green the cities, create the jobs, save the planet…

Or something like that. I think about sustainability a lot. In a previous life, I worked on the development of new construction residential buildings, and very slowly, applied green building practices and materials to those buildings.

I’ve also been thinking about the intersection of green job creation and sustainability in cities. Very quietly, I follow stories about urban gardening/agriculture movements. In 2007, President Clinton was the keynote speaker for an awards dinner at ACORN (yeah, I know… whatever) that I attended and flagged two major issues that we’ve now seen come to pass: job crisis and credit burden. To a crowd of affordable housing professionals, the 42nd President of the United States teased out practical solutions to these problems.  In 2007, 38% of US greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings. As some of us who were awares that the housing bubble would inevitably pop and create a crisis in jobs, Clinton talked to this small crowd about the link between green jobs and affordable housing, specifically pointing to jobs modernizing the existing housing stock with by making them more energy efficient beasts (high-efficiency boilers, energy efficient lighting and appliances, smart building technologies, green roof replacement, etc.) Even then, you could tell that some of these ideas came from folks like Van Jones and Majora Carter, because they’ve already witnessed how these incremental changes created benefits to individual and community.

I could geek out even further on this; water waste in multi family buildings has a solution too. For every flush, 5 gallons of potable water is wasted. The first luxury rental building in NYC to get a gold LEED certification, uses a gray water reclamation system, a very expensive system in its upfront costs. However, if it is an idea we mandate, then we’d be able to eliminate millions of gallons potable water waste.

I might be a little OCD in my interest in sustainability. But it’s nice to know I have noble company.

From GOOD:

“I made this trip,” explained Matt Victoriano, a Marine who served in Iraq, “because it became painfully aware to me that our current energy policy is a direct threat to our national security and the troops.” Marine General Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command, takes it a step further: “We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll.” In other words, to best support our troops, support a clean energy future.”

And this post from TAPPED:

Often these are people returning from prison, people who have lived in generational poverty, or returning combat veterans – some fit all three of these demographics. Each group commonly suffers from, among other things, a deep sense of social isolation that inhibits their participation in the marketplace, increases their social services footprint, and negatively affects the health and educational outcomes of both themselves and the people around them. Typically, these places are the environmental sacrifice zones that make our dirty-energy economy possible.

They have been creating expensive and ever-widening cost vectors for decades – if one looks at how many people are coming out of our prisons, going into poverty, and coming back from multiple deployments for wars with no end in sight. We need to turn those cost vectors around as soon as possible using the tools we can control on regional and community levels.

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Horticultural infrastructure work is highly therapeutic for certain psychological barriers to full participation in society. It’s more cost-effective than pharmaceutical methods too, so this can contribute to public heath savings.

Projects like these, on a massive scale throughout our cities, shorelines, and over-stressed water management systems, can turn some of our most expensive citizens into some of our most productive in three important ways.

Do you see that?  The connection in building a sustainable future could also mean jobs for veterans and under/unemployed in communities of color.

And then there’s my favorite word again: infrastructure.