Our doorbell was ringing constantly this weekend, and not just on Halloween. The election for Cambridge City Council and School Committee is coming up on November 8, and the candidates (or their staffers) are really doing their due diligence in going door to door. I’ve gotten to the point where I just don’t answer anymore. Is this how people in New Hampshire feel during the primaries? The sheer amount of paper wasted is ridiculous!

That's a lot of paper.

So I decided to count up exactly how many flyers we received in our mailbox (or on our porch…or inside our front door). I know this is a minor thing, but it seems like an interesting thought experiment, since the candidates all say they care about environmental issues.

City Council

• Marjorie Decker – 8
• Henrietta Davis – 7
• David Maher – 5
• Denise Simmons – 3 (in a plastic bag!)
• Minka vanBeuzekom – 3
• Tim Toomey – 2
• Leland Cheung – 2
• Ken Reeves – 2
• Charlie Marquardt – 2
• Craig Kelley – 2
• Matt Nelson – 1
• Larry Ward – 1
• Sam Seidel – 0
• Tom Stohlman – 0
• James Williamson – 0
• Gregg Moree – 0
• Gary Mello – 0
• Jamake Pascual – 0

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s going to change who gets my #1 vote. I’m too passionate about Henrietta Davis, Minka vanBeuzekom (a Pragmatic Environmentalism reader!), and Leland Cheung—and now Merven Osborne—to decide on someone else based solely on their literature. However, some people I was lukewarm about did get bumped down the list because of it (I’m looking at you, Denise Simmons).

Some pieces really impressed me as being something more than just junk mail. Henrietta Davis sends out updates quarterly, with great information that we actually put on our refrigerator, like farmers market dates and locations, useful phone numbers, and local discounts. David Maher’s flyer unfolded into a window sign. Way to make it do double duty!

If you want to do your own research on the candidates, Robert Winters has some great profiles on each of them, as well as voting records for the incumbents. His busy site gives me a crazy old man vibe, but I think he does a better job covering Cambridge politics than Cambridge Chronicle.

So Carman Schlamb’s session couldn’t have come at a better time. It was titled “Breaking the Circle of One, or Am I the Only One on This Campus Who Believes in Sustainability?” Schlamb talked about her frustration at years of effort that didn’t seem to lead anywhere. Without a sustainability office at Seneca, students focused on on-the-ground projects, administration focused on economic factors, and there was no institutional memory—whenever a passionate person left, all their work left with them. It wasn’t easy to ferret out what she called the “hidden curriculum” and “hidden partners.” She reached out to people through educational poster sessions and open forums where people presented what their areas were doing. Students helped her to break the barriers between offices. Through this process, Schlamb found that there was a person interested in sustainability just one floor below her!

Bill Dillon’s talk later that day complemented Schlamb’s perfectly. He’s vice president of NACUBO and a certified negotiation trainer, and some of his tips were familiar from the (one!) Negotiation and Conflict Resolution class that I took at Tufts. His main point was that every negotiation is not just about achieving the immediate objective, but also elevating your relationship. He pointed out some tactics to be aware of when others use them:

• Emotional tactics: confrontation, threat, tease, body language
• Power tactics: only the messenger, it’ll never get approved, third-party pressures, violins, deadline
• Logical tactics: limiting, foggy memory, fair and reasonable, expert info

He also suggested some alternatives, like creating a neutral environment, asking first for input from others before sharing your ideas, disclosing your feelings, depersonalizing, and pausing for 10-seconds (it’s a long time!). These may seem obvious, but I find I actually need to think consciously about things that other people may do instinctively.

These two sessions back-to-back emphasized that building a sustainability movement takes a lot of collaboration. I’ve been trying to encourage that at Berklee, but I think I need to do it more consciously in order to be successful.

Bill McKibben

There was a dramatic difference between the very practical workshop in the morning and the student summit keynote by Bill McKibben in the afternoon. I’ve always thought McKibben’s 350.org protests were an inefficient use of energy, but I can see how his enthusiasm for them can be infectious. He’s an entertaining speaker, and his emphasis on the immediacy of climate change is welcome, but I’m worried that he discourages students from doing anything but protesting. At one point he seemed to disparage the point of the entire conference by calling it all just “changing lightbulbs in your dorms.”

