Saturday, May 24, 2008
The region should set cradle-to-cradle goals
From the RoundTable blog
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Gregg Lewis
Lewis is a Salem architect.
Our entire community should respond with enthusiasm and appreciation for the vision shown by those in our region launching the Roanoke Business Environmental Leadership Coalition. Thank you to Roanoke Councilwoman Gwen Mason for bringing this concept forward.
As the coalition members begin their important work to make commercial and governmental activities in Southwest Virginia less damaging to the world, we must applaud their efforts.
Recognition that this issue warrants their attention is an important first step toward creating a sustainable economy and environment at the local level, while seeing the broader implications of our activities at the national and even global level.
We must encourage these individuals and the organizations they represent to create a baseline measurement of how their business and governmental practices continue to impact air and water quality, carbon emissions, toxification and human health.
Those of us who have business relationships with these entities have an important role to play as the coalition's mission evolves. By understanding our roles in shaping the future of the natural world and the health of our and future generations, together we have a chance to set the Blue Ridge region out in front of virtually every other community across the country.
The coalition's goals must be twofold.
There must be measurable goals defined in the short term. These will be met only by creating the benchmarks mentioned above and setting targets annually. The coalition's efforts will succeed only if they are structured in terms of net reductions of things like solid waste, toxic emissions, greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation, and not merely reducing the rate at which these problems are increasing. This distinction is vital to solving the problems we face now.
The second part of the challenge will be stating a long-term goal toward which the annual assessments will point. If the coalition sets out to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a given percentage each year, there is an implied long-term goal. That unstated goal is the total elimination of greenhouse gas emissions.
The most credible way, in the long run, to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions is to eliminate use of fossil fuels in fleet vehicles, electricity generation, and the heating and cooling of buildings. The cost versus benefit analysis of this goal requires that only incremental steps be taken at this time. The coalition can increase the impact of these steps by laying out its long-term goals alongside its plans for the short term.
If the coalition sets out to reduce incrementally the manufacture, use or distribution of toxic materials on an annual basis, for example, it would be wise to state that its proposal seeks in the long term to eliminate the use of known toxins altogether.
This idea is not new. It was, along with the ideas that follow, clearly described by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in the Hanover Principles written just over 10 years ago. The ideas were further developed in the book "Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things."
During a recent visit to Charlottesville, I and representatives of Roanoke, the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce and Carilion met with McDonough to discuss Roanoke's relationship to the future of cradle-to-cradle as it relates to the sustainability of an entire community.
For me, the take-home message that afternoon was that the Roanoke region could -- and I argued should -- be the first community in the world formally to adopt the principles of cradle-to-cradle and seek to use these principles in helping to shape the community's future.
By staking our claim to a future that is prosperous, healthful and abundant, we would set the stage for attracting visitors and residents who understand and value this vision for the world around us -- and those who inhabit it.
Where does the coalition seek to bring us? It is my hope that the Roanoke Business Environmental Leadership Coalition will see and understand the value of McDonough and Braungart's vision and take this opportunity to define the horizon line for the coalition's future work.
The steps for getting there, taken one at a time, are not difficult and are clearly implied in the interim goals it has stated. The time for laying out a bold and achievable agenda for business activity in the Roanoke Valley is now. Congratulations to those coalition members who have put the ball in motion.
