Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Lauren Kuby: Welcome to our sustainability series, our second talk in the semester. Wanna welcome you all here for a talk featuring Robert Colangelo and Mark Lautman. GIS hosts this serendipitous series to welcome guests to campus to speak on a wide range of social, economic, and environmental topics. Our next talk is tomorrow down at 101 in big classroom, and that is going to be Dan Kreeger, who’s the founder of the Association of Climate Change Officers, who’s gonna talk about climate policy and business. He’s a national expert in this area, so be sure to RSVP for that. Keep in mind, our sustainability.asu.edu events is where you RSVP for all of our events. It’s very important to do that so we’re prepared for the onslaught.

We also host a Wrigley Lecture Series, and this semester we’re gonna be hosting four Wrigley speakers. They’re all world-renowned thinkers and doers in the sustainability world. Our first Wrigley speaker, we’re very proud to announce, is Enrique Penalosa, who’s the former mayor of Bogota, Columbia, a new urbanist, and someone just without a doubt a global leader in the urban transportation and urban livability world. Please RSVP to that. The announcement will be up shortly.

I’d now like to introduce Anne Reichman, who is our program manager for the sustainability network—sorry, sustainable cities network—and she will introduce our guest speakers today. Thank you, Anne.

Anne Reichman: Thanks, Lauren. Hi, my name is Anne Riechman. As she mentioned, I’m the program manager for the sustainable cities network that is an outreach and education program for the Global Institute of Sustainability. We work actively to engage sustainability professionals from our local cities and towns on a variety of different subjects, so everything from solar and energy efficiency to water-related issues, best practices, green infrastructure. As you know, sustainability is a very broad topic, so almost all of those touch cities and towns in a variety of different ways.

Certainly, brownfields and the economy are an important topic associated with city sustainability, and so I have had the good fortune of being introduced to Robert Colangelo with the National Brownfield Association. He approached me a couple of years ago to do a workshop here in the Phoenix area on sustainable communities, building sustainable communities and revitalizing them. We did that in, I think it was the fall of 2011. It was very successful, and he was fortunate to get more funding from the EPA to host another one, which we will be doing tomorrow.

He is a wealth of information. He has his own radio show out of Chicago, called Green Sense Radio, and speaks to all different types of people on sustainability pretty much probably all over the world, I would imagine. He has also brought to us Mark Lautman, which he will introduce later. Robert, as an introduction, is the executive director of the National Brownfield Association. He’s got a very broad background. He’s not only a radio show host on green sustainability topics, but he has authored four books, numerous articles on subjects. He serves as the publisher for the Brownfield News Magazine, and he is also in the development area, where he has redeveloped more than one million square feet of brownfield properties. He has a lot of experience.

With that, I’d like to turn it over to Robert. Welcome. He is going to be talking with Mark on the subject of economic architecture and sustainable communities, so if you’ll give us a round of welcome for Robert.

[Applause]

Robert Colangelo: Testing. Does that work? Yes. Anne, thank you for the nice introduction. Thank you very much for inviting us here. I’m really honored to be at a university. I really think that this generation’s gonna change the world, and so I’m honored to present to you. I read a little survey about what the top three things on college students’ minds are. It was: sex, drugs, and sleep. I gotta say, at my age, I have those three things on my mind, too [laughter]. One, I remember about having sex. Two, I wonder if my medication has arrived. Three, I hope I can sleep through the night.

The one thing I wanna put on your mind is sustainability. As Anne said, I’ve founded—I guess I would classify myself as an environmental entrepreneur. I founded several organizations: Environomics Communications, which published Brownfield News Magazine and produces Green Sense radio, The National Brownfield Association, a not-for-profit that really promotes building sustainable developments on brownfield sites. We recently just set up the Surplus Property Network, which is for fortune 100 heavy industrial companies that own large portfolios of surplus properties. It’s founded by Alcoa, BSF, Ford and EInterviewer:onMobil. We have about 15 large industrial companies. They want to better manage these surplus properties. As Anne said, I started a development company that takes title and develops brownfields. Recently, I just started Green Sense Farms, a vertical farming venture. I love this space, and I’ve spent my whole career in it.

As Anne mentioned, I started Green Sense radio show about three or four years ago. I actually sold Brownfield News Magazine, had some spare time, and I thought that this whole green movement was getting underway, and that it needed a vehicle to reach the masses. As I was putting this workshop together that Anne and I are working on, I thought, I’ve been in this field my whole career, but there’s all these new things happening out there. If I’m having trouble getting my arms around it, how does the public get their arms around it? I thought, putting a show together that could be an honest broker of information on sustainability would be a great idea.

I didn’t know anything about radio, and I just sorta figured it out. Now our show is being syndicated nationally. We’re on the number one Chicago station, WBBM, and are on five other stations. We get about 5 to10,000 podcasts downloaded every week. We record a weekly show.

