Jeff Barrie

It’s been just over a decade since Jeff Barrie arrived in Nashville by bicycle, having pedaled all the way from Los Angeles.

An environmental advocate and filmmaker, Barrie bicycled from coast to coast to raise awareness about the importance of protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska from oil development and to promote “Arctic Quest,” his film about the cause.

“I had been touring that around the country, then moved here and worked on that issue for a couple of years,” he says. “Then the opportunity came up to make a film about electricity, and that is where “Kilowatt Ours” came from.”

Barrie’s film, “Kilowatt Ours: A Plan to Re-Energize America,” looks at energy use and the toll it takes on the environment. The documentary gained distribution with the help of National Public Radio, had thousands of screenings across the country and won awards from a number of film festivals.

“The film in my view was very successful,” Barrie says. “And then I stepped back from that, and in the past few years I have been focusing on using the film locally to assist in a partnership with Nashville Electric Service.”

Through the partnership with NES, Barrie conducts energy savings workshops for low-income communities across Nashville, which generally use a high amount of electricity.

“People are very enthusiastic about saving energy,” he says. “However, we still have some of the highest electricity consumption for households in the nation. And that is troublesome to me because we use so much coal to generate electricity in this part of the country.”

In order to help people make fundamental changes about their energy consumption, Barrie has an award-winning youth initiative that fosters leadership skills, scientific inquiry and environmental stewardship by engaging students in an interactive program that trains them to become energy conservation leaders in their homes, schools and communities.

The program offers a standards-based curriculum, train-the-trainer workshops and a peer mentoring focus that empowers students through the process of assessing home energy use and taking energy and money-saving steps in their lives.

“Anyone can save energy through practical steps and behavioral changes,” he says. “I call it good energy stewardship, just taking care of what we have. It seems very simple but no one has really been doing it on this scale.”

Barrie also is on the board of directors for the non-profit organization Trust for the Future, a service for people who want to start an environmental project or conservation-related work but don’t want to form their own non-profit.

“People can start raising money as soon as we approve a project and, as long as they meet our guidelines, then we can serve as the umbrella for their project,” he explains.

Barrie, who also teaches documentary film production at Lipscomb University, is going to switch his focus somewhat in 2011 to a new project, “Pedaling a Dream,” which he hopes will motivate more people to live a green, clean lifestyle.

“I would encourage people to do their part to be good stewards of the energy resources we have,” he says. “I believe that is a key ingredient of solving a lot of the energy-related problems we are having in the world today.”