AZA Green Summit Day 1

The Green Scientific Advisory Group of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums holds a Summit at the annual Mid-Year meeting. This is the third year I have attended. All have been very valuable but this one knocks the ball out of the park!

The 100+ attendees is the largest group yet. Everyone had something to learn and something to contribute - what a great bunch of people.

First we had an update on all the good green work of the GSAG, including the annual report of members. The snapshot above is a summary, but there is more cool material in the Annual Report on Conservation and Science. The bedrock of the online material are the links to the Green Guides, Volumes 1 & 2.  Check them out here. The volunteer leaders are a great resource. GSAG members helped an AZA member find their water meter information online when the city wouldn't give it to them (they are city-owned). It was linked to from the city's budget page.

The presenters spoke to a range of zoo sizes and green experience, taking care to be sure everyone could find good answers and inspiration in their material. Here are my big takeaways:

• Abilene Zoo - Do you have a local chapter of Keep America Beautiful that may be able to help with some of your community engagement projects? 
• St. Louis Zoo - The challenge of receiving quarterly bills delays your anomaly-response time by months. Argue for monthly bills or for metering connected to your Building Automation/Management System (BAS/BMS) so you can spot spikes in use quickly and remedy the leak right away. The Zoo has great plans to steadily increase metering and automation to be able to respond in real time all the time. Great ROI.
• Shedd Aquarium - Smart Operator Training means your BAS/BMS staff not only recognize problems promptly but they become the super team to strategize and manage peak shaving and other activities that save a lot of money and lengthen the life of the equipment. 
• Denver Zoo - They have used some portable water meters for temporary measurement that helps site-specific monitoring to help change behavior. If a keeper attaches it to a hose and does a regular habitat wash down, it's easy to see how water-intensive that practice is -- and easier to cut back on that form of water use. 
• Palm Beach has an awesome CUA program: Connect/Understand/Act that guides their conservation messaging design in keeper talks and animal shows. These clear simple guides provide conservation messages that support habitat and therefor wildlife. Their guidelines for simple messages, no more than three, and all with action items within public reach, are just great. Ask Dave Ruhl to share them with you. 
• Sacramento Zoo - They described their steady approach to building green team participation starting with only 500 bucks a year. A real inspiration. 
• Vancouver Aquarium - Shared a rock-your-world report on how to embed sustainability in the culture of an organization. The long version is here with best practices. I'll be back at you soon with more on this awesome tool. 
• California Academy of Sciences - As always, very cool stuff developing there, including some great educational tools and processes for connecting with the audience for action. I'll be back at you soon with more of these as they roll them out.

What a great day!

UPDATE: Here's what the next day's sessions taught us.

Book Review: Ecoliterate

Ecoliterate: How Educators are Cultivating Emotional, Social and Ecological Intelligence Goleman, Daniel, Lisa Bennett and Zenobia Barlow with professional development sections by Carolie Sly.  (Jossey-Bass, 2012.) 

The museum field is actively exploring how to be better at communicating environmental messages. It’s good, new, hard work and I’m very excited about it. This is the third book in my journey through the related literature.

I was struck by this early sentence as an apt description of why we’re in this state of environmental misunderstanding: The complexity of the web of connections that characterize our global society has created a vast collective blind spot about the effects of human behavior on natural systems.

I am continuously concerned that I don’t know what I don’t know, that is, I don’t realize what I’m not understanding or discovering. I am sure this is what has led me to systems thinking and environmental impact. I want to know what to expect and what I’ve missed. To understand the system at least helps me in that. It’s the key to improving understanding our environmental impact.

 

I was greatly helped in my conundrum by the discussion about the intelligences it focuses on: emotional, social and ecological. Their words are far better than mine, so I quote many here: Social and emotional learning was embraced by many schools on the promise that helping children develop the capacities for self awareness, self management, social awareness, and relationship management would increase their likelihood of success in school and life. Now, extensive research shows, that these do lead to important student gains and reduced risks for failure....Research studies examining the influence of an environment-based context have revealed similar encouraging findings...the Center for Ecoliteracy ...has found that socially and emotionally engaged ecoliteracy advances both teacher and student involvement and achievement through hands-on, experiential, contextualized learning in the natural world and the community.

 

There is a valuable summary of what the Center for Ecoliteracy has identified as "The Five Practices of Emotionally and Socially Engaged Ecoliteracy":

• Developing Empathy for All Forms of Life
• Emracing Sustainability as a Community Practice
• Making the Invisible Visible
• Anticipating Uninntended Consequences
• Understanding How Nature Sustains Life

All of that helps me with my own worries about not knowing what I don't know, and it surely is a recipe for helping individuals, institutions and communities "strengthen and extend their capacity to live sustainably".

The essays in this book are memorable examples of someone not knowing and someone else discovering; they are encouragement that none of us needs to know it all, but that reduce our negative impact on the planet and on each other we must be willing to seek and to adapt and improve -- and that wonderfully astonishing things happen as a result. Even good things you didn't know would happen. 

This approach goes against our training of learn, then do, and move on. This approach is more similar to learn, test, learn more, keep testing, and change course as we constantly improve in new directions. That means you’re never done, you’re never “there”. That of course is why this green stuff is called a journey. 

Ecoliterate's stories highlight people who worked for incremental change and achieved much larger goals; individuals who stood up against companies and governments for change; a woman who simply told nature’s story wherever she could, and created significant change. The stories are about native shrimp, school children, coal and big oil, local farms, and classroom curriculum. And they all relate to so many other challenges we face.

 

This book is very valuable to those who:

• can benefit from reassurance that they have to know it all, that they have to get green right, or that there is a right way to go about this,
• those who have been working at environmental sustainability awhile and are in need of next-level ideas for community engagement,
• and those who have been pursuing changes and could use encouragement to push on.

What you will learn, if you’re an educator, outreach coordinator, institutional leader, and/or individual practitioner, is that the personal and systems relationships really, really matter. Send your attention and energy to understanding those, and then use your educator or manager training to transfer that knowledge to the opportunities in your museum, zoo, garden, park or nature center. You will have discovered what you know and what you don’t know, and will have the relationships to discover how to make change work for you and the planet.

 

Reading List

This is the third book in my reading journey, after The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy, and Ecological Literacy: – please join me by sharing books for me to review; reading along with me and commenting. 

Green Bling

I'm buiding a collection of 'green' cartoons.

This is my favorite so far. It says what I think people feel when they seem me coming -- sorry about that, everyone.

"Oh God, here they come -- act green."

But this is the cartoon I use most. I use it to talk about the perils of Green Bling.

 

This really just shouldn't happen. But it does.

You've seen it around you:

• The dollars spent on a solar array in a low-sun region when the most-important step is improving the building envelope.
• The rain barrels purchased but not hooked-up; or hooked-up but never drained!
• Wind turbines and wind spires in low-wind areas.
• Bamboo single-use utensils (I mean come-on...use them again for Pete's sake!)

This isn't the same thing as Greenwashing - when you say something is greener than it is, or you use associations to convince consumers or viewers that you are doing something for green reasons.

Green Bling is using visible, catchy-looking green practices and products totally inappropriately because you're about the 'look', not the result.

Don't do Green Bling. But do send me pictures of if you see any!