San Francisco hosted the West Coast Green building conference last week at the historic Fort Mason Center. The conference theme, “you are brilliant,” fell flat when it came to integrating efficient transportation and bicycle parking into an event that waves a bright green banner. This lack of brilliance was a talking point among participants, many of whom missed the key note speakers while they waited for the shuttle bus to arrive.
As one of the participants subject to this oversight, I got to thinking about the process of implementing a whole system approach into our sustainability goals. If the green conference event coordinators couldn’t schedule more than one bus or organize a bike valet service for those participants who want to reduce their carbon output, what hope do we have that our urban planners will be able to integrate sustainable systems into our metropolitan landscape?
Integrative planning models like those implemented in Curitiba, Brazil simply won’t fly in this country mainly because the planning bureaucracy is locked into a model of segmented incremental change. Transportation, city planning, building and water agencies operate as their own specialized sectors and departments that work largely in isolation. There are elements of collaboration and public input but at the end of the day the interests of the individual departments, their political power and funding sources trump cooperative efforts. The dominate professional mindsets would rather have small changes in all areas instead of coming together to radically shift to sustainable integrative planning.
What the West Coast Green conference revealed was that human error hasn’t been factored into our energy efficiency solutions. One person tasked to handle numerous elements of a three day event is going to make mistakes. These mistakes could be avoided yet it requires skills that are currently not rewarded; asking for help, letting go of ownership and the status/identity that is wrapped up with it and working with others so that together our collective brilliance will shine.
Lisa Goddard
