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Compiled by Amanda Suutari
Editing: Regina Gregory, Ann Marten
Civil engineer Blake Jones once worked for Brown and Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton) in the Middle East oil and gas industry. But he had a “gradual awakening to wanting passionately to work with renewable energy because I thought there was a better way.” He moved on to Nepal to install solar and hydroelectric systems in remote areas.
In 2004, Amendment 37 was approved by Colorado voters, requiring the state’s biggest utilities to get 10% of their power from renewable resources by 2015 (including 4% from solar power). “It hit me,” said Jones, “the biggest impact I can make is back home in Colorado, where we have fantastic solar resources. The U.S. is the largest consumer of energy and we need to recapture our leadership in the world for setting a positive example.”
In 2005, Jones joined with friends Wes Kennedy and Ray Tuomey to start up Namaste (which means “greeting of great respect, celebrating the interdependence of all living beings”) Solar Electric. It is the very model of a righteous business, both ecologically and socially. The company’s website states “We measure ‘profit’ and ‘success’ in a holistic way that includes not just traditional economic metrics (i.e. earnings and growth) but also the effects on our natural environment, work environment and local/global communities.” Some interesting features include the following:
Namaste’s unique business model has made it the subject of many case studies by MBA students. The company can show impressive results: Namaste has installed over 350 photovoltaic systems in the Denver-Boulder area, including prominent projects such as the Governor’s mansion. The number of employees has grown from 3 to 45. Triple-digit growth (i.e., at least doubling each year) is the norm.
Business really took off in 2006, when the local utility, Xcel, announced its rebate program. By the end of 2007, the utility had paid out $19.5 million to more than 1,000 customers for more than 4.3 megawatts of power. State sales tax rebates and federal tax credits also help to offset the average $12,000 cost of a photovoltaic system. According to satisfied customer Hal Stuber, “for every $3 of cost, from rebates and tax credits I’m getting $2 back.” A further incentive is net metering (or Grid-Tie), where his electric meter actually runs backward, feeding power into the grid, when his system produces more than is being consumed.
The future of solar energy in Colorado became even brighter in 2007, when Governor Bill Ritter—a strong proponent of a “New Energy Economy”—signed a law that set a goal of 20% renewables by 2020.
For more information see the Namaste Solar Electric website.
The Land Institute is researching and developing alternative agriculture in the heartland of agribusiness on the US prairies. Because of massive soil erosion, herbicides in waterways, and the overdrawing of the Ogallala aquifer, Land Institute co-founder Wes Jackson says, this region is headed for a collapse on a scale far surpassing that of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. But this imminent but ultimately avoidable catastrophe is not being addressed. The reason is that it is temporarily masked by the subsidized "cheap food policy" which lulls consumers into illusions of food security, and that soil is now eroding not visibly by wind but by water, where it flows into rivers and ends up eventually in the sea, and creates areas like "the dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico. As with other groups bucking the industrial model, Jackson and his colleagues are making farms mimic natural systems in this case, suited to the prairie ecosystem made up of polycultures of perennial grasses.
After graduating with a PhD in genetics, Jackson began teaching environmental studies in California State University, but soon became dissatisfied with academia. So he quit his job and went back to his native Kansas with his then-wife, Dana, where they acquired a cow and some chickens and began farming. They decided to form the Land Institute, which would give students an opportunity to learn from direct experience.
The institute continues to evolve, but has kept its commitment to studying the prairie ecosystem and developing methods which reduce the impact on the soil, the need for chemicals, and for fossil-fuel driven machinery like tractors and ploughs. To do this, it developed the concept of "Natural Systems Agriculture." The ecosystem, as the result of centuries of evolutionary selection for ecosystem function, has the ability to:
Since prairies naturally show a dominance for perennial grasses instead of the annuals like the corn, wheat, barley etc. grown on prairie farms (which together make up 70% of the human diet), the priorities of the Land Institute are to research whether perennials can produce a high yield seed, and if perennial polycultures can match or outyield perennial monocultures. So far, these results seem to be confirmed. A perennial polyculture in the prairies would change farming techniques in several important ways:
To further recreate the prairie ecosystem, Jackson has begun keeping bison as they are well-adapted to the prairie landscape.
The Land Institute gives research opportunities to postgraduate students, and its work extends beyond natural to social systems, and links the consolidation and corporatization of farming to the overnight disintegration of community, public health and economies across rural North America.
