For any heel-dragging doubters of global warming—a reality that will increasingly shape the livability of the planet—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a panel of several hundred Nobel Peace Prize winning scientists, recently released a draft report that said, yes, beyond doubt global warming is happening and, what’s more, it’s happening at a rate faster than previously feared. If that wasn’t enough bad news, scientists say “human influence” has a greater role than previously acknowledged.
Which is a lot like the captain of the Titanic warning that the hole in the ship’s hull is larger than first reported. And, unless you truly believe that you are single-handedly smarter than several hundred scientists, it is perhaps time to recognize that the upcoming decade is critical to whether humans will curb carbon emissions and the rapid depletion of resources and create not only lifestyles, but entire cities that are truly sustainable.
“Bend is getting there,” explained City Councilor Jodi Barram, “slowly but surely.” She added, “I tend to think there is often room for improvement and innovation.”
It is a humble, but entirely apt, assessment: Over the past couple of years, the city of Bend has implemented dozens of small changes to rechart the course of its operation and philosophy of doing business, a recalibration that has pushed energy savings and waste management toward sustainable practices. But, those changes, in a word, are a beginning, not an ending.
For example, City Hall has converted to draw 100 percent of its electric power from renewable energy, but other city buildings are only partially powered in this manner. (Non-transportation energy consumption, like that used to heat, cool and light buildings, is responsible for roughly one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions.)
Likewise, the department of Community Development also has made good pushes toward sustainability, like curbing carbon emissions from gas-burning vehicles—another major contributor to global warming—by purchasing hybrid vehicles and increasing staff commuting by foot, bike or carpooling to 25 percent of the workforce—a number roughly quadrupling national averages. But even those accomplishments are like congratulating a runner for completing the first several miles of a marathon, while the remainder remains to be finished.
A recent survey conducted by the Source of Bend’s sustainability practices—and a comparison to what other cities are doing—found that Bend certainly has adopted good sustainability measures—especially in resource management and lessening energy consumption. But at a time when we should be running, not walking, toward sustainability practices—and, especially at a time when many other cities are stepping up their sustainability game—Bend remains rather informal and unfocused in its goals and efforts.
“We don’t have a sustainability coordinator,” lamented Brad Emerson, the city’s special projects director. “I sure wish we did.” Friendly and relaxed, he leans back in his chair, arms crossed over his head.
“We have been marching ahead,” assures Emerson, “maybe not in a very visible fashion.”
The lack of recognition of the City’s sustainability efforts stems in part from the fact that while many of these projects and accomplishments are important, they are about as exciting as, well, changing a light bulb. In retrofitting the city’s Centennial Parking Plaza downtown, solar panels were installed and energy-sucking light bulbs changed. “It wasn’t pie-in-the-sky, but tangible things we could do,” says Emerson.
Moreover, as Bend has been nipping and tucking, other cities have been very visibly overhauling. Consider outgoing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who arguably has done more than any other 21st century U.S. mayor to implement life-changing and planet-saving initiatives, including a successful push to ban smoking in bars and restaurants and a grandstanding attempt to ban massive servings of soda pop to bring children’s obesity under control. He also has pushed big initiatives to encourage more bike commuting, taking extraordinary measures like removing an entire lane from the notoriously car-and-cab-choked First Avenue and rolling out a bike lane stretching the length of Manhattan. During his tenure, bike ridership has increased an astonishing 250 percent.
As sustainability has emerged as a guiding term over the past decade, it has assumed the role that environmentalism played in the ’80s and ’90s—and, in the process, expanded to include practices that also are economically and socially, well, sustainable. And, as the term sustainability has matured, so has the geographic center of the movement. During the nascent days of the most recent environmental movement, in the ’80s and ’90s, when individual residents were figuring out ways to lessen their own environmental impact through recycling, bike commuting and eating locally, many of these practices were best on display in progressive mountain towns like Boulder, Colo. and Burlington, as well as Bend. But since the turn-of-the-last-century, leadership for sustainability practices increasingly has come not from individual lifestyles, but from municipalities and local governmental bodies—and, especially from those located in city halls in LA, Chicago and New York, which were the greatest perpetrators of environmental sins in the ’80s and ’90s.
In 2009, for example, San Francisco became the first American city to implement a citywide composting program. Two years later, Portland followed that lead and, since then, regular garbage pickup has been halved to only every other week, a result that underscores the financial savings of such programs (that is, by halving what goes into landfills, it roughly doubles the lifespan for such sites, a massive savings to municipalities).
In response to an article the Source recently published regarding these accomplishments—and Bend’s general lack of municipally sponsored composting—Councilor Barram submitted a letter to the editor explaining that Bend does, in fact, allow residents to throw compostables in with lawn clippings. But that allowance is a stark difference from outright encouraging, if not downright mandating, compositing; it is the difference between passively and aggressively addressing needs and opportunities for sustainability.
