BRSI's
Definition of Sustainability
The Blue Ridge Sustainability Institute is an advocate and catalyst for actions that make the earth more sustainable. Sustainability means creating and maintaining conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony, that permit fulfilling social, economic and environmental requirements of present and future generations. |
Board of Directors
Paul Bellows Chair Retired Chief Operating Officer, Kilpatrick Stockton LLP
Patricia S. Smith Treasurer Retired President, The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina
W. Louis Bissette, Jr. Secretary Partner, McGuire, Wood & Bissette
Becky Anderson Consultant; Founder and Former Director, Hand Made in America
Jack Haiden Britt Blackwell Britt & Associates; Retired Executive Vice President of The University of Tennessee
Susan Fox Assistant Director of Research, Southern Research Station, US Forest Service
Holly Jones Buncombe County Commissioner; Director, YWCA of Asheville
Robert K. McMahan Dean, Professor of Engineering, The Kimmel School, Western Carolina University
LaVoy Spooner WNC Regional Director for External Affairs, AT&T
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BRSI Volunteer Profile
We have an amazing collection of talented professionals who contribute their time and resources to the management and development of BRSI projects and programs.
This month's featured member is:
Steve Cochran
See Steve's full profile to your right.
Thank you, Steve, for your contributions!
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GREEN MONDAY
ROUND-UP
We are pleased to announce that Asheville Green Drinks will be hosting a follow-up discussion to our Green Monday topic.
Click here for more info
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Recent Awards
Energy Foundation
Energy & Higher Education
Community Foundation
EEC Campaign funding
Conrad Industries
Finance Summit
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Partnerships and/or Collaborations
AdvantageGreen
AdvantageWest
Asheville Buncombe Sustainability Community Initiative
Asheville Buncombe Technical Community College
Asheville Chamber of Commerce
Asheville Design Center
Asheville Green Drinks
Asheville Green Opportunities
Asheville HUB
Asheville Independent Restaurants (AIR)
Biltmore Farms
Blue Ridge Biofuels Buncombe County
City of Asheville
Community Foundation of Western North Carolina
Conrard Industries
FIRC Group
FLS Energy
Global Institute for Sustainability Technologies at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College
Green Jobs, ABCCM
Hickory Nut Gap Farm
Land-of-Sky Regional Council
National Climatic Data Center
National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center (NEMAC)
North Carolina Arboretum
North Carolina Department of Environmental and Natural Resources
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Progress Energy
PurpleCat Networks
Push Designs
Self-Help Ventures Fund / Self-Help Credit Union
Southern Energy & Environment Expo
Sundance Power Systems
Sustainability Advisory Committee on Energy and the Environment
The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina
The Nauhaus Institute (NHI)
U.S. Forestry Service's Southern Research Station
University of North Carolina - Asheville
Warren Wilson College
Waste Reduction Partners
Western Carolina University
Western North Carolina Clean Energy Leadership Group
Western North Carolina Green Building Coalition
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Newsletter Team
Editor Lenny Bernstein
Design/Production
Paul Dezendorf
Writers
Tim Ballard
Lenny Bernstein
Steve Cochran
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Comments Welcome
We, at BRSI, strive to provide useful, accurate information to residents of Western North Carolina.
If any errors exist in this publication we invite you to notify Newsletter Staff as a means of quality control.
We appreciate your assistance.
Click here to submit feedback
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Energy Efficiency, Conservation, and Renewables (EECR) Campaign Update
May has been an exciting month for the EECR/Energy Upfit Campaign. We are pleased to announce that BRSI is the recipient of a 2011 Opportunity Grant from the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina for development and launching of our regional energy efficiency, conservation and renewables 'Education and Action' Campaign in support of financial savings for homeowners and businesses and improved regional health. The grant application effort involved several BRSI individuals, but is primarily the work of Steve Cochran and John Stevens. Congratulations on their hard work!
As a piece of the Campaign, on June 14 the Energy Action Council will co-convene a regional Finance Summit with AdvantageWest, hosted by Weaverville-based Conrad Industries. Other Summit partners include: AB-Tech, the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina and Real Returns Consulting Group (New York City).
This Summit will seek to bring together regional financial institutions and clean energy initiatives to provide education on the needs of both groups and facilitate better cooperation and understanding to further mutually beneficial goals. We believe that both clean energy interests and financial institutions in the region will benefit from increased connection and collaboration. With high expectations for the summit, we look forward to updating you in the future on the new programs and collaborations catalyzed by this event.
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Obama's Better Buildings Initiative
In February of this year President Obama launched a 'Better Building's Initiative' encouraging all sectors of society to address the energy efficiency of both new and existing building stock.
A key part of the Initiative is a challenge to college and university presidents to make a personal pledge to upfit (improve)the energy efficiency of their campus buildings through a variety of measures and to become part of a network committed to accomplishing that task.
