The Matt Came Back
Matt Petersen, Global Green USA.
What communities have had the greatest success with adoption of sustainability indicators? What sustainability tactics are the most successful? My county is seven years into a morass of choosing what steps to take. -- Bill Lavery, Saline, Mich.
Don't give up, Bill. Soon you'll get through the morass and into the promised land of viable sustainability indicators! I know from experience that it is not easy. I'm a little biased here, but Santa Monica has really developed a robust and extensive sustainability-indicator system. On the Santa Monica environmental task force, we worked with the staff to develop goals for each area (e.g., resource conservation, environment and public health, etc.), and then came up with indicators to track our progress. We've made good progress on waste diversion, renewable energy, green building, water conservation, and other areas. You can also look at the SustainLane website where they've ranked cities on their green policies and programs to get some ideas.
My career is spent as a data analyst in the field of K-12 education. What can I do to contribute to and spread the word about the greening of schools in my community? Does this concept apply to only future construction projects or can existing buildings become green? -- Sarah Devaney, Ann Arbor, Mich.
The best opportunity for greening schools is in the process of planning for construction, where you can integrate green building products and strategies from the beginning, diminishing any potential increase in first costs. But you can also green existing schools, starting with operations and maintenance. Get your school district to switch from using pesticides and herbicides to an integrated pest-management program -- children are most vulnerable to these dangerous chemicals. Strategic tree planting can help provide shade -- cooling buildings and lessening the need to run air conditioning on hot summer days -- and/or help clean the air of car emissions and other pollution. If there's a school planning an energy retrofit, propose energy-efficiency strategies coupled with on-site solar power generation to further lower energy bills and put more textbooks in the classrooms. Check with your local utility about solar rebate programs, and if they don't exist, petition to create one.
You say you take your greening campaign work to local and national governments in order to make better policy. Do you feel your efforts have been successful? Do you have any examples of ways in which your work has directly affected policy decisions? -- Name not provided
What we strive to do is take the lessons learned and the needs identified working on the ground to policy makers, with the obvious intention of helping make more effective policy. I think most of the time we succeed. One success was when we convinced European governments of the need to invest in Schuchye, a destitute village in the shadow of a large VX nerve gas stockpile. It is not easy going, but we've gotten investments from the Swiss government for health and medical clinics, and just completed a community-needs study that we hope will lead to investment in sanitation and clean-water infrastructure. With our firsthand knowledge, we were also better able to advocate for continued funding from the U.S. Congress to help Russia destroy these chemical weapons and improve the security while the destruction plan is built. Previously, a chain-link fence, bicycle padlocks, and two guards doing a perimeter check twice a day were all that protected these weapons. One drop of the VX nerve gas on your skin will kill you almost instantly, and one warhead would fit neatly in a backpack and, if detonated, could wipe out an entire football stadium of people.
An example of success at the local scale was when we took our work with affordable-housing developers in California and developed incentives to encourage the greening of low-income housing through what's known as tax-credit financing. The lower energy bills and better indoor-air quality help improve the lives of the residents and lessen the impact on their pocketbooks and health. These criteria have been revised every year, taking lessons learned through our partnership and technical work with affordable-housing developers to improve and build upon the existing incentives. These incentives have been replicated to varying degrees in other states, including New Jersey and Georgia. The affordable housing and solar loan fund legislation we sponsored this year (it would create a low-interest revolving loan fund to finance solar power on affordable housing) grew out of our work to create "net-zero" energy affordable housing -- what we learned is that developers didn't need more rebate dollars beyond what they could get from the state of California, they needed more loans to finance larger solar power systems.
For 10 years, my wife and I have taken American youth/young adults to Third World countries to do humanitarian projects that make a difference in the lives of others and in the meantime are not easily forgotten by the participants. We now plan to do the same work by sail which will give us extended periods at sea. What kind of environmental research or public-awareness activities could we involve youth/young adults in while our vessel is at sea? -- Henry Stubbs, Westminster, S.C.
Someone once told me about a school that required its students to carry around in a trash bag every piece of trash they generated, helping them understand the vast amount of waste we create from uneaten food, various disposables, and packaging. An exercise similar to this, particularly in a "closed system" like a ship, could help students do two things: a) understand the vast amount of resources we, as U.S. citizens in particular, consume; and b) give a sense of the tremendous waste we generate. Part of the point is to help them understand that as 5 percent of the world's population, we use 25 percent of the world's energy (and generate more than 25 percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions). Pick one product that they'll eat or drink on the trip, and find some facts and figures on the energy and/or resources that go into creating that good. This will also help provide a stark contrast to the minimal amount of resources used by the people, per capita, in the countries you visit.
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