People, Businesses and Organizations of the Four Corners Working Toward Putting A Best Carbon Footprint Forward
To play off a cliché
- green is the new black.
As the debate about global warming heats up, the word "green" has become more than just a primary color. And it has become more than just an adjective. It has transformed into a ubiquitous verb that often doesn't even need an explanation. "Go green" is now a part of the casual lexicon of people everywhere, especially for those who are paying particular attention to the ever-changing world climate and the impending fallout from years upon years of living our lives somewhat disconnected to what we are putting into the air and taking from the land. Being green is also a political theory.
Global-warming naysayers aside, it's hard to turn anywhere these days and not at least see that word being used to call attention to efforts worldwide to lessen humans' impact on our environment. And worldwide is not an understatement. There is green cuisine, green business, green living, green building, green candidates, green voting, green cartoons, green-collar jobs, green travel and greenwashing (reserved for the companies who package products with the claim of being green but really are not).
The debate about how much or how little our climate is changing because of human behavior seems to be only in the early stages, bringing a cast of characters to the stage in a multi-act play that yet has no ending. But that's precisely what people are trying to avoid: The End.
"The End" might be overstating it just a tad. It doesn't mean people who are taking stock of an ever-changing environment and adjusting their practices in accordance are a bunch of apocalyptic-fearing, conspiracy-believing, Marxist radicals whose every move has socialist undertones. (Though there is a contingency that believes that, to be sure; but let's count them at this point as the minority.) It does, however, mean people who are part of the green movement - to any degree - are aware that the environment and Earth can handle only so much waste, pollution and consumption of resources. Moving on without regard to recognizing that there is a limit to resources is exactly what the green movement is trying to halt.
Plight of the environment
Heeding the warnings of a changing environment is not a new concept. Until the words "global warming" became a widespread phrase in the last half-decade or so, people who worked to lessen the human impact on the environment were doing so without an umbrella buzzword. Even the popular children's stories author Dr. Seuss taught lessons about it in his popular book The Lorax, released in 1971, which is a fable about industrialized society and human impact on the environment. It became a symbol of ecological awareness, especially about tree thinning in forests. At the time, The Lorax was so controversial that some schools and libraries banned it because of its anti-forestry message.
That was then. Now, some 37 years later, The Lorax has lost some of its controversial sting and blended in with mainstream sentiment about the environment and recognition of finite resources. The world is beginning its shift toward eco-awareness, spurred on by even the United Nations, whose Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called out to business leaders last month to help shape the world's economic future by investing in low-carbon markets and enter the "age of green economics."
To simplify the definition of the green movement, it aims to offset greenhouse gas emissions - the often-harmful toxins from primarily coal, natural gas and oil - that foul the air and lead to a changing environment. Some of the consequences are higher global temperatures, disappearing biodiversity, rising sea levels, extreme and unpredictable weather, decreasing crop/food production and more.
The threats are real enough to many people, businesses and organizations that a myriad of efforts in the Four Corners are under way, from carbon offsets to renewable energy, to sustainable initiatives to recyclable goods. Each effort is having a ripple effect. And it's taking less convincing for people to get on board with the green movement, especially in a resource-rich region that boasts some of the country's most famous and loved landscapes, communities and recreation opportunities. For those who are participants, it hasn't been a challenging decision make. It comes down to a unifying goal: global salvation.
Wind for power
"It's the right thing to do," says Moab Mayor Dave Sakrison.
Moab is one of the leading towns in the region to take the green movement as far as economically feasible. In 2004, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency named the popular town in southeast Utah the first Green Power Community in the agency's Green Power Partnership. The program encourages businesses, residences and organizations to use renewable energy. Back then, Moab was offsetting about 3 percent of its power usage and about 5 percent of the town's electricity customers were using pollution-free wind energy. That began with the town started using wind power for about 50 percent of its electricity usage.
"At the time, we realized we live in a special area as far as the environment is concerned," Sakrison says. "We knew that to keep it special, we had to do something for our community and for our world."