More telling, in a wide-reaching 2010 survey of 2,000 local governments, the International City/County Management Association found that cities with half-million-plus populations are doing much, much more than smaller cities to implement sustainable practices in the key areas, such as transportation, energy savings and resource conservation. For almost every indicator—from retrofitting facilities with higher-efficiency light to adding bike lanes—large cities (500,000 or more) way outpaced cities sized 50,000 – 99,999 in adopting sustainable practices. About the only category where smaller towns currently outperform large cities is by supporting local farmers markets—and even that is only by a scant number of respondents.
So far, sustainability measures by the city of Bend have been moderately noble, but not remarkable—more an informal endorsement than an ardent priority. In 2000, partly in response to the energy crisis throughout the West Coast, city council adopted a pledge and philosophy to chase down and enact sustainability measures. Several measures were enacted, but two years later, when council personnel changed, that overt commitment vanished. About the same time, at the turn of the century, a Sustainability Committee was formed with representatives from most city departments. According to Emerson, who served as the “convener,” the committee brainstormed and encouraged new “behaviors and operations.”
The list of accomplishments of the Sustainability Committee is scattered, but impressive. But, Emerson admits, that committee has not met for “several years,” indicating that the economic downturn in 2006, when many city departments were downsized by 20 percent, made it difficult for city employees and department managers to tackle any additional projects.
“As we had to cover more jobs for people who were let go, we had less that we could focus on,” Emerson explains. And, unlike large cities like New York, Chicago and even Portland, with billion-dollar budgets, Bend lacks the resources to roll out new projects.
Yet, while that argument garners understanding, it is also an explanation for Bend’s recent low-key and informal approach to sustainability that ignores the imminent importance of global warming and fails to calculate that sustainable practices simultaneously address economic savings, that measures like reducing energy consumption and eliminating waste can ease budget constraints.
Emerson does acknowledge he has been working “extra time” to pull together a list of the city’s sustainability accomplishments from the past few years. “By looking at the whole picture,” he says, “we can ask, ‘What are we missing here?'”
He goes on to explain that the Sustainability Committee “just needs a tangible reason to reconvene. I think that’s out there.”
He leans forward in his chair and pushes across his desk a sheet listing the priorities for the 2013 city council. The second bullet point reads: “Consider economic, environmental and social impacts of Council action.”
More specifically, this month, representatives from the city of Bend will travel to Portland as part of a seminar with the Energy Trust of Oregon. Over the subsequent year, city employees will work to figure out an operational guide to sure that the city of Bend finds means to reduce its energy consumption and finds a truly sustainable plan.
It is too early to tell whether these recent stirrings mark a redoubled commitment by the city to sustainability, but with other cities visibly, actively and comprehensively addressing these issues—and with global warming worsening—the immediate question remains: If not now, when?
This article appears in Sep 5-11, 2013.
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Yep, well said. While I feel Bend is a great place to live, it is not at the forefront of progressive cities as far as sustainability. Having a plan of action and concrete goals is definitely necessary if the city is to move forward toward becoming more sustainable. It’s disappointing that there is no official sustainability committee. Things are being done and improvements are being made here and there, but is it too little too late?
Any article which uses the nebulous and nonsensical environmentalist term sustainable 27 times, cites the Nobel committee which once nominated soccer for a peace prize and awarded a peace prize to Obama for doing nothing, and references the actions of the megalomaniac Michael Bloomberg was sure to be hopelessly weak. It seems the Source’s only solution is to encourage municipalities to spend more of their taxpayers money on composting, green energy, and bike lanes.
The scientists are motivated by money. They must continue to perpetuate the alarmism in order to keep the research grants flowing. Otherwise they would have to go out and find a job in the competitive private marketplace, an unsavory proposition for the average climate scientist accustomed to sucking at the teat of the taxpayer via government grants.
Politicians, governments, and environmentalists stand to gain by taxing, regulating, and persecuting conventional energy. This is costing everybody as we are forced to pay above market rates for “green” energy. This is also costing millions of American jobs as cheap domestic energy either sits in the ground or moves to the west coast for shipment to China (but not through Oregon, that idiot Kitzhaber is making sure of that). The EPA has declared CO2 a pollutant, paving the way for the IRS to punish all of us evil, polluting humans in our wallets. The policies that all of the greens promote push us more definitively into the arms of energy producers who hate us. This makes our nation more susceptible to the wars, the same wars that they all stand on the corner of Third and Greenwood to protest. We have more energy just in the shale formations in the upper Midwest than has been used by all humanity to date. Lets use it for goodness sake. The environmentalist radicals that stand in the way of domestic energy production need to be taken from the room and the debate by the scruff of their necks and never invited back.
