Illinois Sustainable Technolgoy Center/Champaign, IL
Director. Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC)
Prairie Research Institute
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ISTC, www.istc.illinois.edu, a division within the Prairie Research Institute, invites applications and nominations for the position of Director to lead the Center in the execution of its mission and in maintaining and enhancing its tradition of excellence. We seek candidates with national visibility, proven leadership and managerial skills and a commitment to promoting sustainability. This position requires a graduate degree, with PhD preferred, and demonstrated ability to lead and build successful programs that enhance public good. For full position announcement and application requirements visit, http://www.istc.illinois.edu/…yment.cfm#director. The U of I is an AA-EOE, www.inclusiveillinois.illinois.edu
ShutterstockChug, chug, chug — for the planet, of course.
After weeks of painstakingly thorough research and dedicating my body to the noble profession of journalism by acting as my own guinea pig, I have come to the following conclusion: Beer is awesome.
From its humble beginning as a brewmaster’s hazy notion until that sweet moment when it hits your lips, your brewski may be part of a master plan to bring you an environmentally friendly, carefully sourced, community minded, local-economy-driving, happiness-inducing good time. (That is, unlessyou’re drinking Coors. They want your money but they don’t really care if you have a good time.)
But not all beers are created equal, so in the name of fearless truth-telling, I spoke to brewers and beer experts from across the country, traveled to a distant land known as Soho, and of course, drank plenty of beer. I did all of this in hopes that you, the public, might be better equipped in evaluating the virtuousness of your brew.
The basics: Craft beer vs. everything else
Let’s start with the basics. In the world of beer, there are two main categories: craft and everything else. Under Brewers Association standards, to be a “craft brewer,” you need to meet three requirements. First, you must be small — meaning you produce 6 million barrels of beer or less. (That might sound like a lot, but compared to the nearly 100 million barrels produced by Anheuser Busch in 2012, even the 858,000 barrels produced by Sierra Nevada, the pioneer of craft brewing, looks meager.) Second, you need to be independent: No more than 25 percent of the business can be owned or controlled by a non-craft member of the beer industry. Third, you have to be “traditional.” In this case, that’s defined as brewing “either an all malt flagship” beer “or at least 50 percent” of your volume in all-malt beers. This is really a nice way of saying you can’t water down your beer with additives like rice or corn. On the taste scale, this is what separates your standard craft beer from the mass-produced behemoths like Budweiser, which uses a lot of rice, or Coors, which uses corn, wheat, and other “cereal grains” in its recipes.
Those may be the only technical requirements, but it turns out that craft-brewing guys (and a growing group of gals) have a bit of an overachievement problem. You see, they are really into beer. Like, really into beer. As Dave McLean, brewmaster and owner of San Francisco’s Magnolia Gastropub & Brewery, put it, “Most brewers are simply motivated by the challenge of making great beer.” Some will even break federal laws to do it: Chris Cuzme, the brewer at New York’s 508 GastroBrewery, for example, confessed to smuggling (and not declaring!) chamomile all the way back from Istanbul to make his Sea Witch Wit.
And in addition to being dedicated to the art of beer, some of these brewers also tend to be major environmentalists (not to mention mensches — read on to find out how). As McLean puts it, “Whether they think or articulate it this way, [craft brewers strive to brew] in a way that is good, clean, and fair.”
Ingredients: You are what you drink
At its core, beer is an agricultural product, and the basic recipe is deceptively simple: barley, hops, yeast, and water. But craft brewers go out of their way to carefully source their ingredients, though their relatively long shelf lives means that shipping doesn’t compromise their quality, even if it ups the brewery’s carbon footprint. “It’s not imperative to the quality of the beer that the ingredients come locally or seasonally,” says Megan Flynn, publisher and editor-in-chief of Beer West magazine. “But,” she adds, “there is a movement towards brewing beer with local ingredients where it can be sourced.”
While finding local hops outside of Oregon and Washington continues to be a challenge, a “beer-to-farm” movement, as Jimmy Carbone, owner of New York’s restaurant and beer bar Jimmy’s No. 43 and the co-founder of the city’s Good Beer Seal, calls it, is emerging. “Breweries are realizing they want to have more local hop growers to make beer from and they are building a mini-local beer economy,” he says. The new demand for local hops is bringing the crop back to some of its old stomping grounds. One New York farmer raised more than $30,000 on Kickstarter to import a German hops-harvesting machine, which he plans to make available to any local farmer who wants to use it. Anderson Valley Brewing Co. in Boonville, Calif., began growing hops in the beer garden as an ornamental homage to the region’s history as home to a formerly bustling hops economy. “Then we decided to grow enough to brew a batch of beer, then two batches,” Brewmaster Fal Allen told me, “and now we have about two acres of hop fields in production.”
Sourcing local malted barley is another challenge that craft brewers are meeting head-on. “There are a few big ‘malt houses’ that most of the breweries order from,” Flynn says, both in the U.S. and abroad. “But there’s also a big movement going on right now for artisan malting, or maltsters as they call themselves,” she adds. While there’s no official count on the number of maltsters in the country, Beer West writer Adrienne So reports that they are popping up all over the country, and counts Colorado Malting in Alamosa, Colo., and Valley Malt in Hadley, Mass., as the most prominent. “Malterie Frontenac in Quebec is at the forefront of the movement and helping a lot of people out with equipment and knowledge and the like,” she adds, proving once again that maybe Canada isn’t so bad after all.
Even breweries that aren’t sourcing their main ingredients locally are finding ways to incorporate regional flavors. Brooklyn Brewery infused European malts and Belgian dark sugar with raw wildflower honey from New York for its bomber-sized, cork-finished Local 2, making it an immediate favorite for a certain person who may or may not be drinking it right at this moment.
