Vermont Environmental Consortium

And

BRATTLEBORO REFORMER

#42, January 20, 2008
A Statehouse Breakfast of Champions
by
Daniel Hecht

There was quite a crush – barely room to walk. At first, people clustered near the food and drink tables, but as others came the crowd spread out to fill the room. Everywhere, groups of three or four, animated by each other’s company and the din of chatter, gestured, laughed, emphasized points with stabbing index fingers. Lots of handshaking, back-slapping, introductions, compliments.

Every host hopes a gathering will have the right social ingredients: some bigwigs and celebs, the right proportion of wags, wits, big thinkers, earnest believers, neophytes and old hands, vivacious types and stuffy codgers, to keep things interesting. Enough people who know each other, enough new faces.

The event last Thursday had all the elements. But it was no ordinary party; it was a Statehouse breakfast reception for legislators and members of Vermont’s green enterprise community.

Attending were environmental scientists and engineers, educators, renewable energy entrepreneurs, nonprofit administrators, and legislators. There were videographers specializing in environmental films, business people who market green building materials, recycling program coordinators, agricultural researchers, state agency administrators, a green industries-advocating lieutenant governor, presidents and deans of colleges and universities committed to environmental education and campus sustainability. Environmental lawyers, community development consultants, pollution remediators, composters, green building contractors: a wildly diverse bunch.

They represented a good sampling of Vermont’s green enterprise community – AKA the environmental industry “cluster.”

Hosted by Vermont Environmental Consortium, the event was important because these environmental professionals – expert practitioners in many different fields – represent the sector that’s Vermont’s best hope for economic growth.

Nationally, the environmental industries sector has grown at substantially faster rates than the rest of the economy for 31 of the last 36 years. In 2005, Environmental Business International statistics show the sector growing at 6% while the overall U.S. GDP growth was 4%. For 2006, EBI says green industries grew at 14.5%; for 2007, they’re calculating a whopping 17.2% growth rate.

Impressive; but how big a part of the U.S. economy does this represent? This depends on how you define the sector. EBI has a fairly narrow definition of “environmental industry,” while Vermont Environmental Consortium (like Eco Canada, the Canadian sector council for the industry), has a more inclusive definition. But even EBI says it’s 2.4% of the U.S. GDP. By comparison, the mining industry represents 1.9%, transportation and warehousing 2.7%, accommodation and food 2.6%.

In other words, the green enterprise sector is big.

And it’s getting bigger, fast, propelled by several factors. One is energy: With rising concern about the impact and availability of fossil energy sources, investment in renewables development is soaring. Acknowledging the trend, the new U.S. Energy Bill authorizes workforce training to prepare 3 million people for “green collar” jobs in the coming years.

Another is climate change. As we come understand its potentially catastrophic effects, people are looking for ways to prevent it. This effort is largely focused on reducing carbon emissions, and it has sparked a huge investment of capital and human effort into activities that can do that. The trade in carbon offsets alone mushroomed into a $30 billion industry in 2007.

The stick of pending disaster is supplemented by a very sweet carrot of opportunity. As Jeff Wolfe, CEO of groSolar, recently put it, “There are boat-loads of money to be made” in green industries. With the caveat, of course, that public sector investment in incentives and appropriate regulatory reform support private investment.

But perhaps most important driver, at least here in Vermont, is values: the sense of a moral obligation and heartfelt longing to live in harmony with the natural world. We love our green hills, farms, and rural communities; we yearn for a cease-fire in mankind’s long war against nature. We’re proud to live where we might spot a bear or moose in our backyard -- in a neighborhood that, perhaps, the noble catamount once again finds desirable.

We love this place. We want our kids to inherit it in good shape. We know that if we don’t work to preserve it, we’ll lose it.

I can wax reverent and poetic about this because I have statistics that prove the role of values. Eco Canada’s surveys show that “desire to improve the environment” is overwhelmingly the top reason for people entering the environmental job market, cited by 78% as their foremost motivation. (Only 20% cited salary.) Another indicator: Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility promotes business practices that benefit not only the bottom line but communities, employees, and the environment. With over 700 members, VBSR is by far the largest such organization in the U.S., showing that, sure, Vermont business people want to make money, but they want to make it in the right way.

The Green Enterprise Legislative Breakfast was intended to honor Vermont’s environmental practitioners, the champions of the new green economy -- the men and women working every day to foster environmental and economic sustainability. (Of course, we also rather hoped our legislators, also champions, would take note.)

And a good time was had by all.

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Daniel Hecht is a novelist and executive director of Vermont Environmental Consortium. For more information on any Green Grapevine topic, contact vec@norwich.edu.

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