Vermont Environmental Consortium

Vermont Environmental Monitor

January 2006
Vermont Environmental Consortium & the Green Valley
by
Daniel Hecht

News about the Vermont Environmental Consortium (VEC) has been appearing in the Monitor and other periodicals with increasing frequency recently, but many readers are probably not sure just what it is or what it does. Similarly, references to VEC’s Green Valley vision have been cropping up more and more often, as in Gov. Douglas’s repeated references in his January 5^th State of the State address. It seems like a good time to introduce VEC to Monitor readers.

VEC is a growing, statewide alliance of 45 environmental businesses, educational institutions, public agencies, and non-profit organizations. Members are active in environmental engineering, education, renewable energy, environmental law, sustainable community development consultation, solid and hazardous waste management, policy making and administration, green consumer products, technology R&D, sustainable agriculture, and many other fields.

Incorporated in 2001 as a non-profit organization, VEC is governed by a 15-member board of directors that includes officers of environmental companies, scientists, educators, state agency staff, and public officials. Norwich University kindly houses the VEC office and serves as its host institution.

Mission

VEC was created to help green enterprises thrive. But since our definition of “enterprise” and “environmental” is broad (see sidebar), and success depends on many factors (see below), the end result is a unique organization with a very diverse spectrum of activities.

Concisely, our mission is to:

promote sustainable growth in environmental industries
enhance environment-related education
encourage development and dissemination of sciences and technologies that benefit the natural environment, and
foster the general knowledge and application of sound stewardship practices.

The Green Valley

No, it has nothing to do with the large green guy on the frozen food packages. It’s kind of a cross between Silicon Valley and the Green Mountains – a vision of Vermont as a place where environmental enterprises provide a major revenue stream and where economic growth develops around sustainable practices.

The idea was first suggested in the mid-1990’s, but was best articulated by VEC’s founding president, Peter Murray, in 2002. Since then, the term and vision have been endorsed by an ever-expanding circle, including state officials of all three parties.

We see it as a vision for Vermont’s future that makes the most of the state’s strengths while minimizing its weaknesses.

Prime among Vermont’s strengths are its great natural beauty, its relatively clean environment, and its reputation for producing quality goods. Less recognized are its large (per capita) number of scientists, educators, engineers, and entrepreneurs in technical fields; the independent, outspoken nature of its citizens; and its strong community traditions.

One of its oft-bemoaned weaknesses is that it is not generally viewed as a good place to do business. Complaints include restrictive land use and environmental regulations, lack of a large public purse to fund incentives, lots of dirt roads and narrow bridges, and those outspoken, meddlesome citizens who sometimes impede conventional economic development.

But the Green Valley vision overcomes many of these disadvantages. Those same meddlesome citizens, for example, are the embodiment of American democracy, and their insistence on being heard – usually about better ways of doing things, and on preserving community character and values -- is an asset for the Green Valley vision. The same constituencies that battle box stores or tire-burning are far more likely to welcome enterprises that benefit the environment, maintain strong local ties, and contribute to a region’s self-sufficiency.

VEC sees the Green Valley vision as continuing Vermont’s traditions of respect for farms and forests and the communities that depend upon them; of frugality and pragmatism; of independence and self-sufficiency. It’s a model of economic development that’s appropriate for a future that must be increasingly concerned with sustainability.

Activities

Of course, the agenda is hugely ambitious. How does one go about accomplishing these good things?

VEC works with its members in matters large and small to advance individual enterprises and to improve the environmental sector as a whole. On a daily basis, this often includes supporting individual businesses in very concrete ways.

In 2005, for example, Clean Earth Technology of North Ferrisburgh requested help hosting a prospective client from the People’s Republic of China. The visitor, general manager of a state-owned petroleum company, was coming to look at CET’s proprietary pump technology as a possible solution to their enormous pollution problem. But CET’s small staff was not well prepared to host a foreign visitor -- who spoke no English -- for three days. So VEC found a translator, arranged transportation, and set up an itinerary that included visits to CET’s facility, to a petroleum leak site undergoing remediation, and to the statehouse; a meeting with the lt. governor, lunch with Agency of Commerce international trade staff, and a conference with DEC Hazardous Waste Division staff for an overview of Vermont’s highly-successful petroleum cleanup program. Our goal was to encourage the Chinese company to do business in Vermont and to suggest ideas for programs that would accomplish the widespread remediation they need.

At any given time, VEC is working on many such services to individual member companies, colleges, organizations, and agency programs.

Many of VEC’s activities benefit the sector in larger and more general ways.

