Watch John Cocks and Tom Hopkins’ talk below:
John Cocks is an environmental engineer and sustainability advocate whose lifelong passion has been mountaineering. As an engineer, John has lead significant infrastructure waste management projects, organised and facilitated workshops and training courses, and presented at conferences for over 20 years. A focus area has been solutions for managing human waste in the mountains. He is the current president of the New Zealand Alpine Club, which has a membership of over 3,300. He was convenor of the Club’s accommodation committee for 10 year, which oversees the management of the Club’s 16 mountain lodges and huts. He is co-chair of Sustainable Dunedin City Inc., a charitable entity (a position held since its inception in 2007), which successfully organised and ran a Resilience Summit in 2012 with 75 delegates. John co-presented a paper at Exit Strategies– Managing Human Waste in the Wild conference 2010 and attended the Sustainable Summits conference 2014, both in Golden, Colorado. He has climbed extensively throughout New Zealand, and overseas in the Himalayas, Karakorum, South America, Europe and Africa.
Tom Hopkins is a project manager with 18 years experience working for New Zealand’s Department of Conservation. He’s currently based in Hokitika on the South Island’s West Coast. He specialises in the delivery of recreation facilities projects including car parks, roads, walking tracks and cycle paths, bridges and public toilets. He is a Subject Matter Expert amongst his colleagues for on-site wastewater management in remote locations. He has also managed numerous backcountry hut upgrade and replacement projects, including Mueller and Plateau Huts in Aoraki Mt Cook National Park. His professional development includes an undergraduate degree in Parks and Recreation Management and a New Zealand Diploma in Engineering (Civil). Along with John Cocks of the New Zealand Alpine Club, he attended and presented at the American Alpine Club convened Exit Strategies Conference in Golden, Colorado in 2010. Attending this conference led to his participation in a six-month professional exchange with a civil engineer based out of the United States National Park Service’s Intermountain Regional Office in Lakewood, Colorado in 2012/13. In past lives Tom worked as a ski patroller and avalanche forecaster, as well as Field Support Officer for Antarctica New Zealand at New Zealand’s Scott Base. Tom is happiest riding his mountain bike, hiking, skiing, taking photographs, or simply just hanging out and taking in the view somewhere in New Zealand’s Southern Alps…preferably in the company of his kids.
View Tom and John’s slides below: