On May 20th and 21st I attended a conference on behalf of Konstructr. The conference was held in Orlando, Florida and was titled Green Cities Florida: Advancing The Business & Science of Sustainability for Business & Government. The conference focused on the roles and responsibilities that individuals, businesses, and the government must play in advancing sustainable initiatives.
The highlight of Day One was a presentation by Eric Corey Freed, a principal of organicARCHITECT and a founder and leader of the Re: Vision initiatives. Freed's presentation titled RE:Visioning The American City focused on the Re: Vision Dallas project, the first fully sustainable inner city block in the United States and how the "unified conceptual framework" was applied to overcome challenges. The "unified conceptual framework" is essentially a glorified charette which brings all the individuals who are working on or will be impacted by a project together to overcome challenges. Freed's presentation also discussed the transformation of sustainability from a niche embraced by "hippies" and "treehuggers" into a movement which touches all of us and will be advanced by the education and involvement of the greater community.
On Day One I also attended a workshop titled: Green Media, Marketing and Public Relations. This workshop focused on how governments, businesses organizations and neighborhoods can achieve their sustainable communication by leveraging an integrated approach. The panel consisted of Ia Bryan (President of Sensible City), Sunny Lewis (Editor in-Chief of Environment News Service), Eamon Martin (Executive Director of The Global Report) and Trish Michaels (Co-founder of M4 Marketing). One of the questions I asked was whether using the word "green" in light of how it has become cheapened by efforts to monetize on it is still a good strategy for people who are deeply invested in the green and sustainable movement. The panel responded that the word green is used because it is short and therefore easy to use in media reports and that other words such as sustainable are not often understood by the larger public. The panel's opinion was that use of the word green is still appropriate as long as it is used to the best of our abilities and as long as we seek to clearly define what we mean by the word.
On Day Two I attended a speech by Lt. Governor Jeff Kottkamp and Tim Center the Director of the Collins Center. This speech was titled: Moving Toward a Sustainable Florida- People-Planet- Prosperity. The focus of the speech was to help better understand the concepts of sustainable development in the context of projected growth, transportation demands, infrastructure challenges, and ecological limits of Florida but the lessons can easily be extrapolated to any state. The main message was that sustainability begins with education and that we as thought leaders in this movement need to challenge people to think differently. As Tim said "Thinking that traffic problems can be solved by widening highways is like thinking obesity can be solved by loosening our belts" we need to change the way we tackle the problems our society focuses by educating government leaders, developers, and our fellow citizens to stop taking the easy pathway and instead seek to do things in a way that makes the world a better place for future generations. While some individuals advocate that we do things in a way that leaves no footprint this is an unrealistic goal and instead we should seek to do things in a way that minimize our impact on nature and hopefully create a better world for future generations.