And considering beer is really just delicious, alcoholic water, brewers care a lot about the quality of their water supply, too. In response to the fracking threat in New York, local brewers have been unequivocal in their opposition. Brooklyn Brewery founder Steve Hindy calls fracking’s potential danger to New York’s water system “criminal,” and in February, Larry Bennett, the operator of Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, N.Y., told NBC that he’d sooner close down his operation than brew with tainted water. (Attention Game of Thrones fans: If you’re looking to party like a Westerosi, make sure you try the brewery’s Limited Edition Iron Throne, which combines the blonde sex appeal of a Lannister with the thoughtful complexity of a Stark, making what I like to call the perfect man pale ale.)
What about using organic ingredients?
Despite some well-intentioned efforts to brew and sell organic beer, the overall reaction from both consumers and brewers has been pretty meh. “There’s not yet a super well-developed organic ingredient pipeline,” says McLean. “And one can always argue that there are farmers throughout the food community who do good work on the sustainability front without necessarily being certified as organic.” Flynn is a little less diplomatic on the topic, noting that some brewers have shipped organic hops all the way in from New Zealand, and the results were hardly noticeable. “There isn’t a discernible taste difference in organic beer versus non-organic. Some of the organic breweries would probably kill me for saying that, but there just isn’t,” she adds.
Factor in the added cost of organic ingredients, and the market just hasn’t really sustained an organic beer industry. New Belgium Brewery, a leading craft brewer in Fort Collins, Colo., learned this lesson the hard way when it had to cancel its gold medal-winning, certified-organic Mothership Wit because, according to its website, “consumers didn’t want to pay more for the increased cost.”
Keeping it clean: Craft breweries take sustainability to the next level
It’s not enough that these brewers are breathing new life into the art of beer and reviving lost agricultural traditions. Environmentalism apparently goes hand in hand with the art of beer making — from the very top of the beer industry all the way down to the bottom.
Giving back: Brewers heart their local communities
But beyond the big picture, breweries excel at spreading their focus on craft and quality in their local communities as well. “Community is where things really, truly shine,” McLean says. “Craft breweries employ local workers, keep money in their communities, and foster a sense of local awareness and pride.” This is true on both ends of the size spectrum: While a large brewery like New Belgium holds the Tour de Fat, raising more than $2 million for local nonprofits, the much smaller Keegan Ales in Kingston, N.Y., for example, hosts community events like free concerts showcasing local musicians. (The brewery’s Mother’s Milk, by the way, is so worth writing home about.)
Drink responsibly: Go local
With more than 2,100 craft breweries in the U.S., the Brewers Association estimates that almost every American lives within 10 miles of one (good news for Toby Keith, who might just have a soulmate in every town). Even cocktail-loving New York City has loads (my personal favorite: The aforementioned 508 GastroBrewery, home of rotating beers with wonderful names, like Spray Tan Pale Ale and the bacon-flavored Hamber). Even if a craft brewery isn’t using local hops and barley, drinking its beers means you’re pumping money back into your community’s economy instead of relying on greenhouse gases to truck in your booze. So whether you’re drinking in a brewery, a bar, or by yourself on the couch, look for something made nearby. You’ll be toasting to the health of your town — and the planet’s.
The Rainforest Alliance is an international nonprofit organization that works to conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods by transforming land-use practices, business practices and consumer behavior. Based in New York City, with offices throughout the United States and worldwide, the Rainforest Alliance works with people whose livelihoods depend on the land, helping them transform the way they grow food, harvest wood and host travelers.
As a member and secretariat of the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) — an international coalition of leading conservation organizations — the Rainforest Alliance’s Sustainable Agriculture works with farmers to ensure compliance with the SAN standards for protecting wildlife, ecosystems, workers’ rights, and promoting the well-being of farmers, their families and communities. Farms that meet the SAN’s rigorous environmental, social and economic standards are awarded the Rainforest Alliance Certifiedâ„¢ seal. The SAN standards are applied by producers of major commodity crops (including bananas, pineapple, coffee, cocoa, tea, citrus and flowers) that profoundly affect the economies, environments, cultures and politics of tropical countries. Today more than 350,000 farms in 30 countries are certified and Rainforest Alliance Certified products are widely available in mainstream markets.
Position Summary
The Coordinator will be responsible for providing support to the Vice President and the senior management team of Sustainable Agriculture in all areas of operations, with an emphasis on communications and day-to-day management support.
Responsibilities:
• Coordinate meeting and webinar preparation for the Vice President, including communications with relevant staff, logistics, agendas and materials preparation, as well as meeting follow-up and assistance in tracking implementation of follow-up;
• Assist by drafting letters, reports and other documents, collecting and analyzing information as needed, and facilitating and recording meetings;
• Conduct research projects and support specific initiatives such as research on key topics, support for staff training programs, follow up with contacts from meetings and tradeshows, etc.;
• Assist in developing external program presentations in PowerPoint and other formats, and maintaining an inventory of existing presentations;
• Translate data into effective and usable information illustrating impacts and results of Sustainable Agriculture activities and services, including graphs and other forms of visual presentation;
• Complete travel expense reports;
• Monitor and follow up with staff on time-card completion;
• Be the Units point person and promoter of Sharepoint use; train staff in Sharepoint; maintain calendars and libraries in Sharepoint;
• Coordinate the Unit’s annual planning and quarterly reporting process;
• Design, distribute and analyze surveys using appropriate survey software(s), such as Survey Monkey;
• Translate emails and documents between English and Spanish;
• Assist in managing activities, including supporting administrative and contractual issues with external consultants;
• Assist with outreach to key stakeholders;
• Collect and compile information for the Unit’s section of the Rainforest Alliance monthly update; and
• Other duties as assigned.
