Conservation Through Education

RIACC feels fortunate to be partnering with fellow and sister environmentally minded organizations to develop training programs and an array of workshops for a wide variety of purposes. Our primary interest is in developing support for our fellow commissioners in their municipal functions and work.

We should be leaders and educators. As a part of learning to do our work better, we want to find ways of interfacing more effectively with other and allied environmental constituencies, e.g. citizen-consumers, planners and zoning officials, DEM, builders and developers, and affordable housing advocates. Ecologically and social-politically minded folks should excel at cooperation and we should demonstrate this in whatever collaborative formats we forge together.

Below is a list of the key ingredients we see constituting the elements of a good education or elementary skill set for conservation commissioners. Such a shared curriculum might be useful to other constituencies as well.

In terms of concerns and priorities: aside from focusing on the elements of the town review process – to ensure that all boards are roughly on the same page – our suggestion would be to focus on advanced and alternative eco-design concepts in order to facilitate builders and developers also getting on board. And, in terms of the buying public, ecologically wise design approaches and building need to be made downright appealing as well as unarguably economical!

Forums and expertise! We should create a moving carousel of essential topics and a revolving roundhouse of timely and pertinent subjects. We should create a reference list of expert and outstanding instructors in their fields. We should throw the net near and far to find good people who can offer stimulating perspectives. We want good and useful tools, but we also want an education in a variety of widening contexts so our work both adds up.

We want to encourage thinking that is professional and thorough, critical and creative. We are all ultimately amateurs – in the highest sense – because we must make important decisions not knowing all the answers. There are different fields of expertise but there is no one all-encompassing expertise. We all miss something; therefore we need each other. The Socratic maxim for the best teachers is that no one of us has fully arrived. To be an amateur is to be perpetually in process, to be always learning something new – and of vital importance. True insight, true learning is always a shock.

Since the status quo is filled with problems that stem from the desire of consumers for McMansions and McMalls, we wish to emphasize thinking along the creative edge. We aspire to growing familiarity with models of appealing, superb, imaginative, advanced and inspiring DESIGN. No amount of official regulation can compete with the best regulator of all: the cultivation of peoples’ best and most diverse tastes! Ultimately eco-design in all its aspects will be the expression of good taste and good sense. If that means an ongoing revolution in society and in ourselves – so be it! We don’t want training to simply fit into counterfeit patterns of mindless land use and building structures. Good taste, like good learning, is always a breakthrough.

We want to challenge the worst aspects of the status quo on all fronts! “Training” should be pioneering in deeply sane design and healthy communities, not expertise in how to perform the same destructive patterns more efficiently. Education should result in the capacity to challenge patterns that we know lead nowhere and that sadly add to cumulative environmental and social deficit. Randall Arendt’s Rural By Design is today’s bible of conservation design approaches, heralding more benign forms of development. The most forward-looking work on eco-comprehensive design these days is perhaps William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s wonderful Cradle to Cradle. This latter manifesto lucidly charts the need to move from conservation as regulation – how to minimize acknowledgely negative impacts – to positive and comprehensive design concepts that ask how every structure, interface and use can be organically inspired, non-toxic and an asset to its community. Not how little harm a structure does (invariably too much!), but how much can it contribute to individual and community well-being. (See McDonough and Braungart’s inspiring and incredibly provocative article, “The Extravagant Gesture: Nature and the Transformation of Human Industry.”)

Aside from an education in alternative design concepts and approaches, we wish to emphasize the relevance of “the big picture.” What is the big picture that is emerging from our particularized foci and concerns? We should always ask this question and not be abashed to explore major shifts in environmental thinking and practice. There are a host of contemporary guides who through philosophical and political discussion provide meaningful context and direction of our work across a broad spectrum. I am thinking of the famous essay-challenge by Nordhaus and Shellenberger, “The Death of Environmentalism,” and authors like Donna Meadows, Joanna Macy, Charlene Spretnak, Stewart Brand, Paul Hawken, David Korten, David Orr, Kalle Lasn, Paul Ray and Ruth Sherry Anderson, Wendell Berry and Thomas Berry, Jeffrey Sachs -- a few names that represent a rich legacy of humane social-political critiques, along with dramatically new stories and powerful directions…

What is wisdom in the direction of our polity and planet? We most need to leverage, not just our concepts, but our deepest inspirations! We need to create sensitive forums for such sharing. Without this sort of mutuality, training and narrow expertise become five finger exercises for the choir as the heedless development juggernaut churns on. Training is for monkeys; education in the truest sense should be the happy place of sharing powerful visions of what we are at our best. And how to avoid dragons in the meantime!