AI for Environmental Impact
Founders Cohort
It knows your work. It writes like you.
It takes the tasks you hand it.
Six weeks, live, on your own deliverables. Context, prompting, your voice, an audit of your week, your first real handoff, and the judgment to do the next one.
No technical background needed. What makes the difference is deep knowledge of the work, and you already have that.
Thursdays, October 15- November 19
What We Will Build:
Three things, in this order,
because each one depends on the one before it.
It knows your work
Standing instructions. A personal context document. An organization context document. Set up in the tool you actually use, reviewed by me, and built so it stops guessing.
It writes like you
Everything good is downstream of this. If it does not understand you and your work, it cannot produce anything worth putting your name on.
It takes what you hand it
An audit of your own week, so you can see the work as workflows instead of a job title. The one task the gates allow. A recipe that produces it reliably, run and measured. And a plan for the next two.
How It Runs:
Six live working sessions.
Not lectures. Your real work goes on screen, with your permission, and gets better in front of the room. Everyone builds the same step at the same time, in pairs, so nobody is working alone with the camera off.
Written feedback between every session.
I read your context documents, your audit, and your build, and send notes back before the next session. This is the part that does not scale, which is why the first cohort gets it.
Two one-on-ones with me.
One at the midpoint, to look at your audit together and pick the task you will hand off. One at the close, to look at what changed and plan what comes next.
Pre-work, reviewed before we start.
You build your first context document before session one. I read it and send notes. Week one starts with something on the table.
Office hours after week six.
so you have real days to run the system on your own before your closing call.
Ninety minutes live, sixty to ninety of homework, each week.
Built for working professionals. Recordings go to everyone.
Who's running this
I'm Mike Lynn. I have spent 15+ years in environmental and ecological practice and I still do the work: Ecological design with United Designers International, stormwater inspections for the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, watershed management projects, and professional development teaching nature based solutions for landscape architects and engineers.
I came to AI the way most people in this field did, with too much work and not enough hours, and got the same underwhelming results everyone else got. What changed things was not a better tool. It was understanding what it needed from me.
I am not a technologist. I am a practitioner who went looking for where this actually helps in our kind of work, and where it does not.
Where I stand
If you have hesitations about using AI in this field, you should. Here is where I stand on three of them.
Nothing replaces your judgment.
AI is strong on complicated problems and weak on complex ones, and ecological work is mostly the second kind. It does not make ecological determinations, and I will never teach it as a substitute for what you know.
Footprint gets counted, not waved away.
The energy, water and community costs are real, and they are also widely misunderstood. A great deal of what runs through a data center has nothing to do with AI, and the range between one use and another is enormous. Much of that footprint is something you control rather than something you absorb. Intentional use is the lever, and I will show you where it is.
You will not be asked to put anything sensitive into a tool.
Not during the session, not afterward. If your organization has no AI policy yet, or has a restrictive one, that is a normal place to be and the session is built for it.
The terms
Wednesday, September 16, 7:00 to 8:15pm Eastern.
Fifteen seats. Small on purpose.
$645. Founding cohort rate.
Application and a short call, not a checkout button. I read every application and we talk for twenty minutes before either of us commits. The call is where we pick the work you will bring.
Full refund through the end of week two, no reason needed.
The community of practice opens after this cohort (if there is enough interest). Founders get first access and a founding rate. It is not part of this price and I am not promising it.
Thank you.
Mike Lynn, Ai & Ecology