Environmental Sustainability
Concession Room at Warren Alvarado Oslo School
10:45am Breakout Session
Moderator: Marshall Johnson (N.D. Audubon Society)
Panelists: Roger Garton (RREAL), Dan Svedarsky (UM Crookston Natural Resources), Crystal
Rayamajhi (UND Earth Systems Science & Policy), and Amber Finley (Northstar Council)
Marshall: Our focus here today is to talk about ideas, solutions, and other community issues.
Rural communities in terms of environmental sustainability have an outsized opportunity to
contribute.
First Speaker – Dan
- Crookston in Motion – has been meeting for a year and a half. One thing this group
has developed is “Destiny Drivers” - sustainability as a guiding principle.
o Creating a more walkable community – making it so we don’t have to get in
an automobile to do everything
o Building from the inside out
o Locally grown food – stimulate local economies so people know who is
growing their food, and keep dollars local
o Red Lake River – kayaking, fishing, aesthetics.
o Soil – we’re treating our soil like dirt, we need to do better than that.
- When we look at communities, we look at not only the town but the resources that
surround the town.
- Why shouldn’t we make things so the operating expenses are minimized?
- Crookston area community fund – communiversity fund –
- Cattails as a bioenergy resource – 95,000 acres of cattails in NW MN that provide a
biomass resource. How do we get them out of the wetland basins and utilize the bio
resources and nutrients?
- UMN – Crookston has an active student group. One of their projects is a made in
USA recyclable water bottles to reduce the use of water bottles. “Hydration stations”
to teach people where water comes from.
- GreenCorps program (part of AmeriCorps) – 3 students working, 1 wrote a grant that
saved the city of Crookston thousands of dollars
Second speaker – Roger
- Solar technology
- Solar electricity (what most people are familiar with). Photovotaics (?) – using solar
energy to generate electricity.
o Solar thermal – solar energy for heating processes
o solarthermal water heating – using solar to heat water for showers, washing
dishes, etc.
o solar air heating
- Does solar work in northern climates? Yes, it works exceptionally well. MN has a
solar resource comparable to Miami, FL.
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Is solar right for me? Maybe, possibly – many factors to look at. Need to look at local
resources and your location. You have to make sure you are getting sun and your
environment is right.
Is now a good time to get into the solar industry? Maybe, possibly – many factors to
look at
In the last 10 years solar price has come down.
Solar is very viable economically.
Looking a lot at agricultural applications. Many opportunities are emerging.
o Ex: Process heat for drying biomass – solar technology can speed up process;
solar thermal to extend growing seasons by using solar to heat soil and
lengthen your growing season
Solar isn’t the ‘silver bullet’ that will solve all of our energy problems – it’s one piece
of the puzzle
Community ownership model – members purchase, own, or rent a part of the system
so many can benefit.
There are some rebate programs for solar energy systems both federally and at the
state level.
Third speaker – Crystal
- I grew up on a dairy farm surrounded by nature. There weren’t a lot of people in my
hometown interested in these kinds of things.
- Went to BSU for psychology – took a class on community psychology – psychology
of sustainability.
- There are all of these great technologies out there, but if no one is using them, you are
not really making progress. You need people on the ground to actually use them.
- A green fee on campus created big changes for our university by doing a survey and
finding there was support for this. We were able to do more projects and reach out to
more students that sustainability is a normal and desirable way of life.
- The environmental movement has been using too much guilt to try and persuade
people to adopt behaviors. We have to meet people where they are. Say it’s OK, we
all make mistakes. We also need to work with policy to make changes.
- Gardens, free store idea to help people reuse things such as notebooks, etc. Trying to
tap into these reusable concepts.
Fourth Speaker – Amber
- There’s a pretty high population of Natives in GF, and there isn’t a place for them to
congregate.
- Grew up in Fort Berthold. Living in a reservation community allows you to learn
about traditions.
- Came back to Grand Forks because it’s close to my home community. Rural North
Dakota has really small communities with really tight-knit families.
- How do you get your community involved? How do you get people to want to live a
sustainable life?
- The American Dream – capitalism and sustainability do not go together.
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Native Americans were always thinking this way – how can we leave this for our
children? Almost every tribe has the ideal of what can we leave for the future, not
what we can gain for ourselves.
It’s kind of an oxymoron – we are always thinking about how to bring in money, but
also how we can be sustainable. Example of community gardens at a school to
provide students alternative food options.
Developing community awareness – what each individual can do to make a
community more sustainable.
EPA – over the last few years they have gotten into a community outreach mode.
Toolkits on how to get active in a community instead of waiting for politicians. What
do you want to see? What do you want your children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren to inherit?
All Nations culture camp – Native concepts mixed with Western Medicine. World
view of Native medicine bridged with western concepts you learn anyways.
If you aren’t going to teach your children how to care about things, they aren’t going
to.
WE all have a stake in seeing that we are more sustainable.
Question: I’m intrigued with the idea of turning cattails into a cash crop. How do you do that?
- We’re working on it. Working on ways to draw the water levels down so you can get
in there. People in Canada bailed
- Over 40 years I’ve probably burned 10,000 acres of cattail sloughs.
- If you’re going to harvest these cattails, how are you going to protect other species
that use these?
- Where you have solid cattails, this isn’t a good biolife habitat. It’s not an all or
nothing situation.
