Project Drawdown Author to Keynote COMPOST2020

Katharine Wilkinson

Katharine Wilkinson, author and vice president at Project Drawdown, the organization advancing a groundbreaking approach to climate change that highlights the soils beneath our feet as one of the steps to capturing carbon, headlines the US Composting Council's 2020 conference in Charleston, S.C., next January.

Katharine is vice president of communication and engagement at Project Drawdown, where she is charged with shaping and forwarding the organization's message around the world. She was senior writer for the New York Times bestseller Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, collaborating with Project Drawdown co-founder Paul Hawken and a global team of researchers.

"Soil has a critical role to play in addressing the climate crisis; it's not enough to slow or stop sending emissions up," she said in an interview with USCC. "We must bring carbon back home. Instead of sending valuable organic 'waste' to landfills, we need to cycle it back into gardens, farms and the like."

Wilkinson will keynote COMPOST2020, the nation's largest conference for organics recyclers and compost producers, with an address on January 29, the first day of the conference.

She said she composts at her home in Atlanta, where she "cajoled" her homeowner's association into providing organics collection; and has collaborated with John Wick of the Marin Carbon Project, who has served on Project Drawdown's board of directors.

Project Drawdown is a research and communication organization working toward "Drawdown" - the point when greenhouse gases begin to decline. The Drawdown concept is gaining momentum as the project's solutions resonate with people across the world.

"Through understanding solutions and having a sense of what's possible, people are less likely to turn away from a seemingly impossible problem and more likely to 'dig in,'" she said. "Our collective wisdom is vast; it's time for collective will to match it."

COMPOST2020 is the USCC's 28th Annual Conference, where compost manufacturers, policymakers, equipment manufacturers, service suppliers, allies and partners in the industry gather for a trade show and conference exploring the latest technical and policy information about compost use and composting.

The Trade Show will be held for the first time at the Charleston Convention Center, and equipment manufacturers will exhibit compost equipment indoors. That will be followed by the world's largest Equipment Demonstration Day, featuring active operation of compost equipment at Charleston County's Bees Ferry Compost Facility on Jan. 31, 2020.

Registration will open in August; for more information, see www.compostconference.com.