Since then, the demand and participation has grown. Today, about 4 percent of the area's electricity demand uses wind power and 14 percent to 15 percent of the town - residents, businesses - use wind power. Quantified, this means the town is preventing 5.5 million pounds of carbon dioxide from being emitted into the air. Sakrison says the town's pioneering efforts have exceeded his expectations. Other notables in Moab are that The Times Independent, the local newspaper, is 100 percent powered by wind and so is public radio station KZMU. The annual Moab Folk Festival also uses wind-generated electricity to put on its multi-day music event.
Sakrison says Moab continues to move toward greater sustainability. "We have to continue looking at our future and peak oil so that we know how we are going to transition economically and ecologically when the paradigm shift hits," he explains.
Looking to the future and potential fallout from unabated resource consumption is often the driving force for making substantial green modifications, says Kristin Carpenter-Ogden, owner of Verde Public Relations and Consulting Services in Durango, Colo. In 2006, Carpenter-Ogden changed the name of her public relations firm from KCPR to Verde after a calculated decision to embrace all things green.
"When you have kids, you start to think about how all of this will impact their lives," she says.
That, coupled with a long passion for environment, prompted Carpenter-Ogden to shift the name and focus of her company. She explains that in the early 1990s while in college, she was a "knee-jerk environmentalist" who separated her worldview from her conservative family's and felt empowered by an awareness to contribute to a better world. Her familiarity with the well-known Conservation Alliance, a group of outdoor industry companies and started by big guns like REI, Patagonia, The North Face and Kelty, opened the doors for Carpenter-Ogden to be a green devotee.
Since her company's shift, she has reached out to the media to help it print stories about causes supported by outdoor companies. The Publish for a Cause initiative intends to be a bridge between conservation and sustainable efforts and the media that serves people interested in causes.
Buying power
Early on in her public relations, one of her clients was outdoor clothier prAna. She says the company's progressive and assertive sustainability practices served as a model for her work with the outdoor industry, and, to a degree, her company name change and focus.
"I was infected by prAna's enthusiasm," Carpenter-Ogden says.
Besides producing high-end products made from organic cotton, natural fibers and recycled materials, the California company is extending its reach by helping small independently owned outdoor retail shops throughout the country, including the Four Corners. prAna's Natural Power Initiative rewards its retail partners that do a certain level of sales by paying to offset 100 percent of a company's energy use. It does this by buying renewable energy - wind - through certificates. In turn, this pays for electricity use in 400 of its partner stores in the country, including 10 in the Four Corners.
Durango's Pine Needle Mountaineering is one of those stores. Its sales of prAna products translate into the store being carbon neutral in its use of power. That adds to the store's other efforts as part of the green movement, such as selling recyclable and recycled products, clothing made from organic cotton and making purchasing decisions based on perpetuating sustainability.
The store also is a member of the highly regarded Grassroots Outdoor Alliance, which is a collection of independent outdoor shops focused on sustainability. Keith Roush, owner of Pine Needle, says his store has been a member of the alliance since its inception because its customers are those who profit most from a conserved, clean environment.
"We are the people who are going out there to enjoy the outdoors," says Roush. "So it makes sense that we are the ones who preserve it."
Being part of the alliance sends more than just a message to the community a store serves. Roush says it also helps this network of stores use leverage when doing business with companies that want to sell products in those outlets. It spreads the message. Roush says Outdoor Business Magazine recently named the Top 25 outdoor retail shops in the country, and 16 of them were Grassroots Alliance members (Pine Needle included). With the recognition comes power.
"We are able to ask companies to do a bit more," he says. "We can ask them to use natural fiber or recycled or recyclable products."
The outdoor industry is one of the many worldwide that have been at the forefront of exposing the message and need for supporting the green movement. Beyond organic cotton, today's outdoor recreationists can choose to buy green gear: bamboo snowboards, hemp surfboards, low-impact reactive dyed T-shirts, remnant wood veneer skates. Sometimes it's as invisible of an impact as using veggie oil in cars like Moab Cyclery does in its 15-passenger shuttle vans.