I’m not sure if this works. What I wanted to show is this video—I forgot to ask that. Is there a way to click this to the internet?

[Talking in background]

Robert Colangelo: You know what? I’m not gonna worry about it, but I would suggest, if you haven’t—one of the people I interviewed on my show was Illac Diaz from the Philippines. He developed the Liter of Light. I thought that really exemplifies sustainability. How many have seen this video? Yeah, it’s a great little video. It talks about bringing third-world solutions to third-world problems. Basically, what he developed, was talking a one liter pop bottle that was clear, filling it with water and chlorine, and then putting it in a roof to make a solar light.

That really, I think, epitomizes sustainability. These shanty structures in the Philippines, if you think about the infrastructure needed to bring electricity, to set up billing, just to power a little light, it’s just not sustainable. This was a very sustainable solution. That’s what I wanna talk about. I really wanna not lecture and be judgmental, but share with you my experience in working with brownfields in cities, and all the people that I’ve interviewed. What’s working out there?

Just recently, I did a interview with Andrew Wang out there in Gila Bend. He’s doing the Crossroads Solar Concentrating Solar Power Project, which I thought was pretty cool. Kirby Hoyt is a local architect here that’s been building green structures for a while. He’s actually working on a project right here on the ASU campus. Then I also interviewed Andrew Ross, the author of Bird on Fire. Anyone read that book, about Phoenix being the least sustainable city? I’m always out there, looking for folks that are doing cool, cutting edge things, so if you have any ideas or any inventions, please send 'em my way.

What is a sustainable community? When you look at the key points, what I’ve found is that, it really starts with enlightened leadership. It is really a top-down thing. If it’s not top-down, then I think what Gandhi said works very well. “When the people lead, the leaders will follow.” If the leadership doesn’t wanna take control, it’s really up to the people. That’s what I see, is that this movement started on both ends. It started on the top, politically, where you’ve got enlightened leadership that sets the right policies. It’s also started on a grassroots movement, where people want change. It deals with all the issues mentioned here.

My work with cities is really helping cities and states come up with cogent development plans, where they take their brownfields, or these under-utilized, vacant, industrial properties, and put 'em back to productive use. I’ve worked with lots of cities and mayors and governors on developing strategies, and we’ve put together a workshop on building sustainable communities. When I look at these cities, what comes to mind? What do you think about when you think of Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Camden, and Gary?

Audience: Rust.

Robert Colangelo: Rust! Yeah, the Rust Belt. What else?

Audience: Industrialization.

Robert Colangelo: Right, industrialization, manufacturing. Economically?

Audience: Depressed.

Robert Colangelo: Depressed, the old economy. Are people moving here, or moving out?

[Multiple voices at once]

Robert Colangelo: Shrinking cities, losing populations. That’s the old economy. That model worked very well for 100 years, and it was really a singular-based, one-horse town. It was wrapped around one industry. The highest and best use for land in those towns, 100 years ago, was industrial. They put factories along the water. They used that both for transportation and for waste disposal. Now we have a whole new view of waterfront property. It’s to recreate. It’s to live. It’s to enjoy it. It’s open space.

In the ‘50s, those towns started to separate. People, 100 years ago, lived by those factories. In the ‘50s, they started to move out. There was a separation between residential and industrial places. Then in the ‘90s, it was really connectivity, technology and globalization, that unraveled that economy.

There’s another thing: those cities were not sustainable. There’s a saying, “Take, make, waste.” They lived off that model. They would take things from the earth. They would manufacture those. They would distribute those. Then people would consume those. All along the way, it made pollution and waste. That’s not a sustainable system. It’s very linear. We need to change that cycle. We need to live more in a reduce, reuse, recycle environment, and what I specialize is redevelop. Take land where there’s already infrastructure in place, where there’s transportation routes in place, and recycle that land and put it back into productive use.

What I’ve found is that Corporate America, about two or three years ago, really gets this. There has been a real greening in Corporate America. I recently interviewed Phil Phan, Professor of the Carey Business School at John Hopkins. He did a meticulous research paper, where he looked at lots of data. His analysis is that these large, dirty companies get the greener way of life because it earns them more money. It makes them more profitable. At the end of the day, I don’t care why people do things. As long as we get incremental change, I think we’re moving in the right direction.

Also, I love the UPS example. UPS, a couple years ago, decided to, where they could, not make left turns. Because when you make a left turn, you cross into traffic. You have a higher chance of an accident. The truck’s idling, and it’s not productive. That simple move saved them three million gallons of gasoline, because when you multiply small change by many actions or by many people—millions or billions—you get huge environmental results. That’s what we’re after. It’s not being judgmental, but it’s trying to make incremental change every day. Again, I see that all the time out in the world.

