A conversation with Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert on the subject of the health of our planet.

 

The world is in serious crisis. Rising sea levels, destruction of habitat, loss of farmland, and a host of other outcomes of climate change are destroying the earth’s ecology and could destroy its most dangerous interloper, homo sapiens.

Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine and author of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, has devoted years of travel, research, and writing to the situation and what we can do to get back on course. Kolbert will bring her message as a Master Series speaker to the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, on Thursday, November 19, in her talk, “The Sixth Extinction.”

In a telephone interview from her western Massachusetts home, Kolbert says she will explore how fossil fuels and rising CO2 levels are brewing disaster with the climate. But, as she explains, that will be just a piece of her message to the green building community.

“The world that we inherited is really a world that has been evolving since the last major extinction 66 million years ago,” Kolbert says. “By causing this extinction, we’re undoing that; we’re unraveling this very complicated web of life. Predicted results include shorter food chains and ecosystems that are much less rich.”

Kolbert says her Greenbuild talk will explore the many ways in which we are bringing about this extinction event. “Unfortunately, it is not limited to climate change,” she says, which was the subject of her previous book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. There is also acidification of oceans, which Kolbert has called “the evil twin of climate change”; land conversion and introduced species, defined as those that are living outside their native range due to human activity.

The Sixth Extinction, which took the author to rainforest jungles, mountain ranges, and typical American backyards, details the world’s first five extinctions. A “sixth extinction” would be a game-changer, a human-driven extinction of a variety of plants and animals.

In the book, Kolbert details the damage that already has been done, including the near extinction of the Panamanian golden frog. “Amphibians have the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered class of animals,” Kolbert writes. “But also heading toward extinction are one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and sixth of all birds.”

She expects her Greenbuild talk to push attendees beyond typical discussions of climate change, although whether U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) members should be doing anything differently in their work is another matter. “That’s a good question,” Kolbert says. “I don’t claim to be an expert on green building practices. I’ll ask people to think about this constellation of issues, as opposed to just focusing on climate change. Unfortunately, we need to be thinking of all these issues, which is a big ask.”

Kolbert’s work has brought her into close contact with the world’s political figures with the clout to push environmental change. The 21st COP (Conference of the Parties), an international climate conference, will be held in Paris beginning November 30, on the heels of Greenbuild. The conference is being promoted as a historic event—Kolbert quotes Fatih Birol, the incoming director of the International Energy Agency, who called it “our last hope.” Kolbert realizes how dire the words sound.

“I think that when people say ‘our last hope,’ they mean we really need to curb emissions downward if we’re going to avoid some of the very worst effects,” Kolbert says. “We really don’t know where the border is, the threshold. If we can’t bend that curve—if it keeps going up, up, up—we’re locking in more and more damage. This situation is pretty serious; I can’t overstate that. But there’s not a point at which it wouldn’t still be smart to change things.”

Scientists have commonly thought that limiting the average global surface temperature increase of 2°C (3.6°F) would be adequate to avoid dangerous climate change. But there is a question, Kolbert says, as to whether we have already reached that limit.

“Are we going to lock in massive changes that cause mass migrations of people, that are very destabilizing for the world? There are 7.3 billion people in the world today. Everyone needs to eat. Everyone needs a place to live. If you really start to mess with where people can raise crops and live, you’re obviously creating a recipe for disaster.”

The Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, Australia, is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth.

Kolbert says ambivalence about climate change in the general public has many sources. “I definitely feel there is a disconnect,” she says. “There’s a constellation of reasons. There have been purposeful disinformation campaigns. A lot of people don’t want to believe it.”

The last chapter of The Sixth Extinction is titled “The Thing with Feathers,” a reference to Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers.” Having hope is human, and Kolbert lauds the many people who are environmentally conscious and want to create change. At home, she is used to talking about the subject with her three sons, a 21-year-old and 16-year-old twins. “They’ve really grown up with this issue,” Kolbert says. “I think this has sort of been a part of their childhood, for better or worse.” When people in the public ask her what they can do to help, the first place she points is to government.

“You really need to become active politically,” she says. “If people organize politically, then that will make a difference. It means getting candidates to pay attention to these issues. I urge people to get out and vote, to run for office themselves, or anything in between. People need to understand the issues and write their congressman.”

“In almost every municipality there are issues and debates,” Kolbert continues, including environmental topics and utility law questions. “As everybody knows,” she adds, “there’s a lot of money on the other side.”

