Decompressing from West Coast Green 2009

Eco Factory spent the last week in San Francisco attending West Coast Green, one of the largest green building conferences in the world. The three days of official activities at the Fort Mason Center was a veritable who's who of green building — and it's no wonder. A plethora of major players in the green space call Northern California their home. While on site we captured hours of video, including keynote presentations by green leaders like Ray Anderson, and interviews with Eric Corey Freed of Organic Architect, Allison Arieff of Sunset magazine and the New York Times design blog, and David McConville of Elumenati.

While I'm name dropping, I have to give my most sincere recommendation to visit the California Academy of Sciences and to view the Fragile Earth presentation. While our special Perceiving Home tour of the stars was personally narrated by the impeccable David McConville and given musical soul by violist Christen Lien, the Fragile Earth presentation shares a similarly immersive experience that explains the sheer scope of our universe and the impossible odds that created our planet in a way that could shatter the foundations of the most devout climate skeptic. I exited the planetarium with mixed emotions: our universe is so chaotic, it's a thermodynamic miracle that this planet exists at all. Intelligent Design would bring me solace — both knowing that I'm more than a microbe on a tiny grain of sand in a vast desert, and that I'd eventually have the opportunity experience the universe in a way that conventional existence simply doesn't allow. Certainly, I have a heightened appreciation for our perfect little spec.

For all practical purposes, our planet is absolutely unique in this endless universe.

Bringing my experiences back to a more human scale, spending time in San Francisco puts perspective on what I would call the green meta-game. As one of the most progressive areas in the country, San Francisco blends high-dollar industry with stringent environmental regulation and a bohemian undercurrent that creates a very multifaceted city. While my journey never brought me south of downtown San Francisco, what I experienced of the city is very bicycle and pedestrian friendly, and a wide variety of public transportation options are available. While locals were quick to inform me that living in San Francisco is financially demanding, at any point in time I was generally a 15 minute car ride from a small town or absolute wilderness. That amount of time in Orlando barely gets you out of downtown.

San Franciscans are also much more involved in open conversation, from both those involved in the green space and the skeptics. In our Central Florida home base, there is a pervasive "live-and-let-live" attitude that allows the GHG-concerned and climate skeptics to co-exist without stepping on each others toes. On multiple occasions, San Franciscans at West Coast Green would hotly debate on everything from the widespread use of government subsidies to the economic sense of vehicle electrification. While this contention creates a tense environment for an out-of-towner, it does produce dialog that simply doesn't occur on our side of the country. A colleague of mine pointed out that this is why some of the ideas proposed and passed in Northern California don't translate well to many other areas.

Now that I'm back in Orlando, we have a landslide of information from West Coast Green 2009 that I'm exited to share with you. None of this would have been possible without the help of Ian Bryan and the entire Sensible City team, specifically Kylie Black, Diedra Case, and Pamela Wright. In addition to making sure that we took home as much media coverage from West Coast Green as humanly possible, the crew also showed me a few awesome gems of natural beauty and San Franciscan culture on our last day in town. Thanks a ton!