When I look at these old industrial cities, what I look at is, how do we learn from those, so that we don’t build new cities and make the same mistakes. I think Pittsburgh is an excellent example. I worked very closely with the former mayor, Mayor Murphy, who is really the architect behind the renaissance of Pittsburgh. Early on, he took public money and was the first one to buy contaminated steel mills and property, using public funds to redevelop those for a higher and better productive use.

When you look at the story of Pittsburgh, it exemplifies that one-horse town. It started out dedicated to steel, around the 1800s, to support rail construction. Then it flourished under Civil War demands for steel. Then, in the ‘40s, Pittsburgh employed almost 340,000 workers dedicated to steel. There was over 100 steel mills in Pittsburgh. Today, there’s not one steel mill. In the ‘60s, it was globalization and competition from foreign competitors that really brought that steel mill down, the steel industry.

When you look at the population, it’s the classic shrinking city. In the 1900s, it was about 320,000 people. In the ‘40s, it peaked out at 670—almost double a perfect bell curve. In 2000, it’s back to the 1900 population levels. What does all that mean? One, you’ve got a city now, with twice the infrastructure and half the population. You have a high per capita cost to maintain that infrastructure. That creates a spiral death for a city. You’ve got less people, more burden, and you don’t have what people want.

How did Mayor Murphy turn that city around? It started with a new vision. He wanted to make that place leaner, meaner, and greener. It was cool. You have to create that sense of place. Also, he engaged the public. He got it down to the community level. There was enlightened leadership, but he got buy-in from the community, and he made it their plan. Also, there was a push on green infrastructure, using natural resources to convey water, parks, open space. Also, there was a focus on attracting new talent, which my colleague and friend Mark’s gonna talk a lot about. You can have all these sustainable features, but if you don’t have the right economic architecture, it won’t be sustainable.

Also, they focused on teardowns. Having these vacant, underutilized properties that are present, that have code violations, they’re like a cancer that can metastasize and further decay your city. If you bring those down, even if you put small urban gardens there or something, it’s better than those terrible, blighted buildings. At the end of the day, he understood that mixed-use place-making developments are our future. Creating destination centers with a sense of place, where you attract the brightest and the most entrepreneurial and financial talent out there to keep your city vibrant and alive.

Another individual I interviewed was Justin Hollander. This was over a year ago. He wrote a book, Sunburnt Cities. Anybody read that? Great read. It’s about the Great Recession, depopulation, and urban planning in the American Sunbelt. Basically, the bottom line is that many of the Sunbelt cities use the motto: “We got sun. Build it and they will come.” They did that, and it busted with the recession and the housing crisis. It happened very quickly. Unlike Pittsburgh that took 40, 50, 60 years to decay, a lot of the Sunbelt cities had a decay very quickly. His bottom line was that there’s a lot to learn on how these cities have made it out from the depth of their woes, and that, as we grow, it needs to be in a much more planned manner.

When you look at these cities, what do you think about? What comes to mind?

Audience: Prosperity.

Robert Colangelo: Prosperity. What else?

Audience: Progressive planning.

Robert Colangelo: Progressive, good. Anything else?

Audience: Culture.

Robert Colangelo: Culture? It’s where all the people wanna move. You don’t see people getting happy cuz they’re moving to Cleveland or Camden, but people are very happy when they move to Seattle. Not all these cities have great weather. I think that’s the other misnomer. People think people move to places for the weather. It’s for that sense of place, that cultural, the prosperity. People can work anywhere now. I didn’t hear jobs. In the past, people had to go to those old cities, because that was the center of job creation. Now, with a connected, globalized world, we can work anywhere.

It’s really the emergence of these new prosperous regions that I’d like to focus on. When those come about, we wanna make sure that they’re built sustainably. As these new places emerge, their challenge is gonna be to attack talented entrepreneurs that can create jobs and keep those places vibrant. The places that can’t do it are gonna be left behind, and again, as my colleague will iterate in his book, there’s gonna be a big chasm and a gap between cities that can attract talent and those that cannot. I think sustainability is a big part of that.

The big challenge for cities in the future is gonna be brain drain or brain gain. Are you a college town that creates students, and you get brain drain, that they all leave and go elsewhere? Like Michigan: the state of Michigan’s got great colleges. People go to school there, but they leave Michigan. They’re not staying there to develop those cities.

We found out that cities that are designed to be sustainable, they also have much lower infrastructure costs because that’s a big part of sustainability. If you can use plants versus pipes, it’s a lot cheaper to build. It’s a lot greener. They also have higher property values. Cities that are walkable are much more desirable. When you look at consumption in the US, if everyone in the world consumed like an American, we would need ten earths to support that kind of consumption. When you look at, statistically, on a global portion, 20 percent of the population consumes 80 percent of those resources.

The US is changing greatly, and in the future, the US, I think, has made great strides in the last three to five years. It’s China and India, as they emerge, with their large populations. There’s almost two point five billion people in those two countries. That’s gonna be where the issues are. How do you get those countries to develop sustainably? Those population numbers will destroy the world if we consume at the American rate. Our consumption is not exportable. The numbers won’t make it work.

