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May/June 2006 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Futureville Sidebar: Melbourne Principles In-depth: Exploring sustainable cities Feature: Seasons of the city Feature: Environmental scientist Feature: Spotted owl Feature: Waste generation Sidebar: Household waste disposal The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

Sander laughs as he recalls the time Keith scored 99 percent on a grade-eight physics exam. He had been docked one mark by his elderly teacher for stating — correctly — that light bends with gravity. “He got in a bit of a kerfuffle in class because the teacher wouldn’t believe he was right!”

Then there is the fact that Keith built his own computer before DOS — the disk operating system in most brands of personal computers — had been written.

“It was the real thing and it used some operating-system precursor toMicrosoft,” says Sander. “I mean, nobody built computers at that point. It was just amazing.”

Keith grew up in a learned environment. An only child, he was born inWisconsin, where his Canadian father, Anthony Keith, attended grad school.When David was two, the family moved to Ottawa, where Anthony went on to become a prominent wildlife biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service. David’s mother, Deborah Gorham, was a history professor at Carleton University who later founded the school’s women’s studies program.

Despite his obvious brightness, Keith often struggled at school. He didn’t learn to read until grade three and was later diagnosed with dyslexia. Anthony recalls that his son would sometimes get frustrated because he couldn’t finish exams in the allotted time. He knew the answers but couldn’t write them down fast enough.

“I had a very mixed time of it right up until grad school,” says Keith. “I would alternate between doing very badly and very well. Even today, my spelling is so poor, I’m embarrassed when I have to handwrite something rather than rely on spell-checking.”

As a boy, Keith went birdwatching with his father, and natural history and environmental issues were lively topics of discussion around the family dinner table.

“He was a very articulate, small boy, and he read a lot,” his father, now retired, recalls. But as Keith got a little older, he also became deeply involved in outdoor pursuits, including cross-country skiing, rock climbing and winter camping. Over the years, Keith has used the outdoors as a release from scholarly life. During his undergrad years, for example, he spent three weeks alone in a tent in the bush near Schefferville, Que.

“He’s mixed his academic work with suddenly deciding he wants to get out and do something completely different in the wilds,” says Anthony. “I always thought that was a very sane thing to do.”

Keith got to know his future wife, Susan Poole, after the Edmontonian joined him on one such excursion — a canoe trip north of Yellowknife in the early 1990s. They were married in 1994 and have two children, Alex, 9, and Sarah, 7. These days, they ski and take their children on lengthy camping and hiking trips in the Rockies. In March, Keith and his family joined friends from Boulder, Colorado, for a week in the Libyan desert to see a total eclipse of the sun.

“Two other families were involved, both with kids around the same age as ours,” says Keith. “I’m not that hung up on eclipses, but we figured if friends were willing to commit to such a wild adventure with their kids, we wanted to join in.”

“He’s extraordinarily bright and inventive,” says GrangerMorgan, head of theDepartment of Engineering and Public Policy at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, where Keith worked for five years prior to moving to Calgary. “Rather than accepting common wisdom, he will go back to first principles and ask, ‘All right, can I persuade myself this is true using reasonable arguments based on the science?’ He also has a willingness to explore things that are politically not at all popular.”

Keith’s independent streak is perhaps best demonstrated by his research into wind energy in 2001, which led to a controversial paper published three years later by the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.