K. Christian Bayart from Macalester College reports on the Sustainability Student Worker Network he started.

Luckily, the student presentations after his talk showed that not everyone shared his views. I was especially impressed by the student who created a sustainability student employee network (sometimes by co-opting pieces of jobs in other department that weren’t being fully utilized) and the students who organized their college’s STARS data collection (by making it the final project for an Environmentalism 101 class).

Majora Carter’s keynote detailed her work with Sustainable South Bronx and her consulting company, the Majora Carter Group. Her entrepreneurial mentality and eloquence are so strong that they made me feel at the same time inspired and inadequate. Really—check out her TED talk.

AASHE executive director Paul Rowland pulled it all together when he exhorted the assembled 2,000 sustainability professionals to thoughtfulness, but warned “thoughtful hermits are probably good people—and they probably have a very small carbon footprint—but that’s not sufficient to make a difference in the world.” Harried from a day of running around and wanting nothing more than to shut myself away in my hotel room, I felt like he was speaking directly to me. We’re all doing a lot of thinking this week; now we just have to get back to work and turn that into action.

What’s the Cool Dedham campaign?

The Cool Dedham campaign is modeled after the Cool Mass campaign, which is through the Massachusetts Climate Action Network. The town of Dedham was one of nine communities to be chosen to participate in this groundbreaking initiative that targets residential carbon emissions. We do that by working through a workbook called The Low-Carbon Diet. We have a Carbon Café, held at a café in Dedham. Our first Café we had 70 people come out, and we formed eco-teams—usually 7 or 8 individuals—who work to lower their carbon footprint. This workbook has 24 steps with easy low-hanging fruit to change their lifestyle to make a difference. We have a goal of getting 25% of Dedham’s 24,000 residents to lower their carbon emissions by 25% within a three-year-period.

We started off with this eco-team that was sort of the top of the eco teams; they nicknamed themselves the clothesline gang, because they hang all their clothes out on clotheslines. Their homes were already solar, they already drive hybrid vehicles, they’re vegetarians, they’re doing everything already that could lower their emissions, so we have used them as our standup model of what an eco-team could be, and they’ve really been great in getting the community involved.

It’s honestly been a challenge to try to get that many residents to continue to be engaged and to continue to spread the word about it. So we’re extending that three-year period, and it’s going to be much longer than that. I think that was a very ambitious goal. That’s what a lot of other communities are finding, too. It’s a big challenge, but it’s something that we’re working at.

How are you measuring results?

We’re measuring results by asking the participants to report back to us. And MCAN has a list of questions that they send to us at the end of each year asking us about the total emissions that we believe our eco-teams have reduced. The book is not really scientific, quantitative, but there is a workbook in the back where you can plug in how much you believe that you will reduce if you participate in these measures. So through that we can get a rough estimate of what we believe that we’re reducing as a result.

Is the focus of this entirely on residents or is it also on businesses?

That’s just residents. For businesses we have another program that we just started: commercial recycling. We received a Sustainable Material Recovery Grant from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection Bureau of Waste Prevention. We received technical assistance from a municipal assistance coordinator, and she helped us create a survey that we sent out to Dedham businesses. We’re focusing on Dedham Square, and we’re finding out what they recycle. The reason we started this is that a lot of Dedham businesses don’t recycle, or they recycle but they take it home with them, and that’s because their landlord has not provided recycling services for them. They provide trash services. So we’re trying to find out what their needs are through a survey, and now we are going to put out a request for proposal to hauling companies and see if we can lump these businesses that share an alley in together to save them money on recycling. Also to save space; there’s such limited space in these alleys.

But recycling is usually cheaper than trash pickup, isn’t it?

It is. Exactly. So that’s part of our education campaign of trying to educate these owners and landlords that they’ll actually end up saving money, because it’s actually more expensive to dispose of trash than it is to dispose of recycling.

There’s so much more that I need to learn about urban planning! Thanks to Virginia for putting up with my curiosity.