You can see—there’s that great picture in the middle—we’re bombarded with advertising. You see up top, it says “childhood obesity: don’t take it lightly.” It’s on a billboard. The sign right below it is McDonald’s, promoting their food and big-sized Happy Meals. We have a lot of conflicting information. There’s a big push to buy and consume. All that consumption creates waste. But, again, America’s done a great job in the last five years. For those that are not aware of what’s going on, when you look at the data, it’s amazing how quick America has adapted to the green field. We have zero-waste homes. The Johnson family in California has been well documented, how they produce no garbage every week. I’m from Chicago. In Indiana, there’s the Subaru plant. It was the first zero-waste manufacturing plant.

Audience: My car comes from there [laughter].

Robert Colangelo: Alright! So what’s more important? To have a car with low emissions, or a car that is produced in zero waste? You really want both, but it’s really looking at that total life cycle. Also, there’s Masdar, in the United Arab Emirates. It’s planned to be a zero-waste, zero-carbon city. People are thinking this way. It’s not just philosophizing or theory. I actually see it happening. A couple weeks ago, I interviewed the city of Fresno. They came up, they were just ranked the number one recycling city. 74 percent of their residents are recycling. That’s a really high rate.

We all have choices. Getting back to that small changes in behavior can yield big results. It comes down to simple things. If you’re a city, do you wanna promote garbage and give people big containers and small recycling containers? Or do you wanna shape their behavior, and give 'em big recycling containers, pick up recycling more often, and pick up garbage less? Those little changes, multiplied by millions of people, yield big results. What the city of Fresno did, is not only did they recycle, but they found revenue streams for their recycling waste, which is key. They were able to reduce cost, and it benefited the community.

The next three years, I wanna just hone a little in on is food, water, and energy. I think those are gonna be the three key environmental issues for the next decade or so. It’s going to change the way America looks, and how we behave. This is a very complicated chart, but it is very useful and informative. It’s from the US Energy Information Administration. What is shows is, what are our sources of energy, and what is the percentage of that source in the consumption?

For example, on the bottom, you see nuclear electric power, and you can see that line that says 100 percent is used for electric power use. Coal, it has eight—I can’t read that number, 11 and 92. That means, and it shows the different sectors that use coal. The bottom line takeaway here is that our mix of energy sources: petroleum, natural gas, goal, renewable energy, and nuclear power, is shown in that bar chart. You can see. Renewable energy is just a fraction of what we use. It’s less than ten percent, and a lot of that is hydroelectric. Petroleum is still the dominant source of energy. That whole mix is going to change. We are in a revolution of natural gas exploitation right now.

Now, when you look at Arizona, that pie looks much different. I could not get more accurate data than 2010. I’m not sure how that’s changed in the last several years. I hope it has. If you look at it, coal is almost at 37 percent. The average for the US was 20 percent. Arizona’s way ahead of that. You look at the renewables. It was about even with the state averages, but I’m amazed at how little solar is used. This is predominantly solar. The other thing I’ve learned is that you have to be adaptable. You have to be flexible. You have to use what you have.

I just interviewed, last week, Chris Bentley. He’s the Ministry of Energy for Ontario, Canada. Next year, they’re closing their last coal power plant. We had a great discussion. The province of Ontario, which has 40 percent of the population in Canada, stood up, had some very strong political will, and they stood up against the status quo and said, “We’re not gonna use coal.” I said, “Minister, how did you make that decision? Where did the political will come from?” He said, “We did a total cost analysis of what it really cost to have cheap coal. We had hundreds of thousands of health issues. When you factor that in, coal isn’t cheap.” I said, “Kudos. You stood up against the railroads, the mining industry, and coal. Those are pretty strong lobbying group to stand up against.” It comes down to having that enlightened leadership and political will to make those right decisions.

I also believe economics shape behavior. If you don’t believe that, think about what would happen if gas gets to $10 a gallon. No legislation, nobody’s gonna tell you anything. Your behavior will change greatly because of that one little increase. It’ll change the way you drive. You’ll change the way the cars you buy. You’ll change what you buy because prices will be so high.

We were out in Oklahoma a couple weeks ago, and I met Jay Albert, who’s the Deputy Secretary of Energy. He came up with an idea. He said, “When you have a listing sheet for a home or a commercial building, what happens if you put a sticker on it—much like you have a sticker when you buy car that says how many miles per gallon—that talks about energy conservation, and what’s the energy conservation factor, how much does this home cost to operate, and how much are you saving because of the technology you’ve employed?”

I thought, what happens if we add to that listing sheet a walkability score. If you look at that website, you can get a walkability score for your neighborhood on how you rank. There was a recent report for CEOs for the cities that talks about how walkability raises property values. If you get a profession that’s been very slow to adapt, the appraisers, to actually start to value these things in property values, you gonna change behavior. People will be shopping, based on additional criteria, other than what they’re using now.