One of the Four Corners most forward-looking and leading sustainable companies is Cortez-based pack maker Osprey Packs Inc. Osprey's director of marketing Gareth Martins says the company was on the green movement trail long in the 1990s, before being green became "vogue." The company has used recycled plastic in its products and printed catalogs on recycle paper. As Osprey has grown, so has the company's green factor. In fact, the company created a Green Team a few years ago that is works on boosting its sustainable practices - with its products and the company's operations. Osprey's ReSource series incorporates PET fabric composed entirely of recycled soda bottles and other recycled materials. The company saw its sustainable efforts rewarded earlier this year when REI named Osprey its Vendor Partner of the Year.
The payoff comes from all sources, but especially from customer feedback Martins says, who says it is "overwhelmingly positive."
"It's important to remember that we are a technical pack company - we believe we build the best product for carrying your favorite gear and we like that to be at the forefront of our customers mind as they consider purchasing an Osprey," he adds. "The fact that we can back up the satisfaction of their purchase with things like giving back to the causes that protect our environment or our recycled material ReSource Series makes us a great choice for the responsible consumer."
Green up
The outdoor industry reaps rewards of green efforts from other industries. After all, the climate has significant influence on how much time people spend outdoors. Other businesses are working in concert to sustain a healthy environment. If you've gone skiing recently, you may have had the option of paying a couple of extra dollars to offset carbon dioxide emissions from the resort. The famous SkiGreen Tags are easy ways for the environmentally conscious to exert little effort for a cumulative big payoff.
There also are other ways to buy carbon offsets. Ian Barrowclough recently founded CarbonZero, a Durango-based carbon offset company that lets residents in Southwest Colorado buy carbon credits. CarbonZero also works with local land owners to plant trees - the more trees the more carbon that can be removed from the air as the tree stores cellulose in the trunk, branches, leave and roots before spitting out as clean oxygen into the air.
A few extra dollars at the Telluride Blues & Brews Festival achieves something similar. The "Be Green Ticket" essentially buys 250 kWh of renewable energy made from sources like wind and bio-energy. The ticket helps offset an estimated 341 pounds of carbon dioxide created by activities like driving a car to the festival.
With collective greening efforts, there are needs for capturing the literal energy. In Espanola, N.M., a new project has just received funding that organizers hope will beat global competitors to the punch. In mid-March, the New Mexico Legislature appropriated $9 million for Northern New Mexico College's Solar Energy Research Park and Academy. SERPA, as it is known, will serve as a research clearinghouse looking at creating places to store energy as it is created. Matthew Ellis with Santa Fe Green Business Network, says SERPA and working partners want to bridge the green divide between Santa Fe and the less-affluent town of Espanola by boosting its economy while grabbing exceptional talent from scientists who may be losing jobs at the struggling Los Alamos National Laboratory, a premiere nuclear weapons lab.
Ellis says with greening energy efforts moving rapidly, the "weak heel" in the entire process is adequate storage. "We're trying to solve this issue," he says. "The race is on globally. In Espanola, this is huge because of the possibility of attracting the scale and scope of businesses to address storage."
A matter of values
This story includes only a smattering of the green efforts of companies, individuals and organizations in the Four Corners. Lassoing all of them in one story is impossible. Ten years ago, that may have been different.
We are in full swing of a new - and some say radical - movement, conscious residents and consumers are given many more choices for adding to or taking away from a changing global climate and economy. They are able to do it without being labeled as unthinking environmentalists, tree huggers, doomsayers or socialist radicals. Those terms likely will exist among a contingent of skeptics.
Still, for all the reasons people give for greening up their world, the future is the unifying premise. Whether that is to make sure there is future skiing or future caches of energy to run your dishwasher, it extends beyond the current generation and into the next. Verde P.R.'s Carpenter-Ogden wants her young kids to breathe the clean air and climb the preserved rock formations she did. Santa Fean Ellis wants a safe and healthy playground for his son's children to have fun as he did when his father was doing the interview for this story.
No one has said he or she, or his or her company, does it for the bottom line of profits. Osprey's Martins says it's difficult to quantify the company's yield directly because of its sustainability platform.