The concept of "home coming" or reclaiming this rural way of life is part of Natural Systems Agriculture, and events and education in schools are other programs the Land Institute is involved in. The institute is gaining recognition from other researchers who are examining the potential of perennials and testing the approach, and the underlying principles resonate beyond the prairie ecosystem and have attracted interest from other parts of the world. Jackson has written a number of books and has won several awards, including the Right Livelihood Award. His former wife Dana Jackson is now head of the Land Stewardship Project and his daughter, Laura, is a researcher at the University of Iowa.
For more information visit the Land Institute and Audubon Society.
The Red Lake Band of the Chippewa Tribe lives on an 837,000-acre reservation in northern Minnesota, an area about the size of Rhode Island. The band takes its name from the reservation’s Red Lake, one of the biggest freshwater lakes in the U.S.
The traditional staple food of the Chippewa is wild rice, which once grew in abundance in the marshes around Red Lake. It is a 5-foot-tall aquatic plant native only to North America. In late August—the Wild Rice Moon—the Chippewa paddled canoes into the marshes to harvest the rice. The harvesting method included knocking some grains back into the lake to sustain future harvests, and leaving some grains on the plants as food for birds.
In the 1930s, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began impounding two nearby rivers, the tribe’s major rice-producing areas were destroyed or heavily damaged. Most people on the reservation no longer go “ricing” at all. But the band is trying to restore some of the old rice stands, and has purchased 2,500 acres next to the reservation for a commercial wild rice farm.
Besides making money for the band, the wild rice farm provides critical habitat for a large number of species. Eighteen species of ducks and geese eat wild rice and other plants that grow in the rice paddies. The dense vegetation provides ample nesting sites for bitterns and teals, and when the paddies are drained in late summer, the mudflats serve as stopover areas for godwits, yellowlegs, phalaropes and other shorebirds.
Red Lake also once teemed with fish, in particular walleyes. In 1917 tribal members launched a commercial fishery with gillnets on their portion of the lake, in addition to subsistence fishing. In the portion governed by the state of Minnesota, sport fishing by the general public flourished. Eventually people were taking more fish than the lake could provide, and harvests plummeted.
The Red Lake Band realized the walleye needed time to recover. In 1997 the tribe halted commercial fishing, and in 1998 stopped subsistence and sport fishing as well. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources banned walleye fishing in its portion of the lake in 1999. To augment the natural regeneration process a fish hatchery was established, and between 1999 and 2003 more than 100 million walleye fry were released into the lake.
The fish thrived, and the effort is now known as one of the nation’s most successful freshwater fish recoveries. The lake was reopened to walleye fishing, but in a cautious way to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
For more information see Restoring a Lost Legacy in the National Wildlife Federation’s journal.
The New York City (NYC) Water Department supplies some 1.3 billion gallons of water to nearly 9 million New Yorkers every day, transported mainly by gravity through a system of 19 reservoirs in a 1,969 square mile watershed that extends some 125 miles north and west of NYC (The Croton and Catskills/Delaware watersheds).
For years, NYC's water quality was one of the highest in the country, but increased pressure from agriculture and urban sprawl caused the water quality to decline, as was seen by an increasing number of boil-water alerts over the past 5 years. Installing a filtration system would have cost an exorbitant $2-8 billion dollars. City, state and EPA officials thought it would be much cheaper if they focused their priorities not on purifying degraded water but by preserving it at the source--the watersheds themselves.
From 1989 the city began a watershed protection program, funding upgrades of sewage treatment plants, water supply facilities and dams, and a watershed agricultural program, which paid farmers to remove some sensitive lands from production and apply conservation practices in place of crops. This was the first upstate-downstate collaboration where water quality and economics were viewed as a shared, not a conflicting, goal. In 1997, watershed communities, the City and State governments, the EPA, environmental organizations and others united to create a landmark Watershed Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) which had 3 main elements:
While the MOA is seen as a milestone in the City's water supply, the challenge lies in implementing it, but the expected result is that over 165 stream miles, and thousands of acres of natural areas will be preserved, resulting in improved water quality at a fraction of the price of a filtration system.
For more information visit the New York City Department of Environmental Protection.
South Central, a run-down industrial zone of Los Angeles, is best remembered for the riots of 1994 that exploded following the verdict acquitting policemen caught beating up African American Rodney King on videotape. In the early 1990s, some 30% of its mainly African American, Hispanic and Asian residents lived below the poverty line, and 35% had experienced unemployment lasting more than a year.
The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy (SMMC), which had been buying land in the Mountains and creating interlinking parkland, through a meeting with a local city council member, acquired a tract of land belonging to the LA Department of Water, which it planned to transform into a park.