Water is a big issue. My background’s hydrogeology, so it’s something I’ve always been quite fond of. My new hero is Pat Lindemann. He’s the Drain Commissioner for Ingham County, Michigan, in which Lansing, Michigan’s located. He is on a mission to use plants versus pipes to convey storm water. As an elected official, he has the power and the political will to make those tough decisions, and he’s done it.

He’s got over 30 million dollars of projects in his community that have saved money—cuz he doesn’t talk about the environment. He talks about saving money first. People listen when you tell 'em you’re gonna save money, get greater value. You’re gonna be able to convey more water. It’ll be cleaner. It’ll be cheaper. Guess what? It raises property values. You’re creating a better environment. You’re using nature, trees, and bioswales to slow that water down.

What we’re finding is that access to nature is good for your health. I’m from Chicago, Millennium Park, I don’t know how you could have a park cost four billion dollars, be two billion over budget, and be a great success, but it has been. In New York, you have the skyline, where they took an old rail track and they converted it into an elevated park. Both of these are enormous success. People like nature. They found that kids with ADD get much more focused and calm when you’re sitting out in parks and open space and you’re unconnected.

Energy, water, and food are inextricably linked. I think the next area that you’re gonna see massive change and a big disruptor is current farming practices. They’re very inefficient. They use a lot of water. They use a lot of chemicals. They use a lot of gas. 20 percent of gasoline is used in the farming business to run tractors and equipment, and to transport food. A lot of food travels 1500 miles to the farm to the table. Being able to have new farming practices will help that.

There are some visionaries out there, like Dickson Despommier from Columbia University, who dreams of the plantegon, and the skyscraper for plants. I think these are very theoretical, but at least it starts thinking that way. Can we have urban farms in enclosed, indoor environments, where you control the environment? I’ve just recently started a farm here, where we use a modified hydroponic technology. We’re able to stack ten layers high in a 25-foot tall industrial building. We totally control the environment. We’ve built a indoor growing chamber. We control temperature, humidity, nutrients, and lights. We’ve teamed up with Phillips out of the Netherlands. The Dutch are really the top in indoor growing. We have a state of the art facility, where we totally control the environment. Unlike farming, where you’re dependent on water and sunshine, we control that, and we can harvest 26 times a year. Every two weeks, we have a harvest.

It’s amazing what’s gonna happen. There’s hydroponics. There’s aeroponics. There’s aquaponics. These are being tied together. In the next ten years, you’re gonna see our food supplies change. The reason why is one, our weather is getting more volatile. We have 30 states in drought conditions. Two, the retailers want consistency. They want a set product at their door, consistent volume, consistent quality. You can’t rely on the farm to do that. It also, farming fluctuates prices based on supply and demand. When you go into these new, indoor growing technologies, it takes that ebb and flow out.

There’s also farming on a local level that’s done more on a charitable level. One of the probably most touching interviews I did was with Will Allen of Growing Power, down in the center. Will Allen is the son of a sharecropper, grew up very poor in Mississippi. He became a NBA basketball player, had a successful career, and now he has started Growing Power, which is a nonprofit that’s providing equal access to food that’s healthy, high quality, and locally grown. He’s got a number of farms in Illinois and Wisconsin that feed the homeless, employ the homeless, and feed the needy. He was voted by Time Magazine as the top 100 most influential people. Great guy, heart of gold, and he’s out there changing the world.

I also just did a interview with this young woman, Rebecca Kagan of the Food Recovery Network. She’s a senior at Brown University. They started a network of colleges that are recovering the food that’s not used in the cafeterias. They started this a year ago. They’ve already saved 165 million dollars of food from going into the dump. They feed it to the homeless and the needy around the college towns. I pass this on to Anne. If you don’t have a chapter here, I encourage you to do so. They just got picked up yesterday on MSNBC. This just started a year ago, and it’s growing very rapidly. Good ideas catch on.

Also, a colleague of mine that I’ve worked with is Andrew Winston. He is the author of the bestselling book Green to Gold. He’s a great thinker. Did I think my last interview of the year with him. We looked at some of these tough questions that he’s asking out there. He has five of these questions on his blog. It’s the last one that I think we need to challenge: how much will we challenge the nature of capitalism, and what will that mean for how governments and businesses operate?

I think capitalism is sacrosanct. In our country, no one, I think, is debating that. I worked in the Soviet Union from 1990 to ’97. I saw communism fail. I think capitalism has cracks in it. It’s not, it doesn’t have to be thrown out, but it needs to be fixed. When you look at sustainability, there’s somewhat of a clash. Reduce, reuse, recycle reduces consumption. Capitalism’s about growth. Somewhere there’s a disconnect there. I think we need to start having that debate. The world is rapidly changing. We need to be looking at all our systems to make sure that they’re up with the changes in time.

