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Dennis Reinhardt
Storyteller, Ecological Solution Advisor
and Public Relations
[email protected]
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Spanning nearly four decades, Dennis began his career with an eclectic mix of naturalist, mountaineer, explorer, student, and nature photographer. Early geospatial experiences launched him firmly into the dynamic and awakening disciplines of ecology and systems modeling. In his early career he became ecologist, teacher, aerial photographer, and interdisciplinary student of geography and its technological successor - geographic information systems (GIS). He saw the complementarity between Earth sciences and emergent developments in remote sensing, and he pursued applications derived from whole systems approaches as the underlying theoretical framework for all ecological and environmental sciences. Toward the close of his formal graduate education in the mid-seventies, he emerged by choice from the limits and constraints of traditional science and proceeded to build an alliance with the leading American practitioners in regional ecological planning, landscape architecture, and environmental design – first as a PhD candidate enmeshed in the real world as administrator of several pioneer foundation and NSF funded environmental programs at UC Davis and Berkeley, then as a member of the core faculty of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, and a decade later, at the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University.
From these academic posts, he devised methodologies for integrating ecological theory and complex systems methodologies into the solution of design and planning challenges he encountered as Senior Ecologist at Sasaki Associates, as owner of Cambridge Solar Enterprises, and as Senior Scientist at Earth Satellite Corporation. In these varied professional roles, he was able to infuse "real world" issues into the classroom as case studies and in solution focused research and professional practice. Since the mid-nineties, first at Risk Management Solutions and more recently at Sand Hill Enterprises Dennis has continued his involvement in planet restoration by laying the groundwork for reversing the destructive policies that adversely affect ecological landscapes and the human environment. Dennis founded Sand Hill Enterprises in 2000, to provide satellite imagery for risk and disaster response, but also to support mitigation design, environmental monitoring and assessment, archaeology, and ecological planning. His most recent explorations have been to bring Ian McHarg's regional scale environmental planning approaches into the framework of the technology of twenty-first century GIS. In addition to his involvement with Sand Hill Enterprises, in which he assists environmentally based companies in funding their endeavors, Dennis has become affiliated with Green Fuse Energy Company LLC as Chief Ecology and GIS Officer, where he engages complex geospatial concepts at the institutional scale. He has also recently become the ecological solutions advisor to oneVillage Foundation (www.onevillage.biz) in a major initiative to introduce ICT (information communications technology) into Africa to facilitate solutions to the AIDS crisis.
Raised on a California vineyard, where the daily influences of nature combined with the nurturing voices of mentors and sometime heroes with names like Carson, Meadows, Hessmeyer, Leopold, Unsoeld, Hadsell, Teilhard de Chardin, Brower, Churchman, Treichel, Marsh, Johnson, Adams, Wilson, Dasmann, Sears, and McHarg; these "companions" in life and literature "sang" an accompaniment to a thousand books. Signposts pointing to an inclusive and integrated Nature-Spiritual-Humanist philosophy that has become an eclectic tapestry defining his goals and recent initiatives have marked his life. Dennis was one of the first of the now abundant "chroniclers" of Aldo Leopold and the land ethic, and was a member of the forward looking team of forest ecologists that lit the match for the first "prescribed burn" in Yosemite in the early sixties; he was a local organizer and speaker on the First Earth Day, and he conducted the first workshops leading to institutionalization of the now ubiquitous environmental impact statements as the "red flags" of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. As President of the Oregon State Mountain Club in 1973, his biggest disappointment was that as a standby member of the Everest West Ridge Expedition, and not a member of the summit teams of Unsoeld, Hornbein, Whittaker, Gombu, Bishop, and Jerstad, he did not reach the summit of Everest.
However, during the winters of the early to mid-seventies, he climbed all of the major volcanic peaks of the Oregon Cascades, and stood atop St. Helens several years before the mountain exploded in a cataclysmic demonstration of the dynamic power of earth processes. During the summers, he was the naturalist at Emerald Bay and DL Bliss State Parks at Lake Tahoe, where he repeatedly called for the cessation of road building in the remote areas of the National Forests and where he was the first to identify both the presence of inversion smog at South Lake Tahoe as well as investigate the link between Lake basin development and eutrophication of its pristine waters. Dennis was an ecologist before the word had entered the popular lexicon. During the decade before the launch of the first Landsat satellite, he recognized the importance of viewing the Earth from space, and as pilot of his Cessna 172, he personally acquired one of the largest private collections of aerial images of California – a collection now destined for Harvard. He also piloted his University extension students on numerous interpretive missions over the San Francisco Bay Region as the "field trip" for his popular extension course, 'Ecology of the Land – an aerial perspective'. Dennis is also one of only a few individuals outside of Russia with access to the sub-meter global satellite archives of the Russian Defense Ministry.
Now entering the next phase of a career that has been quietly rewarding, he is committed to assisting in a successful launch of Green Fuse Energy, a company that is being built on the holistic philosophy of Ian McHarg, in his landmark book, "Design with Nature", and on the hope filled insights of E O Wilson, expressed in his newest book, "The Future of Life". As he heads down the home stretch, Dennis intends to spend much of his time writing on various subjects, but all in one way or another focusing on the future of humanity.
Dennis resides in Palo Alto, California, with his wife, Geraldine, archaeologist
and independent scholar specializing in the cultures
of Central Asia and the former Soviet Union. Daughter,
Katrinka resides in Berkeley, is a geologist/archaeologist
specializing in Chinese Bronze Age cultures and is
currently a PhD candidate at Stanford University,
with a dissertation on stratification in the Shang
period at the ancient site of Anyang. As a family,
Katrinka, Geraldine, and Dennis have participated
in archaeological reconnaissance together in Egypt,
Yucatan, Morocco, Kenya, and Tanzania, as well as
traveling to India in connection with his assignment
to establish remote sensing capabilities at the RMS
subsidiary in New Delhi.
Contact Information
Dennis Reinhardt
PO Box 7192
Menlo Park, CA 94026
650-799-3234 mobile
[email protected]
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