Brendan Woodruff ’09 is making sustainability ‘cooler than being cool’
Can government really inspire us to be greener? Can supporting sustainability be fun, too?
Brendan Woodruff ’09, the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation’s (DEC’s) first-ever director of sustainability, is demonstrating that Creative Thought Matters as he works to show how everyone can make a difference.
The Skidmore history major is focusing on lowering the environmental footprint of the department by helping staff meet sustainability goals. But he’s not going to let anyone’s eyes glaze over as he guides DEC employees in being part of the solution.
“Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! Don’t stop this video yet!” a scarved, ice cream cone-eating Woodruff says in an Instagram post, “,” about a newly adopted internal refrigerant management and emissions elimination policy. The policy will eventually eliminate refrigerant emissions in DEC operations.
Refrigerants, he notes, can have a large climate impact when leaked to the atmosphere (including some, like hydrofluorocarbons, that can trap hundreds to thousands of times more heat than carbon dioxide).
The policy stems from the DEC Sustainability Plan 2023–2028 created in response to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s September 2022 Executive Order 22. The order commits New York state government — one of the country’s environmental leaders — to 100% renewable energy in state operations by 2030; an all zero-emission light-duty, nonemergency vehicle fleet by 2035; elimination of single-use plastics in state operations; and ensuring that operations don’t have a negative impact on disadvantaged communities where the state operates.
Thanks in part to Woodruff’s efforts, the DEC was one of the first state agencies to create a sustainability plan — a “holistic vision” identifying 25 goals and 70 actions in all. He admits that the process was tedious at times and required lots of listening and some convincing.
And Woodruff’s fellow staffers are showing their excitement about the plan as evidenced in his with them that he posted to social media.
Discovering his passion for the environment
Landing in the environmental field wasn’t preordained for Woodruff. He comes from a family of social studies teachers and looked to be headed in the same direction early in his Skidmore career.
But the combination of his love of winter, an Environmental Politics and Policy course with Associate Professor of Political Science Bob Turner, and his participation in environmental clubs and activities on campus helped to produce an extended aha! moment that changed his career trajectory.
“Year after year winter just kept getting worse. Even within my lifetime I was able to notice more rain in midwinter,” Woodruff explains. “Eventually while out skiing, it just clicked that I needed to fully commit myself to fighting climate change so that future generations have the ability to continue to enjoy this."
The Mohawk, New York, native later added minors in government (now political science) and geosciences and landed a summer internship with DEC’s Division of Lands and Forests close to home in Herkimer.
Woodruff credits a lot of his success at getting things done in government to his training at Skidmore.
It sounds cliché, but creative thought really does matter. My time at Skidmore allowed me to learn how to approach challenges from a place of thinking creatively to find solutions while learning the foundations of how to communicate effectively.”
He went on to earn an M.S. in Policy Studies at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where his thesis focused on how to better identify policy transfer. He used the transfer of parks policy from the U.S. to Great Britain as an example — in particular the supposed transfer of the "Adirondack model" of land conservation from New York state to Great Britain.
After graduate school, Woodruff spent two years of “bootcamp” as an environmental campaign organizer for the New York Public Interest Research Group influencing legislation and another two years as a labor services representative for New York state’s Department of Labor providing job seekers with reemployment services.
In 2014, he became an environmental program specialist in DEC’s Pollution Prevention Unit providing businesses throughout the state with information and assistance on how they could become more sustainable. In 2021, he was named director of sustainability.
Sustainability is for everybody
Woodruff and colleague Pam Hadad-Hurst appeared on the outlining sustainable practices in place at DEC and in collaboration with other state agencies, not to mention ways New Yorkers can incorporate these same actions into their daily lives.
DEC has 3,300 staff members, some 2,100 facilities, over 1,800 buildings, and more than 1,800 light-duty fleet vehicles. That’s a lot to green up.
“We really want to focus on leading by example,” said Woodruff. “A lot of it starts with our own staff. … When we do things like install composting facilities, folks are able to learn how to use things at the workplace and then they are able to think, ‘Yeah, I can do this at home.’
We know that sustainable actions are contagious. The largest indicator of whether or not you will have solar panels on your house is when your neighbor does.
"When we inspire our people to do these things, they take them home and they inspire others around them — and that’s how we really build this culture of sustainability that is at the core of all of our programs.”
Making DEC’s sustainability plan transparent and accessible to staff and the public and of course other state agencies is also an important cultural building block.
“I love that we’ve shown our work. Step by step, other folks can follow our lead,” he says. “That includes you. Start small, find something that’s right for you, and build upon it from there. There’s no wrong way to do this.”