Climate coach | Professional services: Lisa Dickson Regional manager and principal scientist, Kleinfelder/S E A Consultants
Photo/Tim Greenway
Lisa Dickson, manager and principal scientist at Kleinfelder/S E A Consultants
Kleinfelder/S E A Consultants
151 Capitol St., Augusta
Founded: 1956
Services: Architectural, engineering and science consulting
Employees: 40 in Maine, including seasonal inspectors
Annual revenue: $40 million
Contact: 623-0648
www.seacon.com
To say that Lisa Dickson takes the long view when helping a client to anticipate the effects of climate change is a bit of an understatement. A former paleontologist turned architectural and engineering consultant, Dickson can reference the Paleozoic era in framing her advice to clients. “The external factors that I’m looking at now aren’t volcanoes or meteorites,” she says, but rather modern considerations such as the effects of burning fossil fuels and risks to water supplies.
As head of the Maine division of nationwide consulting firm Kleinfelder, Dickson bridges the gap between environmental science and bottom-line business approaches. She helps her clients, mostly public entities such as the Maine Department of Transportation, to understand the long-term ramifications of climate change in a way that makes sense to them. “You have to phrase it in terms of cost avoidance or financial incentive,” she says from her Augusta office. “Most of the time, you can’t do it from an environmental stewardship perspective. They just can’t sell it.”
Considering those impacts ahead of time can affect anything from where a public department sites a new facility to what a business manufactures, she says. Take, for example, when developers overlook the natural filtration value of wetlands. A new development gets built, that natural benefit is lost and water treatment plants must be constructed to compensate. All must be considered when determining the development’s potential costs, Dickson says.
That kind of forward-thinking has made Dickson’s office one of Kleinfelder’s most successful, leading to a relocation in March to accommodate 10 new staff members, even as others in the architectural and engineering fields laid off employees or closed as clients tightened their belts. Once a 200-person company with six offices known as S E A Consultants, the firm was acquired by Kleinfelder last November, making it part of a consulting network 10 times its original size. Kleinfelder/S E A in 2009 marked its most profitable year in its 50-year history.
Some of the boost came from the infusion of federal stimulus funding for infrastructure projects, but even as the funds dry up “people realize the need to keep up that infrastructure,” Dickson says. While her firm focuses on sustainability services, it also performs engineering work for bridges and roads, as well as natural gas and propane inspection for the Public Utilities Commission.
Public infrastructure is of much concern in China, where Dickson traveled in May as a member of a panel of scientists invited to weigh in on the country’s five-year plan to shift to a low-carbon economy. The Shanghai meeting marked the first time in the 60-year history of the planning process that foreigners were invited to comment. Dickson, a soft-spoken Augusta native with a head of thick curly hair, presented to a global audience about how China could use the carbon credit market to gain additional revenue as part its mass transit plans. “There was a real interest and enthusiasm on this incentives basis,” she says, laughing off her embarrassment at the time of her lack of Chinese language skills.
For all her forward thinking, Dickson’s also well-versed in more archaic matters. In 2007, she published a 500-page book on Maine fossils, which the Maine Geological Survey describes as “the most comprehensive treatise on Maine’s bedrock fossils ever published.” “It really drove home that [paleontology] was a difficult career to support a family,” she says, chuckling. Dickson is now at work on a second book called “Maine’s Historic Bridges,” which she hopes to publish by early next year.
And she continues her focus on a different kind of span — the gap between business practices and scientific understanding. “It’s not an add-on service,” she says of a sustainable market approach. “It’s a philosophy that shapes everything. Sustainability is the new economic driver.”
In her own words
What's the biggest challenge of your career? The work-life balance. Trying to find a way to properly nourish my family and work needs.
When did you know you'd made it? I guess I don't feel that I'm there yet. I still see each day as a step in a journey.
What advice do you wish you'd gotten early in your career? Trust your instincts, follow your passions and have confidence in what you bring to the table.
"I'll relax when... I run out of interesting books to read."
What was your "Haven't we moved beyond this?" moment? I still can't believe there is debate over the science behind climate change, that there is still the perception that it is tied more to a personal belief system than to scientific findings.
Jackie Farwell
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