Another individual that really touched me was James Balog. He did a documentary, Chasing Ice. James Balog is an award-winning photographer for National Geographic. He created this documentary, Chasing Ice, which was about his quest to put 25 time-lapsed digital photographers on five glaciers on five countries. He filmed those over three years. The documentary was the hardship of what it took to put these cameras, and get all the technology to work. It’s just, the pictures are awe-inspiring. His efforts are inspirational on what he did.

At the end of the day, what that movie was all about, he had lots of scientists in there. In the interview we had, the takeaway I got was, don’t believe in climate change or sustainability. Use the science. When you look at the facts, when you look at the figures, and you make fact-based arguments, it’s very hard to dispute some of these things. When we start to work on a belief system, it’s hard to get people to change. You’re not gonna change the way people believe, but you can work with the data and make fact-based arguments.

Lastly, I did an interview with Ed Begley, Jr., the actor. He starred in several things. What amazed me most is, when I met him at a hotel in Chicago, I thought he was a homeless guy at first [laughter], because he was dressed so shabbily. What amazed me is that he walks the walk. He was there promoting a compostable toilet for your home. We got into this discussion, and we were talking about cars, and asking what kinda car he drove. He said, “I live in LA. If I picked on all my friends for the kinds of cars they drove, they wouldn’t invite me to any of these parties. I can’t be preaching to them that they should not be driving their Ferrarris and Lamborghinis.” He said, “What I want them to do is make incremental change every day.”

What I realized, after talking with him, is that sustainability is a journey. It’s not a destination. It’s making that incremental change every day. Not being judgmental, but focusing on that incremental progress. It’s also balanced decision-making. It’s how do you look at social, environmental, and economic impacts, and weigh all those. It’s not always being perfect, but trying to be the best you can be.

Also, I interviewed Patrick Moore, who is the founder of Greenpeace. I remember asking him, “Patrick, when you started out as a young kid, you had this small vessel, and you went against this big Japanese tanker that was dumping nuclear waste in the ocean.” He’s from Vancouver. I said, “That was pretty heroic.” I said, “Can one person still make a difference?” He said, “That’s the only way change’ll happen, is when one person decides to do something.”

What I’ve also learned from Rebecca was that, at the end of the day, you gotta have fun. Because when you’re having fun doing this, that’s how you’re gonna inspire others. That’s what I challenge you. Is the Bird on Fire gonna be true? When you take that down when you graduate, are you gonna change the town you live in? With that, thank you very much. I wanna hand it over to my friend. [Applause]

I met Mark Lautman in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A colleague that I was working with out there said, “You gotta meet this guy. He is a great thinker, and he’s got all these great ideas on how to change communities.” I invited him to speak, and he said, “By the way, he wrote this book, When the Boomers Bail.” I thought, wow, that’s a pretty cool title. It talks about how the world’s gonna change as demographic changes. Mark came to our workshop in Albuquerque. He gave a great presentation. We just had a connection. I’ve been working with him for the last couple of years. I think he is another one of those great thinkers that has some really great ideas on how we need to change communities. I focused more on the bricks and mortar and changing behavior. He focuses more on the economics, cuz at the end of the day, if you build a sustainability community and there’s no jobs, it’s not gonna be sustainable. With that, my good friend Mark Lautman.

[Applause]

Mark Lautman: Thanks. How do we get the?

Robert Colangelo: I’ll get that up for you. I’ll give you a minute.

Mark Lautman: Is the mic on?

Robert Colangelo: Do you want this?

Mark Lautman: No, I’ve got one. They’ve got me wired up.

I started my economic development career 31 years ago. Not by chance—I had actually graduated from UNM, University of New Mexico, with kind of a mixed degree of architecture, economics, and geography. Never really understood why the architecture school, especially the planning part of the architecture school, didn’t spend more time on the economics of places, especially the economic base of places. It seemed like what the community’s workforce was doing every day in the name of earning an income had more to do with the character of the place and the economic and architectural evolution of the place, than almost anything else. It got almost no treatment.

I wasn’t a confident enough student to challenge any professors, so I just kinda wandered off after graduation. Went in the Peace Corps for a while. Came back, built houses. I actually built houses here for five years in Mesa. I was a swimmer, a scholarship swimmer, so I swam in college, then coached for a few years afterwards.

Found myself kind of looking for a career that actually had some meaning. Did a matrix—all my skills across the top, my interests down the side, and where skill and interest intersect, is that a job? I realized—and I had a criteria, a six or seven point criteria, and one of them was you had to have kind of a Peace Corps mission, some purpose to your life. Could you make the world a better place, was one of the factors.

I realized that there were these people that communities hired to help fix their economies when a big plant left, or one of their big economic base sectors unraveled and put everybody outta work, and put the community at risk. I thought, that looks interesting. I did, I went around and started interviewing people that had these economic development jobs, to see if they were really as cool as they sounded. Realized that they were, and that, if you came up with the right kinda program, right strategy, you had the right kinda support from the community, you could actually transform the economic base of a community in less than a decade.