Qualifications:
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent preferred;
• A minimum 4 years of administrative experience; non-profit experience a plus;
• Background in agriculture, natural resources or environment a plus;
• Ability to work within a team structure as well as independently, be creative, take initiative, be attentive to detail and possess excellent interpersonal communication skills.
• Strong organizational skills to manage multiple priorities in a time sensitive manner;
• Excellent written and verbal communications skills in English and Spanish;
• Excellent computer skills (Microsoft Office and Internet) required; comfort working with database programs preferred;
• Ability to multi-task and work under tight deadlines; and
• Willingness and ability to travel a minimum of 10% per year, nationally and internationally.
Salary:
Commensurate with experience. Competitive benefits package provided.
To apply:
Send resume, cover letter and salary history to Human Resources, Rainforest Alliance, 665 Broadway, Suite 500, New York, NY 10012; Fax: 212-677-2187. If emailing, use the following format in the subject line: first name and last name, job title of position you are applying for.
The Obama administration is losing its most powerful supporter of local and organic foods. Kathleen Merrigan, the No. 2 official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, announced last week that she would be leaving her post as USDA’s deputy secretary. Sustainable agriculture groups responded with dismay and disappointment to what the Columbus Dispatch described as her “abrupt” departure. The food industry publication The Packer speculated that this could spell “the end of local food at USDA.”
Merrigan is best known for her local foods initiative called Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food, which brought all of the agency’s efforts to improve regional and local food systems under one conceptual roof. It was a modest program in terms of budget — its funding was measured in mere millions while agribusiness reaped tens of billions in subsidies — but it was the first effort of its kind at an agency long known for its support of large commodity growers. (And small as it was, it was revolutionary enough to draw the ire of Republicans.)
Merrigan is also credited with preserving strong standards for the Organic label, championing a national farm-to-school program, funding hoop houses to allow farmers to grow later into the season, and acting as a key player in the effort to improve the foods sold in school vending machines. Jerry Hagstrom has a good wrap-up in National Journal.
But it wasn’t just about her favored policies. Merrigan also provided political cover to her boss, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. She was a counterweight to the administration’s more industry-friendly moves, especially regarding support for biotech seeds. Decisions like Vilsack’s fast-tracking of approval of so-called Agent Orange corn and USDA’s willingness to ignore a court order and allow farmers to keep growing GMO sugar beets infuriated sustainable-agriculture types. But Merrigan’s presence near the top of USDA’s chain of command convinced them that the agency wasn’t totally in the tank to Big Ag.
Merrigan is the latest of a long line of administration officials to depart as Obama begins his second term, and she’s said that the change has been in the works for some time. But given the abruptness of her departure and the brevity of her resignation announcement, some observers, such as Tom Philpott at Mother Jones, are concerned that she’s being forced out by those who oppose her efforts to reorient the USDA, in however small a way, toward more support for local and regional food. Hagstrom even speculates that Vilsack himself may have engineered her departure because “he was jealous of her public profile.”
Merrigan herself made clear that her departure was not “for personal reasons.” She made a strong statement to USDA staff that she disagrees with those who say that women can’t hold top positions in government, a sensitive topic in the Obama administration.
Regardless of Merrigan’s reasons for leaving, there’s no question that Vilsack supports the policies she championed and a more sustainable agriculture in general. And Merrigan insists that she has institutionalized an interest in local and organic farming within USDA. But hers will be big shoes to fill. Merrigan was not just the government’s highest-ranking sustainable-agriculture advocate, but also perhaps the only such person with the bureaucratic expertise to run the day-to-day operations of the enormous $150 billion-a-year, 100,000-employee agency.
Before joining the USDA, Merrigan was a top aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) who was then chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee. There, she helped write the original law that created the USDA Organic program. A few years later, she was brought in by President Bill Clinton to run the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service just as it was beginning to implement the organic law — and she’s credited with saving it from regulatory irrelevance.
There are certainly many people at the state level and even within USDA who could serve in her current position, but there is no one else out there who has the breadth of expertise and experience in sustainable ag and in USDA administrative wonkery wrapped up in one hard-nosed, efficient package. The closest such person I can think of currently at USDA is Miles McEvoy, who runs the National Organic Program, but it’s difficult to imagine that he’s seriously in the running to replace Merrigan.
One is left hoping that Merrigan is right — that there’s enough institutional momentum behind her work that it continues in her absence. But institutions like USDA are far more often driven by inertia from the status quo — and at the USDA, the status quo ain’t exactly local and organically grown. Kathleen Merrigan will be sorely missed.
When Anslee Connell was growing up, her TV was always tuned to Nick at Nite. She was enamored with the fashion of TheMary Tyler Moore Show, I Love Lucy, and Bewitched and spent hours digging through secondhand shops and her grandmother’s closet. But the vintage finds just didn’t fit. “I’ve always been a big girl,” she says. “I remember saying, ‘One day, I’m either going to be able to wear this or I’m going to make something like this.’”
Luckily for full-figured vintage lovers in Austin, Connell not only picked the latter, she decided to make a career out of it. For the past three and a half years, she’s been designing clothing under the moniker Savannah Red. And the 27-year-old is committed to sustainability, with a sizable percentage of her materials coming from upcycled, vintage, or organic sources.
Hanan ExposuresIn her 2012 collection, Connell explored how to make the boxy flapper style of the ’20s work on women with curves.
One of the few plus-sized designers working with a sustainability bent, Connell makes dresses out of old tablecloths and bedsheets and has a soft spot for reworking vintage polyester, as its colors hold much brighter than newer blends. She sums up her philosophy with a phrase she spotted on the side of an apartment building in Switzerland: “Whoever destroys the old does not deserve the new.” Making good use of existing materials and time-tested styles, rather than just chasing trends, gives her designs a timeless edge.