What exactly does your job involve?

I cover a wide variety of environmental issues for the town of Dedham: climate change, energy efficiency, recycling, stormwater management, wildlife management…. We also have a conservation agent and a conservation commission, and they cover wetlands-related issues. I work with the DPW on recycling, and the town administration, as well. I’m really the education and outreach component, and I also do a lot of grantwriting.

Virginia LeClair

Did this position exist before you came there?

No, this is a new position that was created by the town administration, the town administrator, and the conservation commission. This position has sort of evolved over time as a result of my interest in climate change, my interest in recycling, and it just continues to evolve as we decide that we want to go for other sustainable initiatives and we receive more grants. So it’s very exciting. You never know what you’re going to be doing each day.

Is it difficult for you to get all these different agencies working together?

We have a good system set up. We have weekly operations meetings with the town administrator, and in those meetings are the public works director, the engineering director, the building director, the economic development director, the director of finance, and the assistant town administrator. And then on a monthly basis we have department head meetings where we can inform all the other department heads what projects we’re working on. So we have a really good communication system set up, and everyone here very much has a mindset of we’re all in this together, we’re team players trying to make Dedham better.

What sort of background do you have? It sounds like you are doing a lot of things that don’t really fall under one category.

I’ve worked for nonprofits; I’ve worked for other municipalities; I’ve worked in the private sector, in a consulting company; and I went to school for environmental studies public policy. So just over the years working in all these different sectors in Boston and D.C., I’ve just continued to expand my knowledge of the environmental field.

What sorts of outreach do you do?

On the front of recycling, we did a yearlong outreach campaign, because we switched from dual-stream recycling to single-stream recycling. We did public education discussing the change from five barrels of trash to only one 64 gallon trash barrel and one 96 gallon recycling barrel. Seventy percent of your household garbage is actually recyclable.

Then I’ve done some work with the schools. The All-American Recycling Competition is a competition each year where we go into the elementary schools to teach them about recycling. The third place prize is a compost bin for the school and recycled denim pencils; the second place prize is a recycling magic show; and the first place prize is an interview with Dedham Public TV. So it’s the youth educating adults about what is recyclable, and hopefully that resonates well with adults.

We received a $500,000 grant from Congressman Lynch’s office—this was funding through the Energy and Water Appropriations Act of fiscal year 2010—and we’re using that money to install photovoltaic panels on the town hall and the high school. We’re calling this the Dedham Municipal Solar Project.

The other exciting award that we received was the Leading by Example Award from the state in 2009. It’s given out to commonwealth agencies, public colleges, universities, and municipalities, and we were one of three in Massachusetts to be given this award for implementing comprehensive policy, programs, and strategies resulting in significant and measurable environmental benefits. We received the award in part for our single-stream recycling program and the Green Middle School. It has cisterns that gather rainwater to flush the toilets. In 2010, Dedham received the MassRecycle Small Municipality Award for our single-stream recycling program and recycling initiatives.

What sort of response did you get to the single-stream recycling?

Single-stream recycling has been a great success. As a result of this program, our trash tonnage has dropped by 4,000 tons and our recycling rate has doubled from 12 tons to 25 tons in the first 7 months of implementing it. Our hauler is Russell Disposal, and they were saying that our recycling rates should double, which it did. And we saved $400,000 since switching to Russell Disposal. It’s been a great program.

In 2010, Dedham was designated a Green Community. We’re one of 53 communities in the commonwealth to receive this designation. There are five steps that a community must go through in order to be designated a green community. It involves:

• adopting local zoning bylaw or ordinance that allows “as-of-right-siting” of renewable energy projects
• adopting an expedited permitting process related to the as-of-right facilities
• establishing a municipal energy use baseline and establishing a program designed to reduce baseline use by 20 percent within five years
• purchasing only fuel-efficient vehicles for municipal use, whenever such vehicles are commercially available and practicable
• adopting the stretch code, an optional appendix to the Massachusetts building energy code that allows communities to choose a more energy-efficient option.