My first job was in Grants, New Mexico. It was right after the uranium industry collapsed. Three Mile Island had just happened, and they canceled 110 nuclear power plants across the country. The price for yellow cake, the ore for making enriched uranium rods that are the fuel for the power plant, basically the cost went from $47 a pound to seven. It destroyed the market. The 45 mines that were in operation in Grants, and the other 45 that were in various stages of completion, were all canceled. Three big mills shut down.

In this county of about 35,000 people, there were 12,000 people put outta work in about 18 months. I dunno if there’s any—I mean, Anaconda, Montana, went through something similar, but I don’t think there’s been an example of where a community lost like 70 percent of its economic base in less than two years. They’d hired two economic developers before me. One lasted a week, and they quit. The next one lasted six weeks, and they quit. Then somebody told me about it. I went in there, and I had never done the job before. I just said, “Look, I just did this matrix, and I think this is my life’s work. [Laughter] Gimme a second interview in three weeks. I’ll come back and tell you what I’m gonna do in the next six weeks, or the first six months.”

They had—I can’t remember what the salary was. Something like, they had 30,000 in the budget. I needed 45, and I said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll work for you. Since I don’t have any experience, I’ll work for you for six months for 15,000, for a rate at 15,000 a year. But at the end of six months, you either raise me to 45, or I unconditionally resign. I’ll write a unconditional letter of resignation, dated for six months from now. You guys write one that raises me to 45. At the end of the six months, if I’m not the absolute best economic development person you thought you could get, then tear it up. I’ll go away. I won’t take any unemployment insurance or anything. I’ll just go away, humiliated.” [Laughter]

That’s how I started in the economic development business. The night after they said, “Forget the second interview. We’re just gonna hire you, and we’re gonna give you 30. We’ll figure out how to raise some more money, get you 45, but we want you here.” That night, by the time I spent some time in town and finished all the interviews, they said, “Here, the mining company has a bunch of,” one of the mining companies, I think it was Homestake, had homes that they had had for their senior executives. They said, they gave me to the, when they left town, they gave 'em to the economic development foundation. I had, they said, “Go pick out what house you wanna live in. It’s yours.”

I drove around. It’s starting to get dark. I’m driving around, looking at the house. They gave me a key to each one. I go into them. I had a sleeping bag in my trunk of my car. I was just gonna throw a sleeping, instead of going to a motel. I had to go to the grocery store to get some stuff to make sandwiches with for the drive back to Denver. I’m in the grocery store, at the Smith’s store on Lobo Canyon Drive in Grants, New Mexico. I’m standing there at the checkout line. I’ve got an old jar of mayonnaise and some tuna fish and some bread. I should’ve gotten a basket, and I didn’t.

There’s a woman in front of me with two small children, probably one and three, maybe eight months and two, but pretty small. She is—and the kids are standing in the cart, and she has all of her stuff out on the conveyer. She doesn’t have enough money for everything, so she’s gonna have to put something back. She’s going through her purse, and she’s looking for food stamps. The kids are crying and knocking stuff off the impulse buy rack. They’re not washed. They look like they’ve been living outta their car or something.

I’m standing there, and she’s embarrassed because she’s holding me up. I’m starting to drop stuff. Just then, somebody in the back of the store yells, “He’s got a bottle!” The box boy and the store manager chase this guy, 6’4”, ponytail, Harley Davidson t-shirt, mining boots, chases the guy out the front of the store into the parking lot. They grab him, they bring him back, and he doesn’t have a bottle, he has pork chops. He has pork chops under his Harley Davidson shirt.

They bring him in—and this is the only cash register open. It’s like 8:00 at night. They bring the guy over, and by the time they get him in, this guy’s crying. It turns out it’s her husband. The store manager—she’s crying, he’s crying, the big, burly miner’s crying. The box boy’s starting to cry. The cashier’s crying. The store manager’s like, “Here, just take these pork chops and get outta here. Don’t ever do this again.”

They leave, and I’m going through my stuff, and I’m looking out the window, front of the store, at almost exactly across the street in a strip center is the office where we’re gonna build out this economic development office. I remember standing there while she’s ringing everything up, thinking, I’m the only person in this town whose job it is to fix this. I remember thinking, do I really want this pressure?

It was pretty bleak. I’d been through, I grew up in Seattle. I’d seen Boeing lay off 110,000 people end of my senior year. Had kids coming up to my brothers—T.A. Wilson was the president of Boeing. His son went to our high school and was friends with one of my younger brothers. We had classmates coming up to us, grabbing us, asking us, “Can you get the T.A. to get his dad to get my dad’s job back?” This was in high school.

