As a person with interests ranging from the funding of micro-finance projects to restore rain-forests, to the emerging studies of emergy and water footprints, to the engendering of climate change as an issue to display the imbalance of risk posed by global warming onto women, I am beyond thrilled to be going to COP15.

Coming from a communication background, I am eager to see how people who are in complete denial of climate change(like Senator Inhofe from Oklahoma) will respond to meeting citizens of Arctic regions, Maldives, or Seychelles who are already in climate adaptation mode.

Actually being in Copenhagen allows for the opportunity to document the differences between on the ground blogging and eyewitness accounts versus the corporate media coverage of the conference proceedings. I have never been to a conference with state-level implications, let alone one which will decide global policy for years to come.

This will be a return trip to Copenhagen for me, having spent 5 days in Denmark in May during a month-long traveling course here at Alma College. While studying renewable and alternative energy related issues in Sweden, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, we visited with engineers, academics, government officials, and even an organic farmer in England working to make their countries more sustainable. While in Copenhagen, we met with graduate students and professors at Danish Technical University who were working on making both fuel cell and wind powered cars, an engineer at DONG Energy working on testing coal burning technology reaching close to 50% efficiency, and an official from the Danish Energy Agency working on setting Denmark’s own ambitious emission targets. It was an eye opening experience, though this trip promises to open them beyond what I can possibly imagine sitting in a computer lab in Alma, Michigan, waiting for my plane to leave DTW.

Written by ADAM ELLSWORTH.