It’s the biggest carrot that the state is dangling in front of all the communities right now. As part of this award, we receive $180,000, and we’re using that to buy down the cost of our PV system at the town hall and the high school. And we were also awarded three big belly solar trash compactors.

Look for the second half of my interview with Virginia LeClair on Thursday, when we’ll talk about the Cool Dedham campaign and her initiatives to encourage business recycling.

photo by James Minchen

Mattea’s not quite a coal miner’s daughter, but almost. Both her grandfathers were miners in West Virginia, where she grew up. Now she’s a dedicated environmentalist who uses her celebrity to bring attention to the effects of coal—on both the people who mine it and the rest of the world.

Check out the story over at Berklee.edu.

She calls this a systems approach to creating sustainable communities, and to me it seems like a nice way to create an umbrella for all of the work that people are already doing or might want to do in the future.

Henrietta Davis and Sarah James

First off, the group needs to define exactly what it means by sustainability. All the towns who participate in the eco-municipalities program agree on the following four objectives, from the American Planning Association’s Policy Guide on Planning for Sustainability (which is really useful, by the way!).

Sustainability Objectives

1. Use approaches that reduce dependence on fossil fuels, underground metals, minerals
2. Use approaches that reduce dependence on synthetic chemicals and other unnatural substances
3. Use approaches that reduce encroachment upon nature
4. Use approaches that meet human needs fairly and efficiently

(Sarah points out the #4 is what differentiates the sustainability movement from the environmental movement.)

Then, in order to get as much buy-in as possible from all involved parties, they go through a strict planning process, in which they get official endorsements from their highest officials, educate employees and citizens, and then encourage employee/citizen participation in developing strategies to implement the sustainability objectives.

Strategic Planning Process

1. Awarenesss/education
2. Baseline analysis
3. Creating the vision
4. Developing action plan

I feel woefully ignorant when it comes to any sort of strategic planning, so I’d really like to read James’s books, The Natural Step for Communities and Open Planning for Sustainability. Maybe you’ll see reviews of them in the near future.

Thanks to the Cambridge Energy Alliance, CREATe, and Cambridge city councilor Henrietta Davis for sponsoring this talk!

We’ll Switch to a Dirtier Fuel Source Long Before We Run Out of Oil

“Oil comes out of a hole in the ground, and we set it on fire. It’s a clever but outdated invention of ours…that we will replace with something cleverer as soon as the market determines that doing so is worth our while. The near certainty is that, for many years to come, what the market will replace oil with is not something better (like nuclear fusion, which, at the very least, is decades or generations away) but something worse (such as low-grade coal, China’s main fuel, which makes oil’s carbon footprint and pollution profile look demure).” p. 66

As Fuel Becomes More Expensive, We’ll All Have to Do More Work

“Coal bested firewood as an inexpensive multiplier of economic productivity, and oil and natural gas bested coal. The fossil fuels have enabled us to massively leverage the strength of our bodies, allowing a single farmer to produce the harvest of many, and to produce it on less land, and to ship it farther away, freeing a steadily growing percentage of us to do something other than growing or finding food, and to think of our lives in terms of something other than simple survival.” p. 76

Fuel Efficiency Isn’t the Solution

“Getting more miles to the gallon is of no benefit to the environment if it is accompanied by an offsetting increase in driving—and the standard reaction of American drivers to decreases in the cost of driving, historically, has been to drive more.” p. 96

“The energy inefficiency of individual automobiles…is a far less important environmental issue than the energy inefficiency of the asphalt-latticed way of life that we have built to oblige them….A car’s fuel gauge is far less significant, environmentally speaking, than its odometer.” p. 104

Zoning Is the Problem

“Zoning tends to fully separate residential and commercial uses, to move buildings farther apart and farther from streets and sidewalks, to force low-density developments by limiting building height and lot coverage, and to require the creation of oversized parking facilities, which move buildings still farther apart, usually making them inaccessible to anyone who isn’t driving.” p. 112