In support of that challenge BRSI has been awarded a grant by the Energy Foundation of San Francisco to create, connect and support a 'Higher Education Consortium' to advocate for their presidents to make the pledge.
During a meeting-packed week in Washington DC, BRSI Executive Director John Stevens and BRSI Principal Steve Cochran met with six national organizations that have campus-based student advocacy contingents: the US Green Building Council's 'Green Schools Program'; the National Wildlife Federation's 'Campus Ecology Program'; the Alliance to Save Energy's 'Green Campus Program'; the National Council for Science and the Environment's 'Council of Environmental Deans and Directors'; the Sierra Club's 'Sierra Campus Connect'; and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. We told them of our plans to form a national consortium aimed at implementing the President's initiative on college and university campuses. All six expressed interest in becoming part of the consortium.
Next steps include formalizing the Consortium and engaging the Council on Environmental Quality at the White House, which is responsible for administering the President's Challenge.
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Meet Steve Cochran, BRSI Principal
You may ask, what does a BRSI Principal do? The answer is while other BRSI volunteers tend to have specific expertise, Steve Cochran is more of a generalist uses his talents wherever he can to help further BRSI's goals.
Steve is an internationally-recognized and nationally-prominent leader, speaker, writer and advocate in the field of sustainable enterprise, working with private industry, government, academia and the non-profit world to achieve that goal.
He is the co-founder of Sustainability Strategies, LLC: a Washington DC and Asheville NC-based strategic planning and management consulting firm that enables business - and any organization - to meet their goals and objectives, improve profitability, competitiveness, and market share without compromising resources for future generations.
Steve serves as a founding member of the board of the Washington DC-based United States Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development, with more than three hundred multi-stakeholder and cross-sector partner organizations. The US Partnership is the national response to the United Nations 'Decade of Education for Sustainable Development' (2005-2014).
In April 2009 he served as an elected North American delegate to the United Nations "World Conference on Sustainable Development" in Bonn, Germany. He also served as a 'sustainable development policy' delegate for North America to both the "G8 Civil Summit" in Moscow, and the United Nations "Global Civil Society Forum" in Dubai, in 2006. He was a delegate to the UN 'Global Civil Society Forum' in Monaco in February 2008. In October 2007, he was elected a North American delegate to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe's Sixth Ministerial Forum, in Belgrade. In January 2008 he was elected to a two year term as one of two North American representatives to the United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) "Major Groups Facilitation Committee".
Earlier in his career, he served as leadership coach and Vice President for Technology at the Council for Excellence in Government, in Washington DC. In that capacity he created the "Technology Leadership Consortium", a collaboration of private, public and social sector organizations leveraging the understanding and use of information and communication technology as leadership tools serving government mission. Earlier in his career he developed, managed, and directed the contracting interests of AT&T, Booz Allen & Hamilton, Centel Corporation, and EDS Corporation. He has directed major projects for private industry, academia, defense and civilian agencies of the government, The White House, The House of Representatives, The Library of Congress, and The Supreme Court. In public service, he was the Director of Procurement at the quasi-governmental 'United States Synthetic Fuels Corporation', during its brief but exciting life in the 1980's.
In addition to continuing to serve as a Principal of the Council for Excellence in Government and board member of the US Partnership, Steve is a member of the Technology Advisory Committee of the American Council on Education, in Washington DC. In Asheville, he serves on the boards of the Community and Economic Development Alliance (the "HUB" Plan), the board of the Clean Air Community Trust, and the Board of Visitors of Warren Wilson College, and is the co-founder of the Sustainability Alliance of the Mountains (SAM). In 2001 he became a founding director of the International Centre for e-Governance, in Edinburgh Scotland, a non-profit organization partnered with BT and the Scottish Council Foundation.
Steve was educated at Ohio State University, and The George Washington University in Washington DC.
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No, Natural Processes Won't Rein in Climate Change
In the March issue of Knowledge Into Action, John Stevens, BRSI's Executive Director, stated: ... scientific researchers have wrestled with three big questions for the past 40 years: Is the world warming? If so, are humans the cause? And are natural processes likely to rein it in? In recent years, climate scientists have reached agreement on the answers: yes, yes, and no. This is the last of three articles that will present some of the scientific evidence supporting those answers. The most common argument for natural processes reining in climate change is that the climate change we have experienced over the past 50 years is due to natural climate cycles, not human activities, and that these cycles will eventually bring cooling. There is no question that the many climate cycles, some as short as 90 days, others as long as 100,000 years, are an important part of the climate system, and that they bring both warming and cooling. Increasing greenhouse gas concentrations brings only warming. If you add the effects of increasing greenhouse gas concentration and cyclic behavior, as shown schematically in Figure 1 below, the result is generally increasing temperatures with some periods of cooling. Figure 1 - Schematic Representation of the Combined Effect of Climate Cycles and Increasing Greenhouse Gas Concentrations While not a perfect match for the schematic, the global average temperature record shows a generally upward trend with periods of cooling.
