Alumni & Student Stories

Leading the Charge for Sustainability

Kathleen O'Brien, M.A. Environment and Community, 2003

Kathleen O'Brien says she was led to where she is today by lots of small steps.

"I grew up in a family where waste was unfathomable," says the president of O'Brien and Company, a Seattle sustainable development firm that specializes in design-build consulting, education and research.

Her journey involved years as a successful writer, researcher and editor bent on inspiring others towards sustainability. She later managed demonstration projects and organized the earliest conferences on green building. She found her way to Antioch in 1999.

"I knew my direction, but at the time, I was pretty much a one-person show and felt isolated," she says. "I like working in teams and it can be difficult to build a community of like-minded individuals. I wanted the enrichment Antioch offered."

"Antioch gave me a better basis for understanding the urgency of what I was doing."

At the outset, she made a plan with Jonathan Scherch, core faculty in the Environment and Community master's program, so academic projects could relate directly to her work.

She pursued an independent study practicum with Janine Benyus, nationally recognized author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, who suggests it's more important to learn from nature than extract from it. O'Brien still makes use of concepts of biomimicry and nature as mentor in problem-solving today.

"Antioch gave me a better basis for understanding the urgency of what I was doing," she notes. "I needed a social and economic understanding of the bigger picture.

"In 1970, I was in protests against the Vietnam War. I became radicalized all over again at Antioch. My learning there brought me home to my socio-economic roots and my belief in social justice. Schools and affordable housing are the focus of a lot of my work today."

As part of her studies at Antioch, O'Brien was a member of a group that evaluated the first program to explore how green building can protect salmon habitat.

For a class on the fundamentals of environmental science, she and fellow student Yvonne Kraus wrote a paper on the impact of building with treated wood.

"That paper is still on my (O'Brien and Company) website and now Yvonne Kraus works for me as a project manager," she says.

O'Brien's company continues to grow. She has a staff of 20 and looks to expand further. In  2002 – when she was finishing work on her Antioch degree – she won the Sustainable Seattle Outstanding Leadership Award. She's a certified sustainable building adviser and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) accredited professional. She also serves as a faculty member for the Sustainable Development Training Institute, a division of her company devoted to learning that spurs others to become change agents for sustainable buildings and environments.

She has become nationally recognized as an expert in sustainable design, construction and development and has worked on projects for the Center for Urban Horticulture at the University of Washington, Poulsbo Central Market and Sakai Intermediate School on Bainbridge Island, among others.

"Education is a key component of what we do, so when we created a building for Sakai, we also integrated lesson plans on sustainability," she says.

Together with Kathleen Smith, an architectural designer and project associate at her firm, O'Brien co-authored The Northwest Green Home Primer (Timber Press, $24.95 paperback), which offers tips, checklists and resources for green home planning, construction, remodeling and maintenance. The 304-page guide addresses how to make green home decisions on a budget and tackles everything from choosing a home site to interior design.

She says Portland's Timber Press already agreed to publish a similar green home primer for the Southwest. O'Brien and Smith are collaborating on that book as well.

For information on O'Brien's upcoming book signings, visit Timber Press. You can read a short excerpt from The Northwest Green Home Primer. Learn more about O'Brien and Company.