- Blackbirds thrive in cattails and eat sunflowers.
Question: – ENSIA.com - electronic publication focused on sustainability. You can educate
people all you want, but it does not motivate change. How do you motivate people?
- Game theory and gamification– social psychology used to motivate consumer
behavior – could be applied to motivate.
- If you can motivate people by using competition, following social norms – have you
noticed a difference?
- Crystal has had some experience with this.
o Start with behaviors – these are easier to manipulate than attitudes.
o There isn’t any one thing that will work.
o Competitions can fire people up for a short period of time, but unless you add
information about the broader picture so some people can internalize things,
people tend to drop off.
o You have to teach a little, but that alone won’t do it.
Question: How can each one of us contribute to this conversation about what sustainability is?
How can we create different ideas to create different solutions?
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Thinking about it as a systems approach – everything from reducing consumption to
recycling
This question is posed to everyone in the room. There isn’t any one way of
approaching this problem, we also have a generation gap, there are older people who
maybe don’t care about gamification. We need to create communities that care.
Within the population as a whole, maybe 20% you can appeal to with this talk about
sustainability. You have to model what you want to change in the world to be. Every
one of us in here might be part of this 20%. We have to model ourselves, be inviting,
and lead by example.
Sharing our common knowledge – I see areas where we can work together. I see parallels where we can share our knowledge to create sustainability.
Start with an energy audit. Look at your energy use, look at your baseline.
Systems thinking – the only way to go. We need to think as if there is no box. Put
forward items that the individual can relate to as far as what they can do to make a
difference. We need to get better about recycling nutrients. We need to find new ways
to be better.
Question: Where are these cattail bails and what can I do with them?
- We’re trying to figure out the most expeditious way to get them out of the wetlands
and then processing them into a biomass resource.
- It’s not going to be such that it can replace other conventional energies; it goes back
to the systems approach.
I think we have to change our way of thinking.
- It’s not going to be one solution for everything.
- We have to reinvent it, managing forests, the cattails.
- It’s not reinventing the wheel, it’s looking at the wheel.
I’m getting to see there is a fight about keeping our environment safe. I see solar energy as a
solution.
- We are looking at wind energy, we maybe have to kill some birds.
- Storage piece is a very huge piece. Battery technologies and storage technologies.
- Solar energy does also impact the environment. Any energy is not fully exempt from
that.
- What is having the smallest impact for the largest payout? Solar has a very strong
case in that it has a very large reward.
- It’s going to take a patchwork.
- In terms of killing birds – look at skyscrapers and other windows – look at those
numbers. What is the impact and what is the reward at the end of the day?
- Geothermal – costly upfront but over time can save you money.
We’ve talked a lot about the grassroots. What are the strategies for making policy changes?
- In my house, there are six of us.
- We have agreed to not talk about some of these things. I have no shot with my wife;
she is very focused on other things.
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The social norming takes a long time. I remember in the 80s we mocked people who
paid for water.
How do you see policy changes as part of the grass roots?
Sometimes using a top-down approach might be necessary for those outside the 20%.
- At a local level, people need to be aware of who they are voting in; those local things
make a difference.
- Again, what the policy can help with is making the foundation for people doing the
right thing easier.
- The top-down approach is important. Even if we are doing everything here, China can
still be using coal.
- You are one of only hundreds in your community – you are a larger percentage. It’s
easier to get a consensus on the local level.
- On a national and global scale we do need to take a top-down approach.
- There are 300 million people in China that are middle class right now.
- There is a relationship between consumerism and the lifestyle we like to lead.
- How do we make deprivation ‘sexy’ – things that are kind to the environment.
- There will be 800 million people here.
I grew up recycling. When my daughter was 3, she told her Sunday school teacher “Everything
I’m wearing today is from a rummage sale”. One thing that hasn’t been brought up here is that it
is an UN mandate that wants to get rid of private ownership of property. 70% of small businesses
start from America. Usually people use their homes to fund these. Over half of land in America
is going to go back to its natural habitat where animals take precedence over people.
- There is a lot of misinformation about Agenda 21. There is a lot of fear.
- There is a map that shows in red the areas that are going to go back to nature. You
can google Agenda 21 map and find this.
- If you look at a map and see how much is federally managed land, a lot of the land
matches up. (There were some discrepancies about this).
- If you take away land from farmers, that’s scary.
- There was a farmer who discovered a salamander on his land, brought it into an
extension center, was told it was endangered and could no longer farm that land.
I think what we better do is recognize private property for what it is. We need to teach people the
Magna Carte. We are getting away from what is private property. Name one thing you can do on
your private property that doesn’t have a government influence.
Some of the red areas are being set aside; many of those apply to help improve the lifestyles of
people who live there.
There are a lot of different ways to define sustainability.
- “What are we going to leave for the future versus what are we going to get for
ourselves”
- One of the keys in how we bring this out is how we build relationships with people.
- Also, humility – we don’t have the answers right now, but we need to talk to each
other, community.
I don’t think Agenda 21 is trying to give more rights to animals. We are animals.
- The agenda is about who is going to speak for them.
- That’s our responsibility, to think about more than just ourselves.
- Think about how we interact with our planet.
- I respect that you have a difference of opinion.
- I don’t care about property rights when they impact things. You need to understand
your role.
That’s what this forum is about – networking, learning from each other.