About
I work at the seams because that is where the pattern usually breaks.
Ryan Anderson is an ecological economist, electrification advisor, strategist, and builder — and the whole of Solving for Pattern LLC.
Make environmental ambition useful in practice.
For nineteen years, I have worked where environmental ambition meets the institutions, markets, technologies, and relationships that decide whether it becomes useful in practice.
That has taken me from soil-carbon projects with farmers and landowners to the design of a new carbon-removal market; from nonprofit strategy and state climate policy to remote-sensing technology, traceability software, and residential electrification on Chicago's North Shore. The nouns change. The underlying work does not.
I translate between people who rarely share the same map: scientists and sales teams, policy makers and operators, investors and growers, technologists and the households expected to use what they build.
Sometimes the useful artifact is a methodology, research program, grant proposal, market strategy, product direction, partnership, customer story, or operating system. The artifact matters. More important is whether it helps the people closest to the work act with greater clarity and leaves the larger system healthier.
The name is a working test.
I started Solving for Pattern in 2020 after more than a decade working in environmental markets, conservation finance, food and farming systems, and nonprofit strategy.
The name comes from Wendell Berry's essay “Solving for Pattern.” Its challenge is both practical and moral: do not judge a solution only by whether it fixes the problem placed in front of you. Ask what it does to the larger patterns that contain that problem. Does it solve several problems together? Does it shift costs onto someone with less power? Does it respect limits? Can it be proven in work and in place?
That is not a claim to purity. It is a discipline for making better compromises and noticing what a narrow brief leaves out.
Finance taught me to follow value, incentives, and risk. Ecological economics taught me to ask where the system boundary was drawn, which forms of wealth disappeared outside it, and whether throughput could keep expanding on a finite planet. Practice taught me that neither lens is sufficient without the knowledge of the people who live with the result.
The detailed version, in four chapters.
2007–2019
Learning how value moves · Delta Institute and Loyola University Chicago
I spent twelve years at Delta Institute, beginning in project and carbon-program roles and eventually leading programs, ecological-economics work, and organizational strategy.
The portfolio crossed carbon accounting, ecosystem markets, conservation finance, fertilizer emissions, sustainable agriculture, regional food systems, research, and policy. I helped develop and deliver programs that paid farmers and forest landowners across the Midwest, supported more than $2 million in combined collaborative grants, and co-founded the Artisan Grain Collaborative and ReGenerate Illinois.
During this period I also designed and taught Loyola University Chicago's first undergraduate course in ecological economics. Teaching forced me to make a body of thought legible without flattening its argument — a form of translation I still use every day.
2019–2020
Making an environmental market operable · Nori
At Nori, I co-led development of the Croplands Methodology for a new carbon-removal marketplace. I helped translate COMET-Farm science into software requirements and market rules, coordinated peer review and relationships across thousands of acres, and supported the first independently verified and transacted project.
That work sharpened a conviction: measurement is not adoption. A technically elegant market can still fail if the rules are unusable, the risk lands on the wrong participant, or the value reaches the intermediary before it reaches the person changing practice.
2020–2026
Independent work across the seams · Solving for Pattern
I founded Solving for Pattern to work more directly across boundaries that conventional job descriptions keep separate.
For Environmental Defense Fund, through Sierra View Solutions, I helped examine agricultural methodologies and technology-enabled supply-chain partnerships. For American Farmland Trust and Argonne National Laboratory, I supported market research for perennial bioenergy crops. I also contributed to a U.S. Climate Alliance collaboration with Maryland's agriculture and environment agencies on greenhouse-gas accounting.
I supported Green America's Soil & Climate Initiative; advised The Carbon Underground and the Colorado Collaborative for Healthy Soils; and worked with Soil in Formation on market intelligence and measurement strategy.
With Hummingbird Technologies, later acquired by Agreena, I led U.S. and Canadian sales for remote-sensing measurement, reporting, and verification. With Cquesta, I provided carbon-market expertise and co-led a successful $1.1 million Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research Seeding Solutions proposal. With GeniHub, I moved from strategy and sales into an interim technology-leadership role, helping develop AI-enabled tools and traceability infrastructure while connecting product, partnerships, compliance, and go-to-market work.
The range is intentional. I am most useful when the work requires someone to hold the research, commercial logic, product or program, and public purpose in the same frame.
2026–present
Bringing the energy transition home · Next Step Heating & Cooling
Most recently, I've worked with Next Step Heating & Cooling on electrification and business development.
Residential electrification is climate policy translated into rooms, ducts, electrical panels, family budgets, service calls, and contractor calendars. It makes every abstraction answer to a house and the people living in it. The work connects customer education, building science, incentives, sales, operations, and the craft judgment required to make a system perform in February, not just in a model.
That is why it belongs in the same career as soil carbon and regenerative agriculture. A transition succeeds only when the people expected to carry it can understand it, afford it, install it, maintain it, and improve it.
Small by design. Responsible by default.
Solving for Pattern is a small practice by design. I lead the work and bring in collaborators when the problem needs expertise I do not have. You do not buy a junior team hidden behind senior credentials.
I begin by listening in place. Then I map the relationships around the presenting problem, make assumptions and tradeoffs visible, find a useful point of intervention, and build an artifact people can actually use. I try to leave behind clearer judgment and stronger capacity, not dependence on me.
Evanston, Illinois.
I live in Evanston with my two young boys and rescue dog, in a 1923 bungalow that has become its own long-running electrification project. Most consulting work can happen remotely. Work about place still has to answer to a place.
I hold an MA in Ecological Economics, with distinction, from the University of Leeds and a BS in Finance, summa cum laude with honors, from North Park University.
Bring me the problem that does not fit neatly inside a service category.
A few sentences about what feels stuck is enough to start.