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That sentiment is at the heart of 100 Resilient Cities, the Rockefeller Foundation’s $100 million effort launched to help El Paso and 99 other urban areas around the globe meet 21st-century challenges—from climate-change-induced disasters to deep-rooted economic and social problems. By making progress within this 100-metropolis nucleus, the rest of the world can share the benefits. “We may be called 100 Resilient Cities, but our work is not just about 100 cities,” says Michael Berkowitz, the president who oversees the program. “It’s about building the tools and frameworks so that all the world’s cities can use them. In other words, we’re trying to build a global practice of resilience, one that can help cities do better for their citizens in both good times and bad.”

The 102-year-old Rockefeller Foundation has spent generations addressing the needs of cities because urban settings are uniquely relevant to us all. They’re hubs of culture, business, and technology. Today, more than half the world calls a city home. “By the middle of this century, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities,” Berkowitz adds, “and those urban areas will face greater threats than ever before from factors such as climate change and globalization.”

The concept of resilience refers to how well a city’s constituent parts—its businesses and institutions, the systems that keep it functioning, its residents—can survive, adapt to, and overcome adversity. That adversity generally comes in two forms: chronic stresses (entrenched problems like food and water shortages, drug addiction and violence, and economic deprivation) and acute shocks (distinct disasters like earthquakes, floods, and severe hurricanes). A city’s resilience boils down to four overarching aspects—leadership and strategy, health and well-being, economy and society, and infrastructure and environment—and draws in disparate fields, from sustainability to disaster risk reduction to economic and social justice.

If the scope of resilience sounds far reaching, that’s by design. “It’s about recognizing the intersection of social, physical, and economic issues,” says Max Young, vice president of global communications and marketing at 100 Resilient Cities. “You can’t think about responding to a storm without thinking about poverty: By and large, the poor and vulnerable are the most impacted by storms, especially when you get weeks and months removed. Similarly, you can’t think about earthquakes without thinking about small businesses, because half of small businesses don’t reopen after a disaster.”

At the same time, one resilience intervention often creates a cascade of positive outcomes. Young mentions Medellin, Colombia, a 100 Resilient Cities designee that was once at the center of the global drug trade. For the population living in poverty on the city’s hillside, narcotics seemed to be the only viable career: They were cut off from Medellin’s public transportation system and, as a result, were several hours removed from jobs in the city’s economic center. But when the city built a system of gondolas into the hillside and linked it into the subway system, things changed. “People went from having a commute of several hours to 20 minutes,” Young says. “All of the sudden, they have access to these jobs in the valley floor.” Community centers appeared at the base of the gondolas, new buildings on the hillsides drew more people to the city’s outskirts, and drug-related crime and violence fell along the way. “By solving an economic problem, they actually solved physical and social problems,” Young says.

In 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation announced 100 Resilient Cities, a program designed to improve the resilience prospects of cities around the world. Since 2013, the program has selected 67 locales, from Bangkok, Thailand, to Lisbon, Portugal, to New York City. (The remaining 33 will be selected next year.) Each selection was based on the cities’ track records for building partnerships, their leaderships’ propensity for innovation, and other criteria. Along with connecting these 100 cities to a network of more than 50 partners from the private, public, academic, and nongovernmental organization sectors to help implement resilience measures, the program funds two to three years’ worth of salary for each city’s chief resilience officer (CRO). These advisors report to mayors and chief executives, garner support for resilience-building projects by working across government departments and the broader community, and create strategies based on efficient, cost-effective solutions that have profound, positive impacts.

“The CRO organizes people, brings initiatives together, breaks down silos, and makes sure we’re all moving in the same direction and with the same vision toward the same goal,” Nicole Ferrini says.

El Paso—Ferrini’s lifelong home—was among the first cities selected by 100 Resilient Cities, and Ferrini took her post as CRO in December 2014. Ferrini holds degrees in architecture and interior design and a wealth of experience in urban planning. “But you know what really prepared me to do this?” says Ferrini. “All my time with USGBC.” In 2006, Ferrini helped found the USGBC Chihuahuan Desert Chapter, spending nearly a decade getting the region familiar with the concepts of green building and sustainability. Resilience and sustainability, as Ferrini sees it, are inextricably linked. “Resilience zooms out from the built environment, organic foods, all those places where sustainability tends to live, into this greater umbrella that includes economic development and social justice. But when I map it out in my mind, it always drills back down to that core foundation that sustainability provides. Is resilience different? Yes. Can you separate the two? In my view, absolutely not.”

