keep rate-payer costs of electricity low and avoid conflicts with wildlife and the ecosystems in which they exist. The investment you make will support studies on how to establish renewable energy technologies that produce beneficial outcomes across industrial and ecological boundaries.

Your generosity is critical to our capacity to continue these investigations that delve deeply into understanding the biological and physical world around us. Please join us and be a part of a growing and committed group of donors who support vibrant science that advances our mission of enhancing sustainability on planet earth for all species and ecosystems that humans depend on.