#36E - Happy Minute Toast to Jane Woodward
An energy titan. Jane Woodward a steward of time.
Author note: Happy Minute Toasts can be found each Friday at 4:59p PT. Join Us!
Schopenhauer, the 19th century German philosopher, wrote that humans often cannot recognize the meaning of each moment in their lives until they look back upon it, from the end, in reverse. Only then do they see their story unfolded, crafted as it were deterministically meant to be, in retrospective agency. Most people think, at this very instant, in this otherwise unremarkable moment, we live ad interim, not realizing its import or worse yet squandering it or passively living it.
Well clearly, Schopenhauer didn’t know Jane Woodward (Stanford Bio).
What Schopenhauer didn’t realize is that Jane is a student of time; it’s the holidays so as we invoke Dickens’ Christmas Carol: Jane’s story weaves the past, present and future.
She has looked to the history of the past: her literal study of geology and of the earth, reading tales in the stone and of the flesh, of how all that has proceeded us on this blue marble of ours has had to coexist for millions and billions of years. In this she finds a couched wisdom in the past, closely tied to time’s dilation and what we rheologists find in Deborah number, that “before the eyes of the Lord, even the mountains flow like the rivers.”
She sees to the reporting of the present: Jane’s career has spanned impactful work across the crucially balanced quantity, energy, from the renewable to the petrochemical, from its storage to its deployment. She sees how harnessing energy makes the human world move, alongside the ecologic and geologic. She does this with the technical and the economic, but equally so through the heart, in Tony Foster’s luscious landscape watercolor art.
She envisions the possibility of the future: And what Jane has seen ahead is best embodied by her work at Stanford. She knows that teaching provides the greatest leverage for impact in this world. She educates, teaching generations of future climate engineers, energy entrepreneurs and every day students (to understand energy) who care about the future of our world, for now three, almost four decades. Which side note Jane, I didn’t know that you could be a Stanford professor at the age of three. Each one of those, “Marvel Superheores” go on to grow, thrive, propagate and teach not ad interim, but ad infinitum. She continues to do so, alongside Mox, McColl and Danielson and, as many of you know, through her continued work at Stanford Climate Ventures, Precourt Institute and other endeavors.
Back to Schopenhauer: we get the sense Jane has always known the poignance of each moment in her life. Her journey has been one that is reminiscent much like, Patagonia’s mission statement “to be in the business to save our home planet.” It is good to save but better to enhance, and Jane extends it. To her it is not enough to merely save our planet, but continue to nurture our home planet as she does so through her energy, resolve and, of course, time.
Let us toast Jane Woodward for being recognized as a distinguished alum of Stanford University, of the Doerr School of Sustainability, but perhaps more importantly as the human being, who studied energy, and understood that tapping the potential and moving it to kinetic is how we ultimately, indelibly impact our world.
 | A guest post by
|