And the old can look damn good. “The ‘50s silhouette really comes in at the waistline and accentuates the natural curves of the female body,” she says. “Today’s styles don’t accentuate curves at all, especially for the plus-sized woman.”
Caleb Bryant MillerConnell.
On the business side, things aren’t always easy. Taxes and profit margins and reality can hit hard. And selling $200 dresses in a world brimming with $5 ware from H&M and Forever 21 will always be an uphill battle. “I’ve been running into so many ‘no’s lately,” she says. Connell works out of her garage and still babysits occasionally to make ends meet.
Fashionably Austin
She hopes to eventually open a shared store as well as reopen her Etsy account for custom orders. While she already makes custom orders for size fours, she plans on continuing to expand her line to other sizes. For now, she gets about two to three custom orders a week and sells her other dresses out of Fabricker, a rare and vintage fabric shop with a pattern library.
But Connell’s true passion — and the area where her work could have a greater, indirect effect on sustainability — is empowerment. “Whenever we are the happiest with ourselves, that’s when we are able to help other people,” she says. “Whenever you have ingrained hatred for some part of you, it can really take over and get in the way of you doing something awesome with your talent. I have an agenda to help women really feel amazing in their own skin.”
“I’ve had people cry at my fittings and say, ‘I’ve never felt so beautiful in my life,’” she says. Connell’s response? “Now that you feel awesome, what are you going to go do?”
Have a comment at the ready about Grist supporting consumption, obesity, etc.? Be kind, rewind, and read these first.
Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The nation’s 13th largest metropolitan area (nudging out Detroit) crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. It snuggles next to the nation’s largest nuclear plant and, having exhausted local sources, it depends on an improbable infrastructure to suck water from the distant (and dwindling) Colorado River.
In Phoenix, you don’t ask: What could go wrong? You ask: What couldn’t?
And that’s the point, really. Phoenix’s multiple vulnerabilities, which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it’s a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming. The urban disasters of our time — New Orleans hit by Katrina, New York City swamped by Sandy — may arise from single storms, but the damage they do is the result of a chain reaction of failures — grids going down, levees failing, backup systems not backing up. As you might expect, academics have come up with a name for such breakdowns: infrastructure failure interdependencies. You wouldn’t want to use it in a poem, but it does catch an emerging theme of our time.
Phoenix’s pyramid of complexities looks shakier than most because it stands squarely in the crosshairs of climate change. The area, like much of the rest of the American Southwest, is already hot and dry; it’s getting ever hotter and drier, and is increasingly battered by powerful storms. Sandy and Katrina previewed how coastal cities can expect to fare as seas rise and storms strengthen. Phoenix pulls back the curtain on the future of inland empires. If you want a taste of the brutal new climate to come, the place to look is where that climate is already harsh, and growing more so — the aptly named Valley of the Sun.
In Phoenix, it’s the convergence of heat, drought, and violent winds, interacting and amplifying each other, that you worry about. Generally speaking, in contemporary society, nothing that matters happens for just one reason, and in Phoenix there are all too many “reasons” primed to collaborate and produce big problems, with climate change foremost among them, juicing up the heat, the drought, and the wind to ever greater extremes, like so many sluggers on steroids. Notably, each of these nemeses, in its own way, has the potential to undermine the sine qua non of modern urban life, the electrical grid, which in Phoenix merits special attention.
If, in summer, the grid there fails on a large scale and for a significant period of time, the fallout will make the consequences of Superstorm Sandy look mild. Sure, people will hunt madly for power outlets to charge their cellphones and struggle to keep their milk fresh, but communications and food refrigeration will not top their list of priorities. Phoenix is an air-conditioned city. If the power goes out, people fry.
In the summer of 2003, a heat wave swept Europe and killed 70,000 people. The temperature in London touched 100 degrees F for the first time since records had been kept, and in portions of France the mercury climbed as high as 104 degrees F. Those temperatures, however, are child’s play in Phoenix, where readings commonly exceed 100 degrees F for more than 100 days a year. In 2011, the city set a new record for days over 110 degrees F: There were 33 of them, more than a month of spectacularly superheated days ushering in a new era.
In flight from the sun
It goes without saying that Phoenix’s desert setting is hot by nature, but we’ve made it hotter. The city is a masonry world, with asphalt and concrete everywhere. The hard, heavy materials of its buildings and roads absorb heat efficiently and give it back more slowly than the naked land. In a sense, the whole city is really a thermal battery, soaking up energy by day and releasing it at night. The result is an “urban heat island,” which, in turn, prevents the cool of the desert night from providing much relief.
Sixty years ago, when Phoenix was just embarking on its career of manic growth, nighttime lows never crept above 90 degrees F. Today such temperatures are commonplace, and the vigil has begun for the first night that doesn’t dip below 100 degrees F. Studies indicate that Phoenix’s urban-heat-island effect may boost nighttime temperatures [PDF] by as much as 10 degrees F. It’s as though the city has doubled down on climate change, finding a way to magnify its most unwanted effects even before it hits the rest of us full blast.
Predictably, the poor suffer most from the heat. They live in the hottest neighborhoods with the least greenery to mitigate the heat-island effect, and they possess the fewest resources for combating high temperatures. For most Phoenicians, however, none of this is more than an inconvenience as long as the AC keeps humming and the utility bill gets paid. When the heat intensifies, they learn to scurry from building to car and into the next building, essentially holding their breath. In those cars, the second thing they touch after the ignition is the fan control for the AC. The steering wheel comes later.
In the blazing brilliance of July and August, you venture out undefended to walk or run only in the half-light of dawn or dusk. The idea for residents of the Valley of the Sun is to learn to dodge the heat, not challenge it.
