Glens Falls Chronicle Serving the Glens Falls/Lake George region; Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties since 1980
By Ben Westcott, Chronicle Staff Writer
Drew FitzGerald, the 1989 Glens Falls High grad who in 2015 co-founded JUST Water in Glens Falls, spoke at the annual Warren County Economic Development Corporation Luncheon Tuesday at the Queensbury Hotel.
He talked about Glens Falls as a ‘climate haven,’ embracing AI, and why he’s back here after years in Los Angeles.
“Community is a really big reason why we’re coming home,” said Mr. FitzGerald, who is moving back to the area with his family. “We’re lonely in LA. We can’t wait to be here.
“One of the things I really enjoy about coming back here is how easy it is to interact with people,” he said. “The other day I texted Rachel Murray and said, wanna play pickle? She said yes, and we were over at the courts in 11 minutes. That doesn’t happen in LA.”
Mr. FitzGerald co-founded JUST Water, along with Will and Jaden Smith, “to reduce plastic and carbon emissions in single-serve bottled water packaging through innovative paper packaging and bioplastic alternatives to petroleum,” the luncheon program said.
It described Mr. FitzGerald as “an authority on clean tech, clean energy, and clean water initiatives” who has worked for the past 25 years “in New York and Los Angeles helping international brands tell stories of brand innovation.” He’s also promoted recording artists.
Mr. FitzGerald showed images of the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and talked about extreme heat he dealt with in California. In comparison, he said, Glens Falls is a “climate haven.”
He said Yale’s formula for ‘how to find your climate haven’ advises: “Find a small city in northern latitudes with abundant water and farmland and low risk of natural disasters.”
“I think I know a place,” he said, prompting laughs through the ballroom.
He said that due to the “natural human instinct to get away from danger,” people “are going to fall in love with this place and they’re going to come here from a migratory standpoint, and we should be prepared for them. Climate change is going to be a very unfortunate thing for lots of parts of the world, but it is actually going to be an economic driver here.”
Yet, Mr. FitzGerald said the city won’t be immune to effects of climate change.
“We will get more precipitation here,” he said. “We will get more rainfall. We need to be adaptive and resilient.”
He also stressed the need to adapt to Artificial Intelligence, which he sees as an inevitable part of the city’s future.
“AI, like climate change, is not going anywhere,” he said. “It’s here to stay, and we need to befriend it. The horse has left the barn. It’s just a question of how to corral that horse.”
“Because we have an experience economy here, we become a little bit defensible against the coming threats or opportunities for AI,” he said. “The experience economy is a really important thing that makes people want to come here versus living in dense urban landscapes.”
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