Bright green urbanism is thriving in London. Worldchangers there are thinking long term and incorporating boldly sustainable designs into housing, institutions and urban plans, as witnessed by cutting-edge ideas like London's congestion pricing and the BedZED development. The list of London's sustainability innovations is large and diverse, from zero-footprint homes and sustainable mosques to giant windfarms in the Thames estuary, plans for a green Olympics and "big green" buildings like the Gherkin. None of this makes London a perfect city, by any means, but London does point the way to a variety of strategies we could all use to brightly green our hometowns. London rocks.
One of the reasons London is such an epicenter is the group BioRegional. Indeed, if I were asked to name the single coolest environmental group on the planet, BioRegional would have to be a contender.
It's their recent work -- like the BedZED development, the ZedStandards for neighborhood design, the new SkyZED tower and their work both greening homes and greening London's 2012 Olympics -- that I find particularly exciting. BioRegional seems to have a very clear lock on what it means to make a measurable systemic difference. However, their whole story as an organization is quite inspiring. The best telling of that story I've found so far is the book Bioregional Solutions for Living on One Planet,
Begun by Pooran Desai and Sue Riddlestone in the mid-nineties, BioRegional has always aimed at finding ways of making sustainability work in the real world:
"[W]e have been keen to engage with the market on its own terms and to link ourselves back to the local environment and the earth's natural nutrient and energy cycles. We value technology and the marketplace, but recognize that these can only bring long term benefits when they are linked to natural cycles -- i.e., when we work with, rather than against, nature."
BioRegional's solutions have therefore always aimed at finding leverage points in the larger economy where sustainable solutions with real impact can find a toe-hold. Much of their early work explored ways of meeting resource needs through local economies: creating local paper cycles, promoting hemp clothing, connecting local farmers and local households, finding markets for locally-grown lavender.
A great example is their work to create a market for sustainably-produced British charcoal. As they explain in Bioregional Solutions, most of the charcoal consumed in the U.K. imported, often from South Africa. That charcoal not only spurs resource exploitation in a developing world country (where environmental problems are becoming severe), while giving relatively little economic benefit to the original producers, it also comes with a steep carbon footprint: 1.32 kilos of CO2 for every 3 kilo bag before it is even set alight in the barbecue.
"Coppicing" is a traditional forestry practice in which select trees are cut back and allowed to send out new shoots. If the trees are cut in a slow rotation, not only is the harvest of wood sustainable over long time period, but the forest it creates closely mimics the variation found in natural woods, with a dappled pattern of big old trees, young growing saplings and sunny glades:
"Coppicing creates woodlands with areas of sun and shade, offering a diversity of habitats for wildlife. In the first few years after cutting, woodland flowers such as violets and vetches flourish, stimulated by the light and warmth. These flowers in turn support a variety of insects, notably woodland butterflies. As coppices grow into thickets they become home to a second generation of species such as nightingales, turtledoves and dormice. ... So, although it may seem odd and counter-intuitive at first, harvesting wood, if done in the right way, can be positively beneficial for wildlife and increase biodiversity. Some species in the UK are now dependent on coppicing... The beautiful pearl-bordered fritillary, the U.K.'s fastest-declining butterfly species, is one example of a species that has become locally extinct as coppice woodlands have fallen into neglect."
So, providing an incentive for foresters to continue coppicing is clearly a good idea. But how do you create a market for products made from coppiced wood? For the best wood, supplying furniture-makers and builders might be an option, but what of the remaining wood? After looking at all the possibilities, turning the wood into charcoal stood out as a potentially smart idea: not only would is bring much-needed income to small, local foresters, it would also drop the transportation carbon footprint of a 3 kg bag of charcoal to 0.13 kg per bag, while supporting British biodiversity.
You'll have to read the book to get the whole story of how BioRegional pulled it off, but the short version is that they figured out that a series of regional kilns, working with local farmers, could produce enough (comparatively) sustainable charcoal to be marketable, and they then convinced national retailers B & Q to carry the local charcoal in stores across the UK. Success.
But what of those poor South African charcoal burners? Isn't BioRegional screwing them over? Well, BioRegional did the research and found the answer is yes and no, but mostly no. First of all, most imported charcoal in the UK comes with no fair trade certifications, and the working conditions on (and the ecological impacts of) developing world charcoal operations turn out to be something most of us wouldn't want to be supporting.
Second, the money which actually reaches local producers can be a pittance -- on average less than ten pence for a nearly three pound retail price (and extractive industries based on short-term practices aren't much of a tool for development).
Finally, as the BioRegional folks point out, "we simply have no option but to address sustainability." We can't continue acting as if the climate and environmental costs of bad business practices are of no concern. If nothing else, it is the global poor who are most endangered by climate change.
Indeed, BioRegional developed a clever measurement to assess how effective a trade-off between development and climate chaos a particular enterprise is: The Foreign Exchange Earnings per Transport ton of CO2 (FEET) index. Not surprisingly, producing craft items (like good wine) and intellectual property (for instance software) is by far a better deal for a developing nation (both in terms of cash and climate) than clearcutting its forests and turning them into charcoal.
As you might be able to tell, if you're even a bit of an eco-geek, this book is packed with interesting ideas. I am far more interested in BioRegional's bright green urban future -- where they seem to be using rigorous sustainability thinking to leverage real change in the systems that will ultimately have the biggest impact -- but its small-scale sustainable past is a story worth knowing.
