Chartreuse. More
than a color, this European digestive liqueur is distilled
from 168 herbs collected near the Grand Chartruese Abbey in
the French Alps. It is costly, rare and is specific to the
Saint Pierre du Chartreuse Mountains.
Like the Chartreuse of the Alps, the Western
United States is revered worldwide. Genre movies featuring
John Wayne, mythic expanse of space, 4-H fairs — these
are not mementos, but cultural assets as distinctive as Chartreuse.
If only we hallowed our recipe for Western identity as the
French monastics do their liqueur.
The Sopris
Foundation believes every Western community faces a moment
of reckoning with its identity. In the cross hairs of development
and growth, profiled daily in our newspapers, how can entrepreneurial
and elected leadership respond? With what tools can we equip
them?
That is the subject of an upcoming Sopris Foundation
conference. Titled "Innovative
Ideas for a New West," the conference explores best practices
in land-use planning, renewable energy and wider transportation
choices – with applicability specific to the rural and
mid-sized towns of the American West.
Shirl Boyce of the Boise Valley Economic Partnership
recently shared a line from a 1907 Boise promotional brochure:
"If you are desirous of changing your abiding place and are
a progressive citizen, willing to help shoulder the burdens
… of the community in which you make your home, your
welcome among us will be most cordial…" Isn't this apropos
of all that we Westerners should demand? Teamwork to share
ideas and create the kind of town 180 degrees from those faceless
sprawls from which many of our newest residents are fleeing?
The Sopris Foundation's slate of best practices
is pertinent to these questions:
• Are we Westerners learning from our
neighboring communities as well we could?
• Are we consecrating our work in public policy toward
legislation with vision and teeth — procurement standards,
impact studies, the political backbone to subsidize fledging
initiatives or "zone-it-like-you-mean-it"?
• Are we looking for measures to make our communities
more livable?
• Are we passionate about preserving businesses like
ranching that have defined the historic, iconic West, or
will we just allow them to slip away, replaced by subdivisions?
What is the Sopris Foundation?
The Sopris Foundation is a family foundation funded by John
McBride, a Colorado developer, rancher and pilot. As a developer,
he knows how easy it is to screw up the landscape; as a rancher
he knows how hard it is to save it; and as a long-time pilot,
he knows how easy it is to see the difference! But more, unlike
many entrepreneurs fixated on bottom lines, John's driving
curiosity is with new ideas. This guides Sopris' 2006 conference.
Past conferences addressed national political
and environmental themes, but it was John's curiosity about
European best practices that shifted our 2006 focus. Having
traveled to Europe following his sons Johno (the US Ski Team
Men's Alpine coach) and Peter (a National Geographic photographer),
John felt there were practices worth emulating by the planners,
elected officials and entrepreneurs in the West.
Initially, Sopris considered exclusively featuring
European models of land-preservation, transportation, and
energy. Indeed some of our featured projects and presenters
do hail from Switzerland and Austria. Not surprisingly, though,
we also discovered a treasure chest of fine local initiatives
native to the United States:
• Mark Sardella of
Local
Energy in Santa Fe, N.M., will share his work with mobile,
modular biomass heat units whose price flirts with the pocket-books
of even the most conservative real-estate developer.
• Sue Zielinski, of
the University of Michigan's SMART program, will discuss
the range of transportation initiatives that don't hinge
on urban population densities but which would ease the commute
and transit choices designed by any planner or municipal
procurement officer.
• Brian Halweil will
present his research on supporting local agriculture and
the potential for farmers to diversify their revenue streams
via agri-tourism or school-centered farm studies.
• Betsy Hands of homeWORD
in Missoula, Mont., will describe her work promoting green,
affordable housing.
• Speakers on agricultural energy, car-sharing,
solar, waste-heat recapture, Transferable Development Rights
(TDRs), easements, place-based design and more.
Today the American West must live up to its
legacy as a showcase for innovation. The pressures of growth
demand it. If every Western community were impatient for trends
to trickle down from coastal, urban centers, why couldn't
innovative projects emanate from Dillon, Mont., Sedona, Ariz.,
or Walla Walla, Wash.?
At this conference, projects and solutions featured
by the above speakers and others have to be replicable and
easily emulated at reasonable cost in rural and mid-sized
communities all over the West.
Some solutions are free to implement: The mayors
of Park City, Salt Lake City and Moab compete to see which
Utah municipality uses the most wind energy. This competition
costs nothing more than the pride of the mayors who lose each
month: they must wear a T-Shirt to their council meetings
boasting the winning city's name. A local company provides
free parking to hybrid vehicles. Steamboat Springs appointed
a "green-team" to identify procurement standards, perform
a carbon audit, and research high-performance buildings for
city infrastructure.
Our hope is that the knowledge-sharing among
attendees will meaningfully enhance the contribution of speakers.
Through question-and-answer sessions, informal conversation,
paper and electronic "brainstorm boards" on which to record
each communities' best practices (posted throughout the conference
venue), and a post-conference, online blog initiated by former
Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, the Sopris Foundation
will facilitate the exchange of knowledge to enrich the learning
curve of creative leaders in the West.
What could you offer your community if armed
with these innovative ideas? How many more periods remain
for Westerners to draft a plan that hallows our landscape
– and its magic?
May 2006 event is the impetus for regional
brainstorming
As Daniel Kemmis, Senior fellow at the Center for the Rocky
Mountain West (of which Headwaters News is a project) and
a conference speaker, said earlier this year, we must envision
this conference as part of a larger dialogue. While individualism
is core to Western identity mythology, we must consider ourselves
teammates. We are all here practicing together and should
be talking together.
Our West is as unique as the Chartruese of the
Alps. Let's acknowledge the specific product — our livability
— distilled in our arid air, and hallow it as the monk's
hallow their recipe. As communities who take ownership of
the specific things we love about this place, let's rally
against the inertia blinding us to the urgency. Western character
and land demand teamwork to be preserved. This task is righteous.
And it is owned solely by our generation.
You, too, can join us
We hope people who are not part of the sustainability
"choir" will join us. These initiatives are not painted green
– they are and should be considered as mainstream as
market economics: well-planned communities make fiscal sense.
We have invited leadership from the Intermountain
West – elected officials, entrepreneurs, members of
the philanthropic grantmaking community, journalists, community
organizers, ranchers and farmers, and planners.
Form a team of four, and attend with your mayor,
council-members, local philanthropists, or educators and receive
a discount on registration. We believe the collection of interests
hearing of models "crazy enough they might just work" will
perpetuate the dialogue and action necessary for success.
One lone-drummer will be impossibly challenged to implement
innovations back in Walla Walla, while a cadre of new biodiesel,
biomass, or car-share evangelists leverage real traction.
If you are interested in joining in the event,
please contact
us.
About the
Author
Piper Foster received her BA in Politics at Whitman College
in Walla Walla, WA. She served as a legislative aide for Congressman
George Nethercutt, Jr. in his Washington DC office, and lived
in Barcelona studying music and Arabic. She worked in the
Development office at Rocky Mountain Institute prior to joining
the Sopris Foundation in May 2005. She works part time as
the Executive Director of Tomorrow's Voices.
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