Large Parks Can Be Bad for the Environment

“Environmentalists and urban planners sometimes say that, in order to get people out of their cars and onto their feet, developed areas need to incorporate extended “greenways” and other attractive, vegetated pedestrian corridors. It’s true that such features, along with parks and natural areas, can encourage some people to take walks. But if the goal is to get people to embrace walking as a form of practical transportation, oversized greenways can actually counterproductive. Walking-as-transportation requires closely spaced, accessible destinations, not broad expanses of leafy scenery.” p. 181

Traffic Jams Can Be Good for the Environment

“Most so-called environmental initiatives concerning automobiles are actually counterproductive because this effort is to make driving less expensive and more agreeable. What we really need is to make driving costlier and less pleasant.” p. 48

“Building a gorgeous transit system is not enough to make people use it in large numbers; you also have to make the alternatives bleak, by increasing costs, impeding car traffic, and eliminating lanes and parking spaces.” p. 133

Lawns Suck

“The nation’s largest irrigated crop is cultivated grass, which covers more than 32 million acres in the continental United States. (The second largest irrigated crop, at roughly 10 million acres, is corn.) Homeowners spend more than $40 billion a year on their lawns, and they use approximately a hundred million pounds of pesticides, which they apply more heavily than farmers do. A third of all residential water use, furthermore, goes into yards.” p. 191

Solar Panels and Windmills Are Not the Best Ways to Make Your House More Efficient

“The solar peak generally occurs around midday, often several hours before the electric-demand peak, and the extra electrons often have nowhere useful to go.” p. 244

“The days of the year when the extra power generated by turbines would be the most useful to the grid tend to be hot summer days when, almost by definition, power-generating breezes are not blowing.” p. 244

Neither Are High-Tech Windows

“An efficient window has an R-value of 4 or 5. The typical modern house wall, 22.” P. 252

“In a house that doesn’t have air-conditioning, low-e windows can actually increase energy use, by reducing the sun’s effectiveness during the winter at passively heating rooms with southern exposure.” p. 254

Build Smaller and Insulate Well

“The best strategy for making a new single-family house greener is to build it on a small lot in an already dense neighborhood (which increases embodied efficiency), to build it smaller (which consumes fewer resources during construction, requires less energy forever, and discourages the accumulation of unnecessary possessions), to caulk and insulate it more thoroughly, especially under the roof (which helps to keep heat on the correct side of the building envelope in all seasons), and to go easy on the air-conditioning and the inefficient appliances.” p. 236

I really recommend reading the book, but if you don’t get a chance, at least check out the first chapter. It reads like a New Yorker essay, because it is one.

One year ago: A Fly Infestation.

Green Metropolis by David Owen gets the biggest compliment I can give a book: I wish I had written it myself. It’s a wonderfully clear explanation of why high-density, mixed-use cities like New York and Boston are more environmentally friendly than suburban or even rural communities.

It seems counterintuitive at first—and you get the sense that the author enjoys being contrarian—but the analysis is compelling. And while I would like more information on how some of the statistics he quotes were gathered, they’re staggering. New Yorkers are collectively responsible for 1% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, but they represent 2.7% of the population. This is worth repeating: 2.7% of the population is responsible for just 1% of the greenhouse gas emissions because they live in the city.

How do they manage this?

• By living in such close proximity to everything they need that they walk, bike, and use public transportation, rather than drive
• By living in smaller spaces that are easier to heat and cool

Although environmentalism isn’t generally associated with cities, Owen points out that the best way to preserve open spaces is for people to move closer together, not farther apart: “Wild landscapes are less often destroyed by people who despise wild landscapes than by people who love them…by people who move to be near them, and then, when others follow, move again.”

If the residents of New York were to all live at the density of the author’s hometown (around 4,000 residents in 38.7 square miles), “they would require a space equivalent to the land area of the six New England states plus Delaware and New Jersey.” Considering that, us Boston residents are actually doing my Maine relatives a favor by not crowding them out of their towns!

Of course, as Owen points out, the three cities with the highest transit use, New York, San Francisco, and Boston, didn’t get that way because of good urban planning, but because they’re on an island and peninsulas, thus inhibiting outward growth. The real question is how to preserve that unintentional result and duplicate it in places that already have a very different plan.

One year ago: Should I Filter My Water?