Figure 2 - Global Average Temperature, 1850 - 2005 (Temperature change compared to 1961-1990 average) Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, www.ipcc.ch Some researchers have proposed mechanisms by which the climate system could be self-correcting and compensate for the higher levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. An increase in low level cloudiness is the mechanism most often discussed. Low level clouds reflect solar energy resulting in cooling. While there has been some increase in cloudiness over the past few decades, it has been insufficient to compensate for the warming due to increased greenhouse gases, and there is no evidence that projected future changes in cloudiness would keep global average temperature under control. Another, more complicated, argument for natural processes controlling temperature rise is that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations would lead to more convective heat transfer from the tropics to the poles. This mechanism was first proposed by Prof. Richard Lindzen of MIT in 1990. However, two decades of atmospheric data has failed to show evidence that this change is occurring. |
Previous Green Monday
Sustainable Agriculture:
What Does It Look Like?
In the May 16 Green Monday, five panelists addressed the questions:
� What is sustainable agriculture? and
� How can we ensure that it is sustainable for all?
from a local perspective. These questions will be considered from a global perspective at a future Green Monday.
Peter Marks, Program Coordinator for the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP), presented ASAP's vision: strong farms, thriving local food economies, and healthy communities where farming is valued as central to our heritage and our future. Meeting that vision is a challenge because since 1950 the 23 counties of Western North Carolina (WNC) have lost 70% of their farmland and 80% of their farms. The remaining farms can survive only if they are valued as a source of local food, which a large majority of consumers say they favor and would be willing to pay more for. However, less than 2% of the $2.4 billion of food consumed annually in WMC is locally grown. In ASAP's view sustainable agriculture:
- must sustain the farmer; all kinds of farmers, both conventional and organic;
- is not 100% driven by efficiency;
- must engage the next generation, both as farmers and consumers;
- should foster innovation;
- includes large farmers and commercial distributors to reach all; and
- requires transparency and honesty.
Chase Hubbard, Warren Wilson College's Farm manager and a member of the Buncombe County Soil and Water Conservation Board, described the five year cycle on which Warren Wilson operates its 117 year-old, 350 acres farm in the Swanannoa River valley. Only 275 acres are actually farmed, the remainder is protected riparian zone. The farm's main products are organic beef, swine and chicken. For the first three years the land is planted in forage crops. Then it is plowed under and planted in corn. The corn is harvested in the fall and set aside for fed. Cows are then gazed on the harvested land to glean the corn and fertilize the field with their manure. The fields are then planted in barley, which matures the next summer. After it is harvested, the land is tilled and the cycle restarted. Hubbard described some of the interactions that exist in this crop cycle, which typically yields over 200 bushels of corn per acre, the target for conventional farming, without the use of agrochemicals. His definition of sustainable agriculture included protecting soil and water quality, maintaining economic viability, and educating students to be farmers or consumers.
Jamie Ager, operates Hickory Nut Gap Meats, a grass-fed and pastured meats business. He is part of a fourth generation farm family, who currently lease 300 acres of pasture, twenty minutes from Asheville. His farm's mission is to connect sustainable agriculture practices, his family history, and his customers by sharing the family farm experience and serving as an example of healthy land stewardship while providing high-quality, ethically-raised meats. This is similar to the mission of both ASAP and Warren Wilson's farm. His definition of sustainability includes ecosystem enhancement to build biodiversity and improve soil quality by creating livestock systems that mimic natural systems as they turn grass into meat.
Joe Dofflemyer is a co-founder of Grass2Greens, a food sovereignty activist, and a gardener. He talked about his work with Bountiful Cities, which has as its mission to create on urban land beautiful spaces that produce food in abundance and foster social justice and sustainability. A major focus of this effort is development of urban food gardens, especially in poor and under- represented communities. But urban agriculture doesn't need to be limited to raising vegetables. He suggested that the City of Asheville plant on fruit and nut trees to provide food as well as aesthetic values. He pointed out that sustainability includes social justice, and that the panel did not include any representatives of the minority communities he works with. Finally, he said that we need to support not only local farmers but the restaurants that are buying local food.
Jodie Rhoden is the owner of Short Street Cakes, a Board Member of Bountiful Cities, a social entrepreneur, and a mother. She provided more information on Bountiful Cities, which is a 10 year-old organization that is currently a partner in a dozen gardens, and has a strong emphasis on social justice and inclusivity. She acknowledged that locally grown food is more expensive and the challenge that creates for the large portion of Asheville's population that can't afford the extra cost. Growing your own food is one way to meet this challenge. She argued that sustainably grown food is not only healthier to eat, but the act of growing food also contributes to health. She closed by arguing that we all have an obligation to the triple bottom line of improving the environment, providing economic growth, and fostering social justice.
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BRSI's monthly newsletter, Knowledge Into Action, is made possible by a generous donation from the
James McClure Clarke Fund
Thank you for your dedication to sustainability in Western North Carolina
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