Heat, however, is a tricky adversary. It stresses everything, including electrical equipment. Transformers, when they get too hot, can fail. Likewise, thermoelectric generating stations, whether fired by coal, gas, or neutrons, become less efficient [PDF] as the mercury soars. And the great hydroelectric dams of the Colorado River, including Glen Canyon, which serves greater Phoenix, won’t be able to supply the “peaking power” they do now if the reservoirs behind them are fatally shrunken by drought, as multiple studies forecast they will be. Much of this can be mitigated with upgraded equipment, smart grid technologies, and redundant systems. But then along comes the haboob.
A haboob is a dust/sand/windstorm, usually caused by the collapse of a thunderstorm cell. The plunging air hits the ground and roils outward, picking up debris across the open desert. As the Arabic name suggests, such storms are native to arid regions, but — although Phoenix is no stranger to storm-driven dust — the term haboob has only lately entered the local lexicon. It seems to have been imported to describe a new class of storms, spectacular in their vehemence, which bring visibility to zero and life to a standstill. They sandblast cars, close the airport, and occasionally cause the lights — and AC — to go out. Not to worry, say the two major utilities serving the Phoenix metroplex, Arizona Public Service and the Salt River Project. And the outages have indeed been brief. So far.
Before Katrina hit, the Army Corps of Engineers was similarly reassuring to the people of New Orleans. And until Superstorm Sandy landed, almost no one worried about storm surges filling the subway tunnels of New York.
Every system, like every city, has its vulnerabilities. Climate change, in almost every instance, will worsen them. The beefed-up, juiced-up, greenhouse-gassed, overheated weather of the future will give us haboobs of a sort we can’t yet imagine, packed with ever greater amounts of energy. In all likelihood, the emergence of such storms as a feature of Phoenix life results from an overheating environment, abetted by the loose sand and dust of abandoned farmland (which dried up when water was diverted to the city’s growing subdivisions).
Water, water, everywhere (but not for long)
In dystopic portraits of Phoenix’s unsustainable future, water — or rather the lack of it — is usually painted as the agent of collapse. Indeed, the metropolitan area, a jumble of jurisdictions that includes Scottsdale, Glendale, Tempe, Mesa, Sun City, Chandler, and 15 other municipalities, long ago made full use of such local rivers as the Salt, Verde, and Gila. Next, people sank wells and mined enough groundwater to lower the water table by 400 feet.
Sometimes the land sank, too. Near some wells it subsided by 10 feet or more. All along, everyone knew that the furious extraction of groundwater couldn’t last, so they fixed their hopes on a new bonanza called the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a river-sized, open-air canal supported by an elaborate array of pumps, siphons, and tunnels that would bring Colorado River water across the breadth of Arizona to Phoenix and Tucson.
The CAP came on line in the early 1990s and today is the engine of Arizona’s growth. Unfortunately, in order to win authorization and funding to build it, state officials had to make a bargain with the devil, which in this case turned out to be California. Arizona’s delegation in the House of Representatives was tiny, California’s was huge, and its representatives jealously protected their longstanding stranglehold on the Colorado River. The concession California forced on Arizona was simple: It had to agree that its CAP water rights would take second place to California’s claims.
This means one thing: Once the inevitable day comes when there isn’t enough water to go around, the CAP will absorb the shortage down to the last drop before California even begins to turn off its faucets.
A raw deal for Arizona? You bet, but not exactly the end of the line. Arizona has other “more senior” rights to the Colorado, and when the CAP begins to run dry, you may be sure that the masters of the CAP will pay whatever is necessary to lease those older rights and keep the 330-mile canal flowing. Among their targets will be water rights belonging to Indian tribes at the western edge of the state along the lower reaches of the river. The cost of buying tribal water will drive the rates consumers pay for water in Phoenix sky-high, but they’ll pay it because they’ll have to.
Longer term, the Colorado River poses issues that no amount of tribal water can resolve. Beset by climate change, overuse, and drought, the river and its reservoirs, according to various researchers, may decline [PDF] to the point that water fails to pass Hoover Dam. In that case, the CAP would dry up, but so would the Colorado Aqueduct which serves greater Los Angeles and San Diego, as well as the All-American Canal, on which the factory farms of California’s Imperial and Coachella valleys depend. Irrigators and municipalities downstream in Mexico would also go dry. If nothing changes in the current order of things, it is expected that the possibility of such a debacle could loom in little more than a decade.
The preferred solution to this crisis among the water mavens of the lower Colorado is augmentation, which means importing more water into the Colorado system to boost native supplies. A recently discussed grandiose scheme to bail out the Colorado’s users with a pipeline from the Mississippi River failed to pass the straight-face test and was shot down by then-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar.
Meanwhile, the obvious expedient of cutting back on water consumption finds little support in thirsty California, which will watch the CAP go dry before it gets serious about meaningful system-wide conservation.
Burning uplands
Phoenicians who want to escape water worries, heat waves, and haboobs have traditionally sought refuge in the cool green forests of Arizona’s uplands, or at least they did until recently. In 2002, the Rodeo-Chediski fire consumed 469,000 acres of pine and mixed conifer on the Mogollon Rim, not far from Phoenix. It was an ecological holocaust that no one expected to see surpassed. Only nine years later, in 2011, the Wallow fire picked up the torch, so to speak, and burned across the Rim all the way to the New Mexico border and beyond, topping out at 538,000 charred acres.
Now, nobody thinks such fires are one-off flukes. Diligent modeling of forest response to rising temperatures and increased moisture stress suggests, in fact, that these two fires were harbingers of worse to come. By mid-century, according to a paper by an A team of Southwestern forest ecologists, the “normal” stress on trees will equal that of the worst megadroughts in the region’s distant paleohistory, when most of the trees in the area simply died.
