This week on Enlightened Omnivore, I sit down with Nurit Katz, the Chief Sustainability Officer of the University of California, Los Angeles, for a conversation that stretched far beyond campus boundaries. UCLA isn’t just a university. On any given day, it functions like a small city, serving nearly 90,000 people. It has its own power systems, water demands, food operations, transportation networks, and emergency infrastructure. It’s no wonder that it’s a fascinating test case for sustainability—not just in theory, but in practice. UCLA is a “living laboratory,” a place where research doesn’t sit on a shelf, or only get pondered in the classroom. It gets translated into real, shovel-ready projects. One of the most compelling examples we discuss is a recent solar microgrid project. The campus used electric cars like mobile batteries, borrowing electricity from student, staff, and faculty vehicles during evening hours when solar isn’t available. In simple terms: your car can charge during off-peak hours and then send energy back to the grid when demand spikes—earning you money in the process. Enlightened Omnivore is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. That idea—science moving into action—comes up repeatedly in our conversation. Nurit’s work is about bridging worlds: academic research and operational reality, climate ambition and institutional constraints, idealism and pragmatism. And none of these ideas are small in scale. The university’s transition to renewable sources of energy requires enormous shifts that cost billions of dollars. Yes, I used the b-word. But this conversation isn’t just about energy and infrastructure. It’s also about food—something every student, staff member, and listener can immediately relate to. UCLA Dining is consistently ranked among the best in the country, serving thousands of meals a day. That scale brings unique challenges: sourcing responsibly, reducing waste, balancing nutrition, and responding to student demand for more plant-forward menus. We talk about why “eating sustainably” gets complicated fast when you’re feeding a campus of this size, and how some of the solutions might sound familiar to former customers of Electric City Butcher—ideas rooted in sourcing, scale, and transparency. Nurit also shares something more personal: why she’s no longer 100 percent vegan. She became vegetarian as a child out of concern for animal welfare and the harms of industrial agriculture. But over time, the rigid, all-or-nothing food ideologies seemed more divisive than constructive in her work as an environmental leader. She talks about how moderation—eating less meat, sourcing it better, and making plants the center of the plate—often reaches more people and creates greater impact than excluding items from her diet ever could. Our conversation continued to mirror that perspective again and again. Not defending the status quo, but also not pretending there’s a single perfect solution. Progress, as Nurit puts it, comes from approaches that people can actually adopt. Beyond campus, Nurit also serves as a commissioner for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest public utility in the United States. There, she’s helping guide ambitious goals like 100% clean energy by 2035, and major investments in water recycling, stormwater capture, and nature-based solutions. One of the most unexpected—and inspiring—threads in our conversation centers on birds of prey. Nurit is a co-director of the Los Angeles Raptor Study, a community-science project that tracks hawks, owls, and falcons nesting throughout the city. Raptors, she explains, are powerful indicators of ecosystem health—and powerful connectors between people and the natural world. When neighbors discover a hawk nesting outside their window, something changes. People pay attention. They care. They start asking questions about pesticides, rodenticides, tree trimming, and habitat. Conservation stops being abstract and becomes personal. Late in the conversation, I get personal and share a lesson I learned the hard way with rodenticide. If you like this episode, there are a few events coming up soon that you might want to consider attending. You might even see me at them: * Show Up and Count 30X30 Webinar: Jan. 22, 2026 10am PT; Webinar; An overview of California’s progress toward the global 30×30 Goal to conserve 30% of land and ocean by 2030. * California Nature-Based Solutions Summit: January 29, 9:00am – 4:00pm; Sacramento; The first ever summit featuring nature-based solutions in California to address climate change. Learn more about what California’s doing in this space. The overarching theme of today’s conversation was connection. It runs through the entire episode. Whether we’re talking about energy grids, food systems, biodiversity, or urban wildlife, Nurit keeps returning to the same idea: we are not separate from nature. Even in cities. Especially in cities. We don’t uncover any easy answers in the hour we spoke, but what it offers instead is something far more valuable: a grounded look at how change actually happens, by someone working at the intersection of policy, science, community, and daily life. If you’ve ever wondered what sustainability looks like when ideals meet reality, or how big institutions can still move the needle, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss. Links and Resources * Nurit Katz – Chief Sustainability Officer, UCLA; Commissioner, LADWP * Pasturebird - Regenerative poultry ranch * Los Angeles Raptor Study - Citizen science bird of prey organization * Robin Wall Kimmerer – Author of Braiding Sweetgrass * Power in Pollinators – Habitat along power transmission corridors * iNaturalist – Community science app for identifying plants and animals * RATS (Raptors Are The Solution) – Non-toxic rodent control education Substack Live! February 1st: Food Memories Don’t forget, I’m hosting an Ask Me Anything Substack Live on Saturday, February 1st at 8am PT/11am ET. I’ll be sharing some behind the scenes Podcast conversations, talking a little more about how I pick my topics, what I’ve been reading, and what I’m working on for the month. Stay Connected * Follow along on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok for video content, reels, and behind-the-scenes thoughts. I’m also on Facebook and LinkedIn. * Say hi on Substack Notes—I’m posting almost every day about my random reflections on life. * Join me in Chat. It’s a space just for subscribers, kind of like a group text but less embarrassing. Download the app, tap the Chat icon (it looks like two speech bubbles at the bottom), and find the latest “Enlightened Omnivore” thread. Enlightened Omnivore is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit enlightenedomnivore.substack.com/subscribe
