Mason Arnold’s chemical-engineering degree took him into the kindly world of “environmental services,” where, faced with a closer look at industry’s often-unpleasant impact on the Texas landscape, he made an earth- and life-changing U-turn. The 30-year-old has since launched two eco-friendly companies, helped get Texas lawmakers talking organics, and been named a finalist for Technology Entrepreneur of the Year by Austin Under 40 and won the BigAUSTIN Rookie of the Year Entrepreneurship Award.

Arnold, now bossing an organic-foods delivery service in Austin and San Antonio, will be keynoting Friday night at the Ninth Annual Renewable Energy Roundup and Green Living Fair (theroundup.org) up Fredericksburg way.

You’ve done a lot of different things since you got your chemical-engineering degree. I’m wondering how you translated that…into organics.

When I graduated I went to work with an environmental consulting firm in Austin. Most people think I was fighting the good fight, but we were actually filing permit applications for oil companies. We’d see come across our desks all the time all the news about the environment and what was going on, specifically in Texas. Seeing what was really going on in the environment outside our communities   these different pollutions and spills, is where I really got that deep motivation and drive to try to make some changes.

Research was also showing that organic land management was better for the land and created a better lawn than the chemical alternative, yet people were still buying it in force. That’s kind of how I moved into the landscaping company.
So you were increasingly networking with the local food and organic community in Austin as you were doing the lawn care?

Organics is all about the soil, whether that’s in landscaping or food. There’s a big crossover.

With what you’re doing now, you could almost call it a food-security issue, the more one learns about soil erosion and conditions like that. How do you talk to people about local food issues from a food-security perspective?

What people connect with easiest is with local food infrastructure. Right now, if we’re shipping everything in, people can easily understand – as energy prices go up – it takes a whole lot more energy to ship and truck stuff here than to grow it locally.

Describe how Greenling works. How do you organize that?

We work with pretty much any local vender who is farming sustainably. We used to find a lot of them at farmers’ markets or a few of them at grocery stores. Lately, a lot of them will come to us. But we work with all varieties of local producers. We know on any given week up to 95 percent of what we’re going to sell next week, so we only order from our farmers what we know we’re going to sell.

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