This Napan had astronaut dreams. Now she tackles climate change.

As a child of the 1960s, Linda G. Brown dreamed of the space program and wanted to become an astronaut. Instead, Brown built a career working with another kind of science, spending more than four decades on environmental, sustainability and food safety issues. Brown is a co-founder and shareholder of SCS Global Services, which has been in business since 1984. She retired as the company's senior vice president at the end of 2025 but remains on its board of directors. She is now co-founder and part-owner of Global Heat Reduction, which spun off from SCS earlier this year. The company is developing a climate decision-making tool called the Heatprint, which is designed to show how emissions and efforts to reduce them affect atmospheric heat over time. 1. What was your first job? I worked every summer throughout high school and college. My most interesting summer job was an 8-week internship for the city of Atlanta conducting detailed surveys of residents about their satisfaction with city services. I literally went door-to-door asking people to trust me, a total stranger, to let me into their homes to conduct an hour-long survey! Doesn't that seem amazing in this day and age? My first full-time job after college was as grant writer for a consulting firm based in Atlanta, Georgia that supported cities and counties across the country that did not have their own grant-writing staff. From this job I learned a lot about the challenges cities face in raising funds for worthy projects. 2. What job would you like to try/not try? Try: Field biologist or teacher. Not try: Computer tech. 3. How did you get into this industry? I am a strong believer in the saying attributed to Louis Pasteur: 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' When I was in college in the 1970s, I didn't really know anything about environmental careers. But I knew I loved to write, and that I was curious about a lot of different subjects, so I ended up pursuing a graduate degree in journalism. This brought me to California and eventually landed me a job supporting a brand-new start-up company that had developed a novel certification program to get pesticide residues out of food. This start-up was SCS Global Services. Folks here in Napa may remember the Raley's supermarket program called AgriCheck, offering fruits and vegetables certified to have no detected pesticide residues. That was us. 4. What do you love or like best about what you do? I am grateful to have been able to build a career working on issues that I care deeply about — ranging from food safety to environmental protection to ethical treatment of workers — and to dig into difficult problems along with other colleagues to try to find solutions. The climate crisis has been a longstanding concern, and I have worked on this issue one way or another since the early 1990s. My partner, Stanley Rhodes, was an atmospheric chemist and absolutely brilliant thinker. Years ago, he saw that there was an opportunity to improve the way we account for our climate impacts, and we set out to solve that problem, working with climate scientists and experts around the world. Today, I have the pleasure of working with the highly motivated team at Global Heat Reduction to bring Stan's vision to the market. 5. What is the biggest challenge your industry has faced? The science of climate change is well-established, and the threats to all of us are quite real and pressing. Yet, as we all know, over the past several decades, there has been a lot of misinformation promulgated for political gain or for greed. This misinformation has been used to spread doubt and has cost us all precious time. That said, a lot of technologies have been developed in the meantime, like heat pumps to replace natural-gas-powered furnaces and solar rooftop power systems, that are available today to help us out of this climate quagmire. 6. Who do you most admire in the business world? It's hard to say who I admire most — there are so many — but Stewart Brand comes to mind, who was co-founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. This enterprise opened up many people's eyes about a more sustainable way of living. 7. What's one thing Napa could do to help local businesses or the economy? Napa's new draft zoning ordinances, currently being developed to advance the goals of the Napa General Plan, will help new and existing businesses do the right thing, while avoiding environmentally destructive business-as-usual approaches. For instance, it's time to put community health and the climate over convenience by banning the development of drive-through establishments, and encouraging existing drive-through patrons, parents waiting to pick up their kids from school, and vehicles loading and unloading cargo, to simply turn their engines off. 8. What's your favorite charity or nonprofit? Napa Climate NOW! of course. Napa Climate NOW! is a grassroots group of residents working on solutions to the climate crisis. This organization is full of passionate people who have really helped to move the climate conversation forward toward action. 9. What's something people might be surprised to know about you? I have been practicing Tai Chi since 1990 and teach free classes in Fuller Park on Wednesday and Friday mornings. It's a great way to get the day going! 10. What is one thing you hope to accomplish in your lifetime that you haven't yet? I would love to find a way to have common sense conversations with people who have been taught to believe that climate change is a hoax, so that they can contribute to the solutions we all need. For more information, visit scsglobalservices.com or email linda.brown@heatreduction.com.