The Compton-Slaison intersection, a boundary for four different neighborhood gangs, was an 8.5-acre derelict brownfield, full of pipes and other relics from the Department of Water, closed off by chain link and razor wire fences. The landscape architects who agreed to support the project with the SMMC had plenty of challenges ahead of them (not least of which were skeptics who doubted the merits of bringing nature to the poor when they had so many more urgent needs, and who were moreover assumed to have little interest in nature).
Initial efforts to bring the community into the plans through town meetings and door-to-door surveys brought limited success, until a table was set up at a supermarket across the street from the park, which attracted input and interest from hundreds of residents.
The plan was a collaboration of various agencies, community members, designers, contractors, the SMMC, and community groups such as ArtShare which organizes kids' workshops on public art.
During initial meetings intended to discuss the park's design, safety issues continued to dominate, and so designers realized this issue had to be addressed first before going further into the design plans. They finally decided to fence off the park with gates on four sides and employ a full-time park ranger. Resolving these concerns helped to build support for the project and gain needed trust for the design teams. When the community discussed priorities for the park, initial plans to build ball courts were scrapped in favor of facilities for nature education because they were decided to be of higher priority.
The collaboration continued throughout the project, with community members, those involved with nature education and SMMC rangers, for example, present during design meetings, as all of these issues needed to be addressed at the design phase. The plan included a library, visitors exhibit, facilities for nature study, an amphitheater, a stream and fountain powered by a windmill. Hills were created to create a refuge atmosphere from the surrounding neighborhood, and to create microclimates to support native species. The challenge of finding dirt to make these hills (the existing soil couldn't be used due to pollution) was solved by luck when rainstorms caused landslides near Malibu and left soil removal teams with excess, which was transported to the park. ArtShare LA brought in 140 students and community members to paint tiles and design mosaic benches for the amphitheater, and the two ArtShare artists who built the wrought-iron fence included images of native animals and plants in the fence's design.
Some materials were recycled, for example, the existing concrete was crushed to make a parking area, and trees and a cactus garden were donated. A grove of pecan and walnut trees and avocado trees was also created.
Some 50 residents were hired for temporary construction of the project, and permanent park maintenance staff were also hired, as well as educators for the wildlife and gardening programs. There are various activities such as a homework club, a Saturday science series, gardening and crafts clubs and events in the amphitheater. There are also programs which take South Central kids to other neighborhood parks and vice versa (bringing kids from Beverly Hills who have been taught to fear South Central). Camping trips, junior ranger and other programs have begun. Once a week, a free bus takes people from the park to other SMMC parks in the mountains. The park acts as a "portal" to the outdoors; Augustus F. Hawkins Park, while small, offers initial exposure to natural spaces which will open doors to learn about and explore bigger, wilder areas in their state and in the world.
The park is widely accepted as a major success and a rarity, which is now inspiring the creation of a similar project called the Vista Hermosa Park. The park has created a new sense of safety and community; while gangs still exist they have a tacit agreement not to fight in the park. Kids' perceptions of the government has changed as a result of its involvement in the project, and the park has kept them off the streets and in school.
Most importantly, the project challenged stereotypes of poverty, and showed that natural spaces were as much a priority to lower-income people as to anyone, and that bringing natural areas to poor areas will solve much more than just environmental problems.
For more information visit the American Society of Landscape Architects.
This is an example of "regional environmental management" for a degraded and economically important ecosystem. It shows how a complex web of players can coordinate a successful strategy despite multiple interests and agendas.
The Barataria-Terrebonne (BT) estuary in Louisiana is the country's largest, covering an area of 16,835 square km where the Mississippi River flows into the Gulf of Mexico. Its rich natural resources have been important to the livelihood of the people who live there, but overexploitation, development, agriculture, and industry dramatically impacted the water quality, posed health risks, affected fisheries, and was causing land to sink.
Concerned about the state of the nation's estuaries, the US government made a decision to create environmental management plans for the major ones in 1990. Hiring a small team of full-time staff and recruiting volunteers who were given the challenge of developing a plan for the BT estuary, the government's conditions were that the plans should be an inclusive coalition of "government, private and commercial interests" to identify the issues, create strategies, and coordinate the whole process through carrying out the commitments.
The plan was developed in clear stages. Workshops, open to everyone who wanted to participate, attracted some 250 people, and included representatives from all three levels of government, industry, citizens and others.