"As (sustainability) is an area that is proving to be front and center in consumer decisions in a wide range of companies from the likes of Johnson and Johnson to many of our partners in the outdoor industry, it seems intuitive to add to our corporate social responsibility platform as a way to help increase our bottom line," he says.
Ellis is a realist about how ethics trump earnings.
"You don't make a lot of money saving the world," he says. "In the end, it's a moral question."
Amy Maestas is a contributing editor of Inside/Outside Southwest magazine. She can be reached at amy@insideoutsidemag.com
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How Green is Your World?
While there are numerous efforts by organizations, companies and individuals in the Four Corners to green our region, going beyond the geographical confines is easy and equally beneficial. The efforts have a cumulative effect.
Here are tools to help green up your larger world.
EcoScorecard for Corporations
Want to see how serious corporations are about changing the climate? This online tool can also be used with your cell phone. Created by Stonyfield Farms CEO Gary Hirshberg, the organization takes a watchful eye on the big guys like Apple, Starbucks, Nike, McDonald's, U.S. Postal Service and more. There are two ways to get this information: Visit the organization's Web site and search for the company's rating, or use your cell phone to send a text message to the organization and request an immediate rating of the productmaker or organization.
climatecounts.org
Big feet?
To truly find out how full of bad (greenhouse) gas you are, an online calculator allows you to measure your carbon footprint. The three-step process lets you see how much carbon your everyday living is creating, teaches you how to reduce your carbon emissions and gives you ideas about how to offset them (such as buying carbon credits). Carbon footprints are the measure of how much carbon dioxide your activities produce in the environment.
carbonfootprint.com
Regional impacts
The Four Corners has several American Indian tribes that are both targets and solvers of the energy world. A group known as NativeEnergy helps businesses and individuals build American Indian, farmer-owned, community-based renewable-energy projects that create social, economic and environmental benefits. The organization has helped build more than a dozen projects that have changed carbon output.
nativeenergy.com
Little things, big changes
Can't handle the idea of radically changing your environment and habits? Some of the easiest ways to reduce carbon pollution are small efforts. A Web site called Ideal Bite helps you identify those that are quick and easy. Visit the site to get daily tips (or have them e-mailed to you) and discover the small bites.
idealbite.com
Shiny, happy green people
MySpace, Facebook, online dating sites - they all have successfully pulled an array of people around the world together and planted them in one place with one goal. The Web site GenGreen does the same. Here, you are able to join an online community by creating your own profile, groups, photos and even blogs - and then share them with the rest of the like-minded people or organizations.
gengreen.org |
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Shrink the Footprint of Your Shopping Spree
One role in the green movement is the practice of buying local products. Across the Four Corners, organizations are working to urge residents of their communities to support independently owned and operated businesses, especially those who make their own products.
When the Santa Fe Alliance organized in 2003, the group focused mostly on getting people to shop at local stores. The intent, says Executive Director Vicki Pozzebon, was to create a strong local economy. A few years later, the Alliance evolved into educating buyers that local support also had a profound impact on the environment.
"This was the next logical step," Pozzebon says. "We realized that you can't have one without the other."
Besides boosting a community's economy, buying local helps reduce carbon emissions borne from transporting goods, overflowing landfills with nonorganic or recyclable waste, less-expensive goods and more. Santa Fe Alliance is also pushing its Farm to Restaurant Project, which pushes its restaurant members to buy and serve food that is locally farmed. That project, along with the Alliance's original objective, has been successful enough to make the group one of the largest such organizations in the country. To date, Pozzebon says the alliance has 600 members.
Local products, especially food items, typically are free of chemicals, pesticides, hormones and antibiotics - all of which green-movement followers say harm the environment and add to the ongoing (but oft-debated) global-warming issue.
Several organizations in the Four Corners are part of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, or BALLE, which is a national group that believes in the power of local independent business. The end goal is vitality.
"A sustainable business equals a sustainable economy," says Kristin Carpenter-Ogden, owner of Verde Public Relations and Consulting Services in Durango, Colo. "You can't create a positive change if you are out of business."
- Amy Maestas |