We host two or three major conferences each year to foster the exchange of ideas, encourage networking among Vermont firms, promote sound policy, and raise the profile of the sector. We hold smaller events that bring policy makers, legislators, and agency staff together with members of the business and education communities to share news and views and forge working contacts. We represent Vermont’s companies and colleges at international trade fairs and missions. We identify troublesome policy issues, assemble teams to develop solutions, and offer objective recommendations to regulators. We also circulate RFPs of relevance to the sector, help student groups with research projects, host green job fairs, and consult and make referrals for green business and green community development.

Finally, though it hasn’t happened yet, VEC’s goals include seeking federal and philanthropic funding to advance major projects in environmental research, technology, and renewable energy.

Green Values and Greenbacks

A number of strategic considerations shape our agenda, and they’re worth mentioning because they’re probably relevant to the success of the whole sector as much as to VEC as an organization.

One is that, more than most workforce constituencies, environmental professionals tend to be moved by personal values as much as profit motive. Yes, they want to make a pile of money in what will or should be a burgeoning field. But they’ve chosen their field because it helps the natural environment – helps, literally, to save the world. Similarly, Vermont citizens are moved by a moral impulse to conserve their beautiful landscape as well as the desire to have reasonably secure lives with healthy living conditions, food, water, and jobs.

To describe the theory underlying VEC’s market-based approach to environmental preservation – or, you could say, its green approach to economic development -- I often use a simple graphic:

From the profit motive standpoint, you can’t sell environmental goods or services unless the general culture and government policies foster a demand for them. From the values standpoint, you can’t clean up pollution or switch to climate-friendly renewables without buying the goods or services of environmental professionals. Success in either requires progress in both.

As simple as this seems, it can be hard to explain the crucial values component to hard-nosed, bottom-line business people; and it can be just as hard to explain the vital importance of markets, technology, and profit incentives to traditional environmentalists. This kind of paradigm-busting is one of VEC’s most important “big-picture” efforts.

Systemic Synergy

The founding impetus of VEC was to facilitate partnering among Vermont environmental firms so that they could jointly pursue larger, national or international contracts. But as the above graphic suggests, the whole system must be addressed; the whole wheel must turn. Our conception of synergy has grown; we now think in terms of collaborative processes not just among businesses but between very different critters in the environmental jungle. The business community alone can’t single-handedly improve market conditions; state agencies alone can’t foster innovation and entrepreneurial leadership; the non-profit community alone can’t foster the values of stewardship and sustainability. Educational institutions alone can’t assure that information gets to every place where it’s needed.

So many of VEC’s activities focus on connecting these constituencies, building synergy among the larger community of environment-related enterprises (see sidebar). We define the sector broadly because we think it’s a more realistic real measure and because all the components of environmental challenges and opportunities are so closely connected. In scientific terms, this means linking diverse disciplines and bodies of knowledge; in implementation terms, it means linking public sector with private sector and policy makers with the enterprise community, people with technology, academia with business, and local communities with statewide resources. The consortium model is inherently a good mechanism for bringing these together and creating systemic solutions.

Leverage Points

Given the scope of the challenge and the limits of staff and financial resources, VEC seeks to focus on issues that bear upon multiple problems. One example of this is our efforts to improve brownfields redevelopment.

Surprisingly few people recognize the full importance of those empty buildings or abandoned lots in most of our towns. But most brownfield sites occur in prime real estate: historic downtowns, riverfronts, transportation corridors, former manufacturing sites. Redeveloping those sites affects not just the environment, but the economy and our quality of life: removing pollutants improves public health; redeveloping empty buildings revitalizes downtowns and preserves historic architecture, creates economic stimulus, reduces sprawl and conserves farm and forest land; it even improves net tax revenues by avoiding unnecessary extension of infrastructure to outlying sites.

Our April, 2005 conference on brownfields, our ongoing policy working group, and other activities are intended to improve Vermont’s brownfields program so that more properties enter the redevelopment process and benefit our communities in all these ways.

Agriculture is another leverage point -- an important element of Vermont’s economy and identity with a convergent set of environmental challenges and enormous potentials in under-used resources. Implementing new ideas, practices, and technologies on Vermont’s farms will improve their profitability, reduce their negative impact on natural ecosystems, provide local, renewable energy sources, develop value-added products that build the regional economy – all while protecting Vermont’s rural traditions and beautiful landscape.

The huge attendance at our Agriculture and the Environment Conference of December, 2005 shows that farmers, policy-makers, and environmental professionals increasingly recognize the leveraging potential in agriculture. VEC expects to have an ongoing role in promoting sustainable agricultural practice and policy.