The first stage was a "visioning" exercise where participants were to brainstorm what they hoped to see for the estuary in 25 years time. This would include the variety of perspectives, which were then written and displayed as keywords, which were organized into loose groups. This helped to clarify some of the basic themes, and to summarize a vision statement.
The following workshops followed the same procedure as the first. The next workshop was to identify obstacles to realizing the vision, and challenges in overcoming them. In the third workshop, participants brainstormed actions to deal with the challenges. Another workshop gave participants a chance to identify "catalytic actions," those which would not only produce desirable results, but that would trigger other desirable results as well.
Results of this workshop formed the basis of the "action plans" which were part of the final environmental management plan, for each of which alliances were created, and participants then signed up for the ones they wanted to be a part of. Over the next year, details within each alliance were worked out, and the plans began to be implemented in 1996. The management plan is comprehensive and includes four basic elements:
Until now, the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program has been successful in attracting public attention on the estuary as an important ecosystem, garnering support and involvement from citizens, and gaining a level of trust and credibility for the program. Some of the concrete actions so far have focused on preventing further land loss, so mulberry, blackberry, oak and other trees have been planted to protect the soil. Old Christmas trees have created brush fences which were lined up on the coast to protect soil from eroding through wave action. Some other projects have worked to redistribute water or silt to build land where it is most needed. Still others are installing small-scale sewage treatment systems for houses and cabins along the waterways, and an education program was launched to help farmers find alternative methods of weed and pest control (to reduce the use of chemicals). Many of these programs have involved the use of community volunteer groups, high school students and local business associations, which has helped to create a high level of public participation in the project.
For more information visit the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program.
The work of PODER (or People Organized in the Defense of Earth and Her Resources) began with the successful removal of a 52-acre "tank farm," or fuel storage facility which for 35 years had emitted toxic chemicals and was linked to chronic illnesses for neighborhoods in East Austin, where 88% of the population is Mexican or African American also suffering from high rates of crime and unemployment.
In 1993, after over a year of campaigning, PODER, other community groups and residents succeeded in the closure and relocation of the site, whose three pipelines were owned by major oil corporations, a notable achievement in the state of Texas.
From this success, other initiatives began, including:
PODER began teaming up with other neighborhood groups to look at issues of regulations, taxes, policy and design of infrastructure, which have major implications for East Austin residents, despite the fact that decisions were taken without the input of those most affected. Such issues have growing importance to PODER and other neighborhood groups and they have launched various Land Use/Rights campaigns, including:
They are also involved with various transportation issues:
Working with other neighborhood groups such as El Pueblos, community members are being given the tools, information and motivation to work with local city and transportation agencies to get investments that improve safety and livability of communities.
This case highlights the concept of "environmental justice," and how environmental issues in low-income communities are inherently bound up in historical, social and economic forces which have shaped land use, zoning regulations and demographics. It also shows how the system enables middle or upper classes to externalize the costs of their lifestyle onto the poor and politically marginalized on many levels, for example through flight into white suburbs which is draining the tax base from inner cities, or through siting of commuter freeways, industrial sites, or landfills in poor neighborhoods. As one PODER executive member pointed out, "Land-use practices and transportation design are the worst agents of these injustices." Rather than simply battling each new issue piecemeal, PODER is pushing for changes at the deeper level of fiscal regulation, zoning policy and transportation design.
For more information visit PODER-Texas.
Both programs have won recognition as leaders in the sustainable building and energy sectors. Since the 1980s, Austin launched the Energy Star Program which rated energy efficiency of new homes.
In the early 1990s, there was a sense among the more progressive architects and builders that more could be done beyond energy savings. Materials in house building, for example, are generally inefficient as the used building materials, containing mined materials and other recyclables, mostly end up in landfills because of the low disposal fees. In 1990, with a grant from the Urban Consortium for Energy, a partnership between Austin Habitat for Humanity and American Institute, with the help of volunteers, created a demonstration project which helped to promote the program to buyers, builders, developers and architects. Green building principles view the house as a system, which includes four main areas (water, energy, materials, and waste). The program began as a checklist which focused on site, energy, water landscape, waste material issues and indoor air quality which later evolved into a rating system ranging from 1-5 stars (5 being the highest). Green practices included in the system might include:
Materials:
Water:
Energy:
Waste:
Austin currently has slightly different programs for residential, commercial, multifamily and municipal buildings (setting standards with the construction of its new airport and other City buildings). The program also offers technical support and assistance for architects and builders, puts out educational publications for builders, promotional and educational materials for buyers, and offers financial incentives for builders and the public. The program has largely relied on using market forces to achieve critical mass and drive the standards into the mainstream instead of appealing to regulation to force it there.