Compared to Phoenix’s other heat and water woes, the demise of Arizona’s forests may seem like a side issue, whose effects would be noticeable mainly in the siltation of reservoirs and the destabilization of the watersheds on which the city depends. But it could well prove a regional disaster. Consider, then, heat, drought, windstorms, and fire as the four horsemen of Phoenix’s Apocalypse. As it happens, though, this potential apocalypse has a fifth horseman as well.
Rebecca Solnit has written eloquently of the way a sudden catastrophe — an earthquake, hurricane, or tornado — can dissolve social divisions and cause a community to cohere, bringing out the best in its citizenry. Drought and heat waves are different. You don’t know that they have taken hold until you are already in them, and you never know when they will end. The unpleasantness eats away at you. It corrodes your state of mind. You have lots of time to meditate on the deficiencies of your neighbors, which loom larger the longer the crisis goes on.
Drought divides people, and Phoenix is already a divided place — notoriously so, thanks to the brutal antics of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. In Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City, Andrew Ross offers a dismal portrait of contemporary Phoenix — of a city threatened by its particular brand of local politics and economic domination, shaped by more than the usual quotient of prejudice, greed, class insularity, and devotion to raw power.
It is a truism that communities that do not pull together fail to surmount their challenges. Phoenix’s are as daunting as any faced by an American city in the new age of climate change, but its winner-take-all politics (out of which has come Arizona’s flagrantly repressive anti-immigration law), combined with the fragmentation of the metro area into nearly two dozen competing jurisdictions, essentially guarantee that, when the worst of times hit, common action and shared sacrifice will remain as insubstantial as a desert mirage. When one day the U-Haul vans all point away from town and the people of the Valley of the Sun clog the interstates heading for greener, wetter pastures, more than the brutal heat of a new climate paradigm will be driving them away. The breakdown of cooperation and connectedness will spur them along, too.
One day, some of them may look back and think of the real estate crash of 2007-2008 and the recession that followed with fond nostalgia. The city’s economy was in the tank, growth had stalled, and for a while business-as-usual had nothing usual about it. But there was a rare kind of potential. That recession might have been the last best chance for Phoenix and other go-go Sunbelt cities to reassess their lamentably unsustainable habits and re-organize themselves, politically and economically, to get ready for life on the front burner of climate change. Land use, transportation, water policies, building codes, growth management — you name it — might all have experienced a healthy overhaul. It was a chance no one took. Instead, one or several decades from now, people will bet on a surer thing: They’ll take the road out of town.
I’ve known for a while now that the real action on sustainability is happening in cities — other than Washington, D.C., that is — but a few months back, it came to my attention that many of the people leading the charge are women, often young ones.
While higher-up positions in city government are still skewed in favor of men, sustainability directors seem to be more evenly split between the genders. Because most sustainability director positions have been created in the last 10 years, there isn’t the same good-ol’-boy hierarchy in place. And due to the fact that the field is so young, so are many of its practitioners. Take, for example, Katherine Gajewski, who was just 29 years old when Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter asked her to head up the city’s sustainability department.
Inspired by the women who are leading the sustainability movement in cities big and small, I created Knope and change, a series named after Leslie Knope, the main character in the popular television show, Parks and Recreation. Knope, played by the estimable Amy Poehler, is a mid-level bureaucrat working in her city’s parks department. She loves her city, works tirelessly to improve it, and never lets bureaucracy discourage her.
Over the course of the past five months, I found a lot of Knope-ish energy in the burgeoning field of urban sustainability. Although there are still female sustainability directors out there deserving of a profile, my compatriots and I felt 15 interviews were enough, so with this post, I’m wrapping it up.
I realize how lucky I’ve been to write this series — talking to passionate women from around the country was like taking a carbon-free trip every week to a new city. I wish every young writer could do the same. I wanted to share a bit of what I’ve learned, in case you haven’t read and reflected on every piece. (Of course, you’ve read every piece. Right? Right?)
THE THINGS I LEARNED FROM THEM
1.When you’re building a new field, you need all the help you can get.
“Sustainability” is such a broad term — and the resulting city policies and programs are just as wide. A sustainability director must be versed in local food, energy efficiency, waste management, and public transportation. “You have to be ADHD” to do the job, jokes Oak Park, Ill., Sustainability Manager K.C. Poulos.
Add anemic city budgets and the burden of having a new, sometimes politically controversial, position to the mix, and it’s a lot of pressure. As a result, sustainability directors built up a sharing network, the Urban Sustainability Directors Network. Members compare notes on what is or isn’t working in their cities, share plans, and even use regional networks to approach utilities or test strategies for communicating with their communities.
After all, when it comes to sustainability in municipal government, “We’re all making it up as we go along,” says long-time Minneapolis Sustainability Director Gayle Prest. The resulting camaraderie, energy, and mutual respect is rare to see in municipal government. Several of the interviewees described meeting Prest at a USDN conference in words and tones typically reserved for describing run-ins with rockstars.
2.To get anything done, you have to tailor your approach to your community.
Prest uses the term “Minnesota nice” to describe her approach to introducing new programs and interacting with her community. Minneapolis’ bikeshare is even named “Nice Ride.” Salt Lake’s Vicki Bennett uses Mormonism’s roots as a sustainable, independent community to break through with religious conservatives. Susanne Torriente, of Fort Lauderdale, plans for rising sea levels by pointing out recent flooding, rather than rehashing the climate change debate in polarized Florida. Lauren Riga argues that sustainability can be an important tool to turn abandoned, apocalyptic Gary, Ind. into a lauded example of urban renewal. Lawrence, Kan., Sustainability Director Eileen Horn uses local sports rivalries to convince otherwise-conservative Kansans to try energy efficiency programs.
3.While cities are carrying the torch on sustainability, they can only go so far.
Austin may have a high hip factor and cool new eco-districts, but if Texas continues to dry up, so will the city’s water supply. San Francisco might be bringing down greenhouse gas emissions and shooting for zero waste by 2020, but it won’t matter much if a good chunk of the city is underwater by the end of the century. And even the greenest cities have a long, long way to go. More on that in a minute.