Providing Tools

The environmentalism of the last forty years was based to a large extent on opposition to misuses and abuses of nature. This was (and remains) an important function of environmental protection: the public needed to know that pollutants caused human birth defects or killed wildlife, and we simply had to stop putting poisons in our water and soil, or exterminating animal or plant species, etc.

The positive side of this cultural process was that we were awakened to our collective impact on the natural world and to the ways we imperil the survival of animals, plants, and humans. The negative side is that, for many, “environmentalism” took on a connotation of conflict and of negativity, especially towards economic development.

In the last twenty years, a market-based approach has emerged and has proven quite effective. Human actions are driven by human needs, and if humans think their needs can be met by killing elephants for their ivory, or burning rainforests to create cropland, that’s what they’ll do. Market-based solutions work not just because they acknowledge the inevitable primacy of human needs, but because they point out the greater material value of, say, living elephants or intact rainforest ecosystems. Today, increasingly, we see that the natural environment is our life and livelihood, and that our needs are best served by protecting it; substantial economic opportunities lie in making better use of resources and preserving natural systems.

Of course, as oil supplies dwindle, as climate change progresses, as rising populations put pressure on resources, the paradigm is already evolving further in much of the world. That is, from the relative luxury of market-based entrepreneurialism as a driving motive for environmental protection, there’s a growing emphasis on providing basic assurances -- water, food, energy, survivable living conditions, and jobs. If we don’t keep the natural world healthy, use renewable energy, and sustainably budget use of resources, we won’t be able to provide these.

VEC’s approach has been to avoid paradigms of conflict and focus instead on providing the tools that create financial incentives and provide basic assurances. For example: Yes, we feel there are ways the Vermont brownfields program could be improved; but the best way to accomplish this is not to condemn the existing program or its proponents but to identify specific glitches and articulate specific ways to remedy them. We scout the landscape for examples of successful programs, mine their ideas, brainstorm, formulate recommendations, and look for ways to implement positive change.

Innovation Happens

One of my greatest pleasures in recent months has been to sit in a room with a bunch of experts in various disciplines with a problem to solve, and watch their body language. At first, people act in the usual, decorous way – using proper speech, politely taking turns, making only minor hand gestures. After a little while, as the possibilities start to dawn on us, sparks begin to fly. Solutions start popping like popcorn, people gesticulate, all talk at once, laugh and cuss and get generally hyperactive. Arthur Koestler suggested that this energized state derives from a neurocognitive process that he labeled “bisociation” – the convergence of two (or more) planes or systems of thought. It’s what makes a pun funny, and it’s what makes new ideas emerge from static thought habits.

To describe it, I can’t resist borrowing a bit from CVPS Cow Power’s motto, surely one of the funniest, Energy Happens.

So: Innovation Happens. Under the right conditions, anyway. It’s inspiring because it suggests a renewed spirit of optimism in environmental circles.

Importantly, innovation is not just an idea pertaining to technology. It applies equally to how to get people to understand something; how to create effective teams; how to unify or motivate a community; how to structure an organization; how to build a business; how to rethink policy; how to re-envision the future.

Again, the consortium structure serves this process well in that it can bring together many different perspectives, and then – innovation happens. It has proven so productive that it has emerged as one of the core strategic functions of the organization, shaping our agenda in many ways.

What’s Next for VEC? Some Coming Activities

Capabilities survey and web-accessible database: We’ll be sending a questionnaire to every environmental business in Vermont. The resulting profile of activities will end up in a directory to be handed out at trade fairs and missions, and in a web-accessible, user-searchable database that will make it easy for clients to shop for goods and services and for Vermont firms to find partners or subcontractors.
Green Valley Institute: Our goal is to enlist the participation of every Vermont college and university in a program that will create environmental internships, enrich environmental curricula, foster co-curricular programs, and encourage technology transfer.
Globe 2006: The largest environmental technology trade show and conference in the world, March 29 – 31, in Vancouver, B.C. VEC will occupy a booth, distribute information on Vermont companies, and, working with the Vermont Agency of Commerce and U.S. Commercial Service, facilitate one-to-one matchmaking.
Green branding initiative: With members of the business community, educational institutions, and state agencies, VEC will be working to consolidate Vermont’s image as the place to receive an environmental education, shop for green products or services, or start a green company.

Daniel Hecht is executive director of the Vermont Environmental Consortium and the author of six novels published in the U.S. and abroad. He lives in Montpelier.

For more information about VEC, visit www.VECgreenvalley.org, or write to vec@norwich.edu.

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