Mel Manalis, who pioneered the study of wind in California and preached the gospel of renewable energy to more than 6,000 students at UCSB, died last month of congestive heart failure at the age of 83.
Mel was a lecturer in the Environmental Studies Program — one of the top majors at UCSB and one of the first of its kind in the world — for 42 years, until he retired in 2017. Well ahead of his time, he was promoting wind, geothermal, ocean wave, and solar power through the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s, even as three Republican presidents cut off subsidies for renewables and fostered a fracking boom in oil and natural gas.
As a physicist, Mel was focused on big-picture problems such as entropy — the way energy disperses and becomes less useful over time. An example of this would be a piece of burning firewood that turns into smoke, ash, and gas. The greater the entropy, the greater the losses to the environment, usually in the form of heat. So fixated on entropy was Mel that his family learned never to “set him off” by uttering the word!