4.Don’t count out people from small towns.
Some of my favorite interviewees were from smaller cities. I’ll never forget Maggie Ullman, of Asheville, N.C., and the groggy chickens. (A resident called to complain that the brighter, LED streetlights in front of her place were keeping her flock up at night. Ullman talked to the woman’s neighbors and turned that streetlight off.) Or K.C. Poulos and her experiments in trying to create a versatile, storm-resistant electricity grid.
While sustainability directors in major cities manage staffs that can number in the hundreds — especially if they are in charge of the waste department — small city departments are tiny. This means that sustainability directors have to be scrappy and buckle down on a handful of issues that are important to them. Plus, they are automatically closer to their communities. Which brings me to my next major lessons.
THE THINGS I LEARNED FROM YOU
1.Read the comments.
There’s a rule that many in online journalism espouse: Don’t read the comments. There’s even a Twitter account by that name that offers justifications for never taking a peek below the fold. Due to the openness of the web, comment sections can brim with racism, sexism, and folks who are the reader equivalent of overzealous Yelp reviewers. Trolls abound. But despite all this, I read the comments. Every one.
When you’re a 25-year-old still struggling to hit her journalistic stride, this can be terrifying. It’s the sort of thing that makes you stumble out of bed at 6 a.m. to make sure you haven’t made a fool of Grist’s good name — and your parents and your editors as well.
But I’m glad I did. While I wouldn’t say it’s gotten easier, it has shown me the value of an engaged community.
2.There’s always more to learn.
Take long-time commenter Swells22. Swells (I can call you Swells, right?) commented on many of my pieces. His comments often opened my eyes to an aspect of the city I hadn’t even thought of. After reading my article on Norfolk, Va., and its attempts to fight back sea-level rise, he pointed out that the city is built on marshes and so “no matter how much greenhouse gases are stopped, Norfolk will continue to slip into the mud.”
Many of you weighed in on missing pieces of my coverage. For example, Burlington, Vt.’s sustainability director pointed out the issues that stem from trying to plan public transportation in light of low-vacancy rates and sprawl. Commenter ltf wrote:
One thing I always found disturbing about Vermont, and much of New England, was how using aggressive zoning and permitting processes, all the prime areas with decent economic opportunities were reserved for the affluent and the “riff raff” were relegated to the boondocks with long commutes. The social and environmental costs of these practices offset a lot of their liberalism. Burlington does not ‘struggle’ with a low vacancy rate, they deliberately enacted policies which created it.
3.Even the greenest cities have a long, long way to go.
If we all dressed in repurposed burlap coffee bags and stood outside our houses to pass groceries and other stuff to our neighbors bucket-brigade style instead of all of this wasteful traveling, we’d have hardly any impact on the planet! I get pretty sick of hearing how cool we are while we cut bus routes and build streetcar lines costing hundreds of millions of dollars, but travel at walking speed.
And hmnpwr:
This is truly a tallest midget contest. Perhaps we should call PDX the least unsustainable U.S. city. … Because of the abundant hydroelectric resources in the Pacific Northwest, the single largest contributor to climate change in this region is personal automobile use. If PDX can’t do any better than the rest of the nation does, then it should be ashamed. Some leader.
Snarkist sums it up succinctly:
Its not that we are so great, we just suck a little less than everyone else.
GOING FORWARD
In doing these interviews, I sometimes ended up feeling a bit too much like a self-aware version of Parks and Recreation‘s Perd Hapley:
But as Leslie Knope shows us, doing your job well means knowing your community. It means listening to feedback and not letting yourself make excuses.
Knope describes feedback in heated open meetings as “People caring loudly at me.” And it’s true: You learn from your community, even when it stings. That goes for the women who are leading the movement toward more sustainable cities — and those of us who write about them as well.
If you are smart, passionate, creative, committed to delivering results, and looking for an opportunity to play a role in helping businesses successfully transform for sustainability, you may want to consider joining our team!
Founded in 2004 and incorporated in 2006, Sustainable Life Media is home for business professionals looking to build new value and competitive advantage by innovating more sustainable strategies, practices and products. We bring you top stories related to the what, who and how of environmental and social innovation, and help you connect with thought leaders, peers, partners and solutions providers that can help you quickly reach your goals.
The Sales Research Intern will work directly with the sales team to identify companies not currently in our CRM database that would be good prospects for our non-attendee product offerings. The position will report directly to the Director of Business Development and will work 2 days per week in our San Francisco Office.
General Duties and Responsibilities
• Use own initiative + “lead mines†passed along by SB team to search for sales prospects
• Research the current sustainability-related initiatives and activities of prospective clients to aid sales team in positioning client presentations and sales strategies
• Search for appropriate/best contact information for prospects
• Enter all info in to SB’s CRM system according to company protocol
• Report results weekly to sales team
Who you are
• Passionate about what’s happening in sustainable business innovation
• Exceptionally organized, detail oriented and professional
• Proven web-based research skills
• Demonstrated workflow and organizational skills
• Proficiency with Microsoft Excel, Word, and Google Docs
Preferred Qualifications
• CRM Experience (Salesforce, SugarCRM, etc.)
• Background in market analysis or sales prospecting
What we can offer:
In addition to the opportunity to plug in with a terrific team of media and sustainable business experts, this position offers the opportunity to meet and interface with some of the top innovators on the global sustainable business landscape and complimentary admission to the Sustainable Brands '13 Conference in San Diego in June (a $2395 value). Access can also be granted simultaneously for work on class projects.
Please send your resume via email, along with a cover letter detailing your interest in this field and in this role, as well as how you feel you can contribute.Submissions without targeted cover letter will not be considered.
