A story by Connie O'Connor on Eric Gruenstein. This article is also featured in the May 9, 2025, issue of The Ripple.
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Dr. Eric Gruenstein is a neuroscientist with a deep love for teaching. Over two decades ago, a friend invited him to see former Vice President Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, at a local theater. Eric’s science training made it easy for him to follow the fact-filled feature about climate change, and to worry.
Eric soon found a way to channel his worry into action. He learned that Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, founded to catalyze a global solution to the climate crisis and still thriving today, was training people to give climate presentations to spread the word. Eric says, “I thought to myself, this seems like a good fit.” While his application wasn’t accepted the first time around, Eric persisted. The second time he applied, he was invited to join about one hundred others in Nashville, Tennessee for a three-day training. Eric was delighted to spend time with Al Gore who was with the cohort most of the time, and who, according to Eric, is “an incredibly smart person whose knowledge is both broad and deep.”
Eric loves to learn as much as he loves to teach, and he was delighted when storyteller Andy Goodman taught the cohort how to give better Powerpoint presentations. Eric says, “Although at that point I had already given a fair number of Powerpoint presentations, both as a professor and at scientific meetings, I learned an enormous amount from it.” Over the years since the training, Eric has given climate presentations to countless groups of all ages, both locally and as far away as New Zealand and Israel.
Listening to a radio show on the drive home from the Nashville training, Eric heard about a program in Louisville called The Partnership for a Green City where public schools, a local university, and city government partnered for positive impact on the environment. Eric wondered if he could help start a similar partnership in Cincinnati. Back at home the next day, his networking began with civic-minded Terry Grundy who helped him connect with Duke Energy, leading to a $50,000 donation to start what would come to be known as Green Partnership for Greater Cincinnati. The five partners were Duke Energy, City of Cincinnati, Cincinnati Technical College, University of Cincinnati (where Eric works), and Cincinnati Public Schools. Over time, they accomplished several projects in the city, including energy audits for the public schools, getting laws changed to allow the use of rainwater for non-potable purposes.
Eric says “maybe 6 months after we got organized, the Green Umbrella collaboration appeared on the scene. Over time, some of the projects started by The Green Partnership for Cincinnati moved over to Green Umbrella, including the highly successful tree planting program called Taking Root. We preceded them by almost a year, but we weren’t as experienced as Green Umbrella. All of the members of our partnership agreed that Green Umbrella was doing a lot a good stuff, better than we were, so the time to terminate our organization had arrived.”
But Eric’s commitment to the environment endured. He applied to teach a climate change course for the UC Honors program. “I had never taught an undergraduate course,” remembers Eric. “My teaching had always been to medical and graduate students.” He called the course “Climate Change: Think Globally, Act Locally.” He explains, “I taught students about climate change and its consequences for the first half of the course, and for the second half, they went out in the community to find some way they could help. For example, one team contacted Habitat for Humanity and used the $1,000 budgeted for their projects to install programmable thermostats in the homes, which was a significant energy savings.” Eric remembers fondly, “Teaching that class was a lot of fun!”
While continuing to work full time, Eric was happy to help elementary and high school teachers incorporate sustainability and climate science into their curriculum. For example, at Parker Woods Montessori and Walnut Hills High School, he helped students work on sustainability projects for their science fairs.