Al Gore, who frankly couldn’t care less about the earth, is only out to enrich himself. And he has succeeded marvelously. He is part of the movement which drags the rank and file into this nonsense. Along with a complicit, brainwashed, and eager media, we are bombarded daily with stories of how horrible we are as humans and that any day now we could all die from this fallout or that caused by global warming. Preying upon and instilling two primal emotions in millions of people, guilt and fear, this cabal has, with the use of collaborative data suppression/cherry picking, creatively scaled graphical representation, and outright lies, perpetuated the greatest hoax ever foisted on humanity.
I couldn’t care less what the city of Bend does about any energy conserving programs so long as they do not want my money due to pressure from envirowhackos. If those people tried to show up when the mill was still in operation they would of ended up in the ER with broken jaws and noses and the police would have turned their heads.
It should be entirely up to the individual as to what, if any, energy saving attempt they feel like implementing on their property. These new age hippies have never had anyone local challenge them at 3rd & Greenwood. I live in Arizona now but the next time I am in town, which could be for the nitro burning, eat up the ozone drag boats at Haystack this weekend I would invite those folks to express their opinions at that event without having the police close by.
I read some of these comments and it takes me back to the Vietnam War era…early in it. There were millions upon millions of people who believed, truly in their hearts believed, that the world was falling prey to “Communism,” and that the U.S. had to fight it in the jungles of Vietnam. Well, guess what, belief in the “Domino Theory” of creeping communism went the way of the Flat Earth Society. People who continue to blame those on welfare, food stamps and unemployment for destroying the economy are now bashing Global Climate Change. Just because there is a lot of them doesn’t change the truth one whit.
Phil, you talk about all of the big city composting programs and I wonder what will you do with all of the compost ? Do you bag it and sell it nationwide. Will you have a city wide law that requires everyone to have a compost pile in their backyard.
Phil. I understand the benefit of compost for growing vegetables, but have you ever tried growing a garden in Central Oregon ? You have to be a master gardner and then it is a crapshoot. The more I read your crap the more I realize that you do not know what you are talking about when it comes to actually applying it at the local level.
Wow – interesting comments so far. Is there some kind of an organized climate change denier system out there to spew this anti-enviro rhetoric any time anyone publishes an article about sustainability? It just seems weird that these are so often the first few comments. I’ve studied the polls. As of April 2013 only 16% of Americans still denied climate change. But they sure are vocal! I wonder if those guys are even from Bend.
But now on to substance:
I think it’s great that Bend is beginning to address sustainability. What I’d love to see in our little town in is an attention to the kind of large scale sustainability we could encourage through good land use planning, and incentives for sustainable building. We can do a lot as individuals, but cities have an opportunity to build sustainability into the very fabric of our community. For example codes that encouraged (rather than just allowed) passive solar building could lower the entire city’s energy usage, and save residents tons of money.
The city is already making some great strides this direction in the form of the Central Area Plan, and their attention to making the city more bike friendly. They could do so much more, but they so tight for cash that there isn’t the staff to research all the cutting edge technologies coming out these days. I’d love to see our city a leader in this area.
Pam, please define the word “encourage” instead of allowed solar use. Who is to pay for all of the high tech panels that even though they have dropped in price by about 67% over the last ten years people are not going to buy these systems when electricity is so cheap. Don’t you know that the power companies understand this ? I lived in CO for 25 years and I know that there are more broke people there than anywhere in the state and standing around at 3rd and Greenwood bitching about whatever demands these people want will get zero results. These are the same people that were in the story last week called “Is beer town now party town” they are more interested in gourmet beer and high end smoke than they are about any kind of sustainable power. Why the hell don’t I see articles about individuals that have cheap easy to install and maintain solar / inverter systems for 12V DC or low consumption 120V AC lighting or pictures of large water containers that heat the water in the day and radiate it at night. You and the people that look to the city for the answers are not getting it at all. Old Chinese proverb says that “man who stands on side of mountain waiting for roast Pheasant to fly into mouth, have a long wait” It will take a collective effort of individuals wanting to be off the grid and that will not happen until either the lights go out or the kw per hr price is too much to bear. I rode a bicycle for two years in Bend during 1973-74 and it was great but that is only for the inner city people. Pam, please show us your solar system that you are using today, or all of your other so called sustainable use systems. Lets see your compost pile or the rain water collecting sistern and how you purify that water for safe use. The city will do NOTHING but tease you.
Phil, please put your money where your mouth is and show us all images of all your personal self sustaining systems on your home. I mean that anyone reading your impressive article would certainly expect that if anyone would have sustainability it would be you, right ? I am sure that you must have solar, wind, water, composting, etc at your home / property because the last thing you would want to do is set any ideas of double standards from your readers. Please put this curiosity to rest.