If you are smart, passionate, creative, committed to delivering results, and looking for an opportunity to play a role in helping businesses successfully transform for sustainability, you may want to consider joining our team!
Founded in 2004 and incorporated in 2006, Sustainable Life Media is home for business professionals looking to build new value and competitive advantage by innovating more sustainable strategies, practices and products. We bring you top stories related to the what, who and how of environmental and social innovation, and help you connect with thought leaders, peers, partners and solutions providers that can help you quickly reach your goals.
As a Sales Associate for Sustainable Brands, your primary goal will be to maintain and close both new and existing sales accounts, contributing significantly to company revenue goals. Areas of sales include live event sponsorships, exhibit hall sales, digital media sponsorships, solution provider memberships, and other products developed/identified. We are looking for a values-aligned team member to fill this role who has a solid understanding of the sales process, the corporate sustainability space, and who can deliver results in line with our brand promise.
General Duties and Responsibilities
• Lead generation – Enter potential leads into corporate CRM database
• Research the mission and current sustainability initiatives of new and existing accounts
• Position company offerings to address current and potential client needs
• Manage new and existing relationships through regular email and telephone contact; identify areas of mutual benefit
• Track all communications, sales opportunities, and contact info in company CRM database
• Be available to travel to attend company events and other live events as needed
• Help identify new possible revenue streams and work with team to generate related products
Who you are
• Passionate about what’s happening in sustainable business innovation
• Exceptionally organized, detail oriented and professional
• Strong communications skills – ability to present the brand and business effectively to clients
• A thorough relationship manager – many of our clients are multi-product and long-term
• Proven ability to close in a high-volume sales environment
• Proficiency with Microsoft Excel, Word, and Google Docs
Please send your resume, along with a cover letter detailing your interest in this field, role, and how you feel you can contribute. Resume's without cover letters will not be considered.
Institute for Sustainable Communities/Montpelier, VT
Program Officer – Country Support & Climate
The Program Officer (CSC PO) will split his/her time between two main task areas:
1. Support Bangladesh Country Program (50%)
2. Support the development and implementation of climate programs. (50%)
The Program Officer is located in Montpelier, VT. Some travel may be required.
Organization Description
ISC is an innovative, international development organization that has successfully worked for over 21 years to give citizens and the organizations that support them the tools, skills, and resources they need to improve lives and build a more peaceful, stable world. Our current areas of programmatic growth include strengthening democratic institutions and citizenship in transition countries; helping communities in the U.S. and Asia become more resource efficient and transition to low-carbon economy; and supporting sustainable community development – particularly in areas recovering from natural disasters or that are vulnerable to climate disruption. Founded by Madeleine M. Kunin in 1991, ISC is based in Vermont, a state that values grassroots democracy and environmental stewardship. ISC has an office in Washington, DC, and international offices in China and Serbia.
Key Responsibilities
Country Program Support
The Program Officer will act as the main contact point at the ISC headquarters for the ISC Bangladesh country program. Key duties include:
• Act as main liaison between ISC Bangladesh staff and ISC Vermont staff. Transmit and direct requests related to administration, human resources, finance, etc. and ensure that these tasks/requests are completed in a timely and professional manner.
• Ensure that all administrative processes (travel requests, visa processing, trip planning, donor and consultant contracts, etc) are completed professionally and in a timely manner.
• Support the preparation of all narrative donor reports.
• Assist with the development and tracking of project budgets
• Track project implementation and be aware of key project activities, milestones, key indicators.
• Prepare briefing reports, brochures, and other communication materials on ISC Bangladesh projects.
• Visit country program at least once a year.
Climate Program Support
The Program Officer will support the development and implementation of international climate programming which may include the design, planning and execution of climate leadership academies (CLAs) and other capacity and network building activities.
• Participate as a member of a program team in the development, implementation and support of ISC climate programs. Programs focus on climate action issues, urban development and ecosystem services.
• Research and prepare case studies and resource guides.
• Work collaboratively with partners in the development and delivery of peer to peer training opportunities in a workshop setting. Conduct phone call interviews with potential program participants.
• Carry out all logistical planning necessary to implement a large workshop type event in another country (participant travel, hotel planning, food, visas, venue setup and planning, agenda development, speaker logistics, etc.)
• Assist in the dissemination of program materials to participants
• Assist with the development and implementation of communications strategies and materials
• Provide administrative support to as necessary
• Other duties as assigned
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
• Ability to proficiently manage multiple tasks simultaneously.
• High attention to detail.
• Excellent interpersonal, oral, and written communication skills
• Strong research and analytical skills
• Strong work ethic, personal integrity
• Ability to work effectively with diverse people from different communities and cultures
• Ability to work effectively both independently, and collaboratively as a positive and contributing team member
• Flexibility and willingness to adapt to changing program priorities
• Ability to prioritize work assignments appropriately and manage pressure of conflicting demands
• Good skills in Microsoft Office suite, data processing, e-mail, internet browsers
Qualifications
• Bachelor’s degree in related area. Master’s in relevant field preferred.
• Technical expertise in urban development or climate issues preferred.
• International experience in urban development or climate programming preferred.
• Demonstrated strong writing skills.
• Two to five years of relevant professional experience.
• Commitment to the ISC mission and goals.
Please send your cover letter and resume with your last name, first initial and “Program Officer CSC†in the subject line to jobs@iscvt.org.
Applications are reviewed as received. No phone calls, please. Only finalists will be contacted.
Illinois Sustainable Technolgoy Center/Champaign, IL
The Obama administration is losing its most powerful supporter of local and organic foods. Kathleen Merrigan, the No. 2 official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 
Sustainable Life Media/San Francisco, CA
Sustainable Life Media/San Francisco, CA
Institute for Sustainable Communities/Montpelier, VT