In 1992, Austin had the only green builders program and the National Association of Homebuilders had little awareness or interest in promoting it; but today the NAHB hosts green building conferences and many similar programs are thriving around the country.
Integral to the program is the Green Choice program, considered one of the more successful utility-sponsored green power programs in the US, especially considering it is in the country's fossil fuel capital. The program offers a choice to consumers to pay extra for energy from renewable sources (which in Austin would be wind, solar or biogas from a landfill) at 3.3 cents/KW-hour as opposed to standard fees of 2.8 cents/KW-hour for standard fuel sources (which rely on coal or natural gas). While of course these renewable sources can't be singled out to provide energy to individual subscribers, the program operates so that the more subscribers pay for the program, the more green power sources will be contracted out, displacing conventional sources. The program also promotes renewable energy and provides low-cost loans for installation of solar panels, as well as offering rebates for improvements to energy efficiency (i.e., upgrades to more efficient air conditioners or other appliances).
For more information visit the Austin Green Building Program and the Austin Green Choice Program.
In the 1980s, Travis County in central Texas was growing, with most development in the periphery of Austin. The Balcones Canyonlands, a natural area of limestone hills, spring-fed canyons, caves, springs, and sinkholes (below which is an aquifer which supplies water to some 1.5 Central Texas residents) are home to unique species found nowhere else in the world.
When it became clear that the Fish and Wildlife Service would list species found in the area as endangered, such as two songbirds (the golden-cheeked warbler and the black-capped vireo), some city and regional planners worried that enforcing the ESA (Endangered Species Act) would lead to an ad hoc checkerboard pattern of development across the county.
In 1988, the city of Austin and Travis County formed a steering committee that would create a plan for economic stability and that would protect certain species. A series of meetings were to begin a grueling, 8-year long process of public meetings with agencies from three levels of government as well as scientists, developers and environmental organizations. In 1992, Austin's mayor supported a $US 22 million city bond, with which the Nature Conservancy acquired land, as the first step towards creation of the Balcones Canyonlands Nature Preserve which came into being in 1996. The Preserve is a multi-agency conservation effort which includes the Nature Conservancy Texas, the Lower Colorado River Authority, the Texas Audubon Society, various government agencies and industry.
It works through acquisition of targeted land in the reserve deemed to be habitat of several endangered species or "species of concern." The final goal is to acquire and manage 30,428 acres, approximately 80% of which had been acquired by 2002. Certain reserves have various levels of regulation and conditions, for example some are required to provide for maintenance, patrol and biological management, biological monitoring and research, as well as restriction of activities such as biking or hiking. Others are open to various recreational or development activities, including hunting or building. It is meant to strike a compromise between development and conservation. It works under a system of "incidental take permits," where acquired land is given mitigation "credits" for infrastructure development; that is, development in the acquisition causing direct or indirect damage (or "take") of an endangered species is "compensated for" by purchasing the credit which goes towards acquisition of other land in the reserve.
The Balcones Canyonlands Conservation Program (BCCP) was among the first of regional multi-species habitat conservation plans, which has served as a model for locally-based habitat protection programs that balances competing needs of developers and conservationists. It has had mixed reviews of its success. Restrictions on mountain bikers has drawn criticism from sport/adventure enthusiasts who say their impact is minimal and far less invasive than the construction of strip malls or subdivisions built close to the edge of reserves. Others say that development at the edges of reserves means the area of the reserve is much smaller than it appears, as a large buffer zone is needed between pristine and developed areas. (These songbirds, for example, need a 100-meter distance away from human settlement). Still others say that the BCCP was designed to allow development to continue, and that developers pay for the right to destroy habitat (much as the greenhouse credit trading critics say it allows industries to buy the right to burn greenhouse gases). For example, the BCCP allows "take" of 55% of black-capped vireo and 71% of identified golden-cheeked warbler habitat. The original habitat documents prepared by scientists identified a region more than twice the size of the current target.
But many environmentalists do concede that while it is far from adequate, the BCCP is better than nothing, and that it has potential to protect a large tract of land from being swallowed up by development characteristic of Texas. It has been praised as increasing badly-needed trust between developers and environmentalists, and built a strong relationship between the city and county staff. It has also set the wheels in motion to establish other land near BCCP boundaries.
For more information visit the National Center for Environmental Decision-Making Research and the Austin Chronicle.
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