Council for Sustainability and Eco Practices at SCAD

By Scott Boylston

(Originally published on Friday, Feb. 22, 2008 in The Chronicle)

As I sit in the Melbourne (Australia) Airport writing this, I can feel somewhat sanguine knowing that the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from my air travel to Australia for a conference on sustainable urban development were “neutralized” by the conference’s offsetting of all carbon emissions from their guest speakers’ travel. Judging from the variety of the speakers’ countries of origin — China, Norway, Germany, Colombia, India, Denmark, Lebanon, Kenya and Holland, to name a few — the offsets must have been substantial.

EcoEdge2: The Urgent Design Challenge in Building Sustainable Cities featured some of the world’s most innovative green architects and urban planners, including James Brearley, Bernard Khoury and Stefan Behnisch. They spoke of heroic endeavors, such as building entire green cities in China from the riverbed up, creating meaningful architecture in post-war Beirut and developing impressive green architecture portfolios. I talked about Savannah.

Over the last eight months I’ve investigated the emerging sustainable attributes of the city, interviewing urban planners, city officials, architects, nonprofit directors, organic farmers, environmentalists and many other individuals interested in creating a greener Savannah. And while Savannah still faces a host of challenges in terms of environmental sustainability, it also possesses a rapidly crystallizing promise for a much greener future. What had long been a personal hunch before my interviews and research soon transformed itself into an intriguing mosaic of efforts by many individuals to make use of the city’s embodied “green wealth.” The dynamic interplay of Savannah’s historic patterns of organization, coupled with its varied yet increasingly harmonized, emergent sustainable properties, has created an urban landscape that hints at what a sustainable city for the 21st century might look like during its nascent stages.

Make no mistake: We are a long way from realizing that promise. But rather than delving into the shortcomings here, I’d like to highlight the need for individuals who are interested in contributing to positive change to step forward, to actively involve themselves, and to seek out sources that can help them become founts of information and inspiration in their own right. The EcoEdge conference wasn’t filled with people bemoaning the slow rate of change with tirades against the problems of the world. It was filled with individuals who are doing something about it. They are all creative to their very bones, but their creativity is not trapped in some isolated notion of what their particular discipline demands of them. Instead, their creativity is applied to their disciplines in relation to a much broader context — the struggle of humankind to carve out an existence that isn’t, at its core, destructive to the rest of the living systems on Earth.

Savannah’s best hope for a green future is not Oglethorpe’s human-scaled city grid — that’s already done its job by getting us to this particular point. Neither is it SCAD’s impressive adaptive re-use of historic buildings throughout the city — that, too, is firmly established as a part of the important foundation. Savannah’s best hope is now in the hands of the creative individuals who reside within its city limits, and in the city’s willingness to look outward for its inspiration even as it looks inward for its opportunities.

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