Joseph Riccillo, chairman of the board for the Chihuahuan Desert Chapter, who has high praise for Ferrini’s early efforts as El Paso’s CRO, agrees. “To be honest, I think sustainability started the conversation and made people more aware of the need for resilience. Resilience and sustainability go hand in hand.”

For the last six months, Ferrini has been working out of the city’s Office of Resilience and Sustainability, building on her years of experience with the USGBC Chihuahuan Desert Chapter to hash out El Paso’s resilience strategy. While the region has occasional, disastrous flooding—the last such incident occurred in 2006—it’s not as exposed to the same acute shocks as other 100 Resilient Cities locales. Instead, Ferrini expects El Paso’s resilience strategy to address those everyday stressors that affect the city’s long-term stability: economic diversity, access to quality affordable housing, access to water in an arid climate, and, in particular, health and wellness. “Health and wellness has been a huge driver in every single conversation we’ve had,” Ferrini says. “How can we leverage a physical environment within our city that supports wellness for the individual? How do we create an economic system that allows people to be comfortable enough to focus on their own health and wellness? How do we get past some of these preventable disease components? How do we reduce the strain on our local healthcare system?”

The answers to these questions and others transcend borders. Ciudad Juarez—another 100 Resilient Cities designee just over the Rio Grande in Chihuahua, Mexico—and Las Cruces, New Mexico, share many of the same resilience challenges as El Paso, as do other desert locales around the world. “The capacity to survive, adapt, and thrive in the face of 21st-century challenges is critical for any city,” says Kurt Fenstermacher, assistant to the city manager for El Paso. “El Paso, however, is unique in that we are positioned to set the standard for safety, prosperity, diversity, and human health in the context of a growing international metroplex nestled in the arid climate of the desert southwest.”

As part of formulating the city’s resilience strategy, Ferrini has connected with more than 25,000 residents through social media and met face to face with hundreds of community stakeholders through a series of intimate roundtable discussions. And when her audience’s opinions dissent from her own, she opens her ears. “Really, I want to hear what they think resilience means for their community and measure those perceptions against the activities we have going on,” Ferrini says.

Recent strides in green building have helped further the resilience conversation in El Paso. The city is home to Paisano Green, a 73-unit complex that’s the first LEED Platinum-certified senior public housing building in the country. (Within the next half decade, all of El Paso’s public housing will be upgraded to LEED Silver standards or better.)

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SUNY’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry opens the doors to its Gateway Center—an unparalleled model of green building design.

 

I remember telling them the building had to be beyond Platinum,” says Dr. Cornelius “Neil” B. Murphy, Jr., senior fellow for environmental and sustainable systems at SUNY’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) in Syracuse, New York.

In 2008, when interested parties began laying out what they envisioned for the school’s new Gateway Center, they met with Architerra, a Boston-based boutique firm specializing in high-performance sustainable building design. “We were considering architects,” recalls Murphy, who was ESF president at the time the building was planned and constructed, “and I remember the discussion of what we would require as a minimum for the building: ‘Given you are the College of Environmental Science and Forestry, it’s likely you’ll want a green building.’” Yes, the planning committee agreed, it needs to be green. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver certification was subsequently proposed. “I remember us saying, ‘No, that’s not sufficient.’” LEED Gold certification was then put on the table. “Again, we said, ‘No, that’s not what we want.’” It had to be Platinum. It had to be beyond Platinum.

Chief among the projects proposed in the college’s Climate Action Plan, the Gateway Center is a giant step toward the ultimate goal: carbon neutrality. The building, which formally opened in September 2013, is both a hub for campus activity and a teaching tool that demonstrates sustainability. As the

2014 fall semester commenced, the center was fully operational and had established itself as the focal point of campus activities.

According to Murphy, the center was built, in major part, “to educate our students about how to put their education to practical use.” To that end, the design included features that would evoke questions from students and visitors about how it works. In addition to housing faculty, student, and staff activities, “The building itself had to teach,” he says. “I think that was a guiding philosophy.”

Among the factors that helped the building achieve LEED Platinum certification are its site selection—repurposed land that had been a parking lot near the college’s main entrance, development density and community connectivity, public transportation access, water-efficient landscaping, optimized energy performance, onsite renewable energy, construction waste management, recycled content in materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, stormwater design, and heat island effect. To aid in the effort, neighboring Syracuse University donated a 15-foot strip of property for SUNY’s use and also granted a 15-foot easement.

