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Green Grows Up — Page 3
“We are trying to establish SHIFT as a human-to-human
organization,” says Geiger, a management consultant
who has worked with a wide range of industries. “You
can’t lob idea grenades out there; you have to
go in and engage. You have to build relationships with
government, the business community, the faith community,
the unions. You will have much more success approaching
them on a human level.”
It also helps if you’ve done your homework, which
is why SHIFT has developed spreadsheet-based modelling
tools that analyse the impact of dozens of possible
strategic moves—i.e., “use hybrid shunt
locomotives,” “prevent the incineration
of plastics”—to see which do the most atmospheric
good.
Gentle, fact-based nudging and one-to-one appeals will
help get us to Vancouver 2.0, but again, so will good
old-fashioned competitive drive. As consumers insist
on all things green, we’ll move into an era of
unprecedented eco-one-upmanship. (Auto-body shops, dry
cleaners, new-home builders, and zinc miners now advertise
themselves as “green.”) Consumers will quickly
sort out who’s really acting sustainably and who’s
just along for the ride. Before long, we’ll barely
raise an eyebrow when we come across the “first
Canada Green Building Council-certified Tim Hortons”
or the “first waterless-urinal-equipped super-ferry”—though
both would, of course, be welcome.
The green-building bar will continue to be moved up;
what was cutting-edge six months back is now old news.
The competition will keep ratcheting up in coming years
until a silver rating will be considered so-so, gold
will be barely good enough, and platinum will be passé.
When ultra-healthy, high-efficiency, low-impact buildings
become as common as colds, Vancouver 2.0 will embrace
the next ring out: the so-called “living”
building.
“A living building will generate all its own energy
on site, capture and treat all its own water, and maximize
energy efficiency and beauty,” explains Jason
McLennan, CEO of the Cascadia Green Building Council.
Though McLennan is based in Seattle, the council focusses
its research on the greater bioregion and maintains
an office on Granville Island.
Nobody has yet built a living building. The concept
is still at the outer edge of what the market can deliver
and existing technologies can accomplish—though
the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability,
the cutting-edge facility in the works for the Finning
Lands near east False Creek, may one day qualify. The
next project to watch: the redevelopment of Little Mountain,
which could prove a model for neighbourhood-level sustainability.
The shift to Vancouver 2.0 is already well underway,
but like those leafy streetscapes of 2020, much of the
evolution is happening just off-stage. It’s an
exciting era, one in which heroes and anti-heroes will
emerge from the unlikeliest of places. “We’ve
been leading urbanistically for 20 years,” says
Toderian, “and Vancouver will always be something
of a model. Now it’s about finding the next level
of the bar.”
One thing’s for sure: it doesn’t feel as
high as it used to.
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