The integrated high-performance center features a green roof planted with rare native plant species from eastern Lake Ontario dunes and alvar pavement barrens from the northeastern end of the lake. The roof hosts many research and demonstration projects, and serves as a teaching tool for water resource engineering classes. “It’s the synthesis of what is being taught in that course,” notes Murphy.

Students outside the Gateway

The Center holds a portion of the Roosevelt Wildlife collection.

In addition, the Gateway Center—with its Trailhead Cafe, ESF College Bookstore, and a large promenade full of tables where students study, eat, and hold discussion groups—combine for a space that feels intended for them. Furthermore, three large conference rooms, when opened up, accommodate 400 visitors. Also, a portion of the renowned Roosevelt Wild Life Collection is now permanently on display. The Office of Undergraduate Admissions and Outreach—the two departments that have the most contact with the public and make the first impression—have also found a home in the center. In short, it is the college’s very epicenter. “I think the focus on student space but also outreach to the community really dictated the functions that would be served by that building,” says Murphy.

Of particular note is the combined heat-and-power system (CHP), which generates significantly more energy than is consumed by the Gateway Center. (It supplies the campus with 60 percent of its heating needs and 20 percent of its electrical power.) The system serves not only the center but also four other buildings on campus. Though, Murphy notes, “We need another operating year before we can say if it achieves the energy savings that we would anticipate.”

The idea for the center really began with the students—there wasn’t “a holistic space that we could call our student space,” explains Murphy, who shares the students’ mantra: If you are going to teach green, you have to be green. “They absolutely love it,” he says of student response to the building. Also needed was a place that would literally serve as the gateway to the college. “We wanted this building to meet both of those needs. We wanted it to be a special gateway and a special space for our students.” (“Special” is a word Murphy uses often in reference to the center.)

Originally a college of forestry established in 1911, ESF’s planning committee wanted to use as much wood in the building as possible—they aspired to displace structural steel and replace it with glulam beams and other wood applications. “It’s very important to us, given our history, to show how wood can be used in a large modern green building,” Murphy explains. Douglas firs from the Pacific Northwest form beams; other veneers are made of timber from New York State forests. The effect is a striking architectural composition of natural elements.

The city of Syracuse has a number of LEED-certified buildings, but this was to be a building that would better connect the college with the greater community. Or, as Murphy puts it, “The Gateway Center was to demonstrate to the community what an extraordinarily designed building can do, and have it be a place where the community would want to visit.” It has proven to be exactly that. “Most of the goals we set were achieved,” notes Murphy. The primary construction material is wood; the school’s history and roots are reflected; and a state-of-the-art bioclimatic shell exemplifies the entire mission. “It provides a high-performance space that optimizes indoor environmental quality,” affirms Murphy.

Back when the idea for the Gateway Center was taking shape, there were no existing LEED-certified buildings on campus, though ESF did renovate a former chemistry laboratory building, which now houses engineering facilities, to achieve LEED Silver certification. Since then, a new residence hall has been LEED Gold certified, and the school conserves energy in several other buildings on campus by lighting and adding high-efficiency motors, photovoltaic systems, and operating some of the campus vehicles using a biofuel system fed by student-produced biodiesel. The energy and sustainability projects that are part of the Gateway Center and the rest of the campus form a core of resources that ESF relied on in developing a new bachelor’s program in sustainable energy management. It has become one of the fastest-growing majors on campus.

Currently, the Campus Climate Action Committee—made up of several faculty, half a dozen students, representatives from the physical plant and from Syracuse University, and several administrators—recommends and implements different activities with the ultimate goal of reducing the school’s carbon footprint. “It’s a cross-section committee,” notes Murphy, saying they are now looking at designs for a new academic research building that will include as many sustainable features as possible. Also on tap is a second CHP facility—the goal, once again, being carbon neutrality.

Many members of the ESF campus community were involved in the Gateway Center’s making, particularly Michael Kelleher, who is now a faculty member but then served as ESF executive director of energy and sustainability. Kelleher put together a proposal—funded by the New York State Energy Research Development Agency—that resulted in a million-dollar grant, which helped support the CHP system. Additionally, the chair of the environmental and forest biology faculty, together with a faculty member in the landscape architecture department and Kelleher, presented a proposal to the New York State Environmental Facilities Corporation; a resulting half-million-dollar grant helped fund resources for the green roof.

When it came to the building of ESF’s Gateway Center, there was no shortage of enthusiasm, no lack of drive or vision. And just about everyone played some kind of role. “I probably led the need for this project to be special,” says Murphy. “I tried my best to reflect the ethos of our students and what I thought our community needed from this project.” The building is the very picture of his success.

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