In Peace Corps, I saw what happened when Allende was taken out in the military coup. Pinochet took over. They essentially cleansed the economy, and nobody had any jobs for probably 15 years. The economy really didn’t produce enough jobs for everybody.

I’ve seen what happens to people and places when the economy doesn’t stay in pace with the population, the growth in population. You can’t do anything positive. You have to wait ‘til it gets a point where Pittsburgh was, when Tom Murphy became mayor. You oughta have him talk. He is a powerful, compelling speaker, and he will tell you what he had to go through. It wasn’t easy, and it wouldn’ta happened—you can get the sense—it would never have happened, had he not been there at that time and, by fluke really, gotten elected. Then he took, basically career death threat proportion risks to make what happened happen.

This is not a normal path, turning economies around. It may take the complete—how many of you guys have played Sim City? When it first came out, I started playing it. You can’t really go past, you couldn’t go past 1967 without destroying the whole town first, letting the Godzilla or fires take over. You couldn’t really go too far. There may be—I mean, it’s heresy for an economic developer to say, “Let’s let the whole economic system collapse, and start over.” When you, without pain and without destroying value and recalibrating, it’s really hard to make big quantum leaps in a lot of areas that we want.

Now, we wanna see, and so three months—I mean, three years later, I’m standing in the same grocery store. I’ve got a cart this time. I’m about halfway down the aisle, and it’s the aisle right behind the same, it’s right off the same cash register where I was three years before. This lady comes up to me, and she says, “Are you Mr. Lautman?” Yeah. She goes, “I wanna thank you. You saved my family.” Really? How’d that happen?

She said, “My husband had a job at Anaconda, and when they shut the mill, he lost his job and he started drinking again. We lost the, he lost his truck, it was repossessed. We had two kids. They were both doing very well in school. One of 'em had, after my husband started, after he lost his job, the older one dropped out and was hanging out with kids and had gotten in trouble with drugs. The younger one was starting to follow the same path. His grades dropped off, and he was in junior high.”

The first company we got was actually a manufacturer plastic injection molding company from Phoenix. Bagdad Plastics, they made plastic pipes for water and sewer systems, for the most part. We moved them to Grants, into an empty building, and we had all these people willing to go to work. Her husband got a job there. Stopped drinking, got their car back, got their house payments back on course. The youngest, as a freshman, won the state high school science fair, first place. The second one had just gotten a wrestling scholarship to Iowa, and was off at the college.

She said that, had Tom, her husband, not gotten the job at Bagdad Plastics, her family was just that far away from going outta business. They would’ve gotten divorced, been homeless, kids were a mess. Everything spooled back up because he got a job at Bagdad Plastics. She’s literally shaking my hand, then with both hands, then she’s hugging me at the end. I’m in the middle of a grocery store. I remember, I’d been looking straight out the window again at my office thinking, I’m in on this.

Every job I had since, I paid lots of attention to what happens if one of these economic strategies that we perfect for a place actually pans out. When it does, dramatic things happen that otherwise wouldn’t happen. This has been a vocation of mine for 30 years now. I’ve spent most of my time, since that job, actually working for big, master plan community developers.

The last one was in Albuquerque, where we had a very large project. It was a piece of state land. We had to prove to the city and the state that we weren’t gonna build the project out. It was gonna a 100,000 population, 38,000 housing units was the size of the project. We had to convince the city and the state, in order to get the permits and the tax increment financing, that we wouldn’t build the project out on the backs of the existing taxpayers, that we would bring the economy along with that we needed to support the population, plus some extra for the rest of the city.

It’s very seldom to people actually apply design thinking to an economy. Most people, we don’t think we have enough influence or control over how an economy turns out to do that. I’ve got a much more deliberate kinda premeditated, predictive approach to what you can do as a community. The community can be a state, a region, a metro area, a neighborhood. It can be, what’s the economy underneath the submarket of the mixed-use development project you’re designing and trying to build?

If you don’t know, then I propose all of your other plans are at risk. If you don’t have a parallel plan for, what’s the economic base—I’m gonna explain the term in a minute—under that project or under that community, that all of your other aspirations for that place are at risk. You should spend a proportional amount of time, design time and strategic planning time, on: what is the economy of your location or community gonna be?

The rest of this presentation is pretty frightening. What’s happened is, there’s so many changes in the underlying fundamentals of how economies work, especially community economies work now, that anything you think you know, that you learned in the last 30 years about how community economies work, you should just throw out. Don’t trust it right now. You’re gonna have to recalibrate. It’s frightening, and I’m gonna talk a little bit about brain chemistry.

If this is a room of environmentalists, you guys are properly concerned about the future of the planet and the ecosystem. I can almost guarantee you, if that’s your area of interest and focus, you’re completely underestimating how at-risk you are and the planet is to an economic meltdown of equal proportions. Gonna have the same impact on human lives and also on the social system.

Right now, in my world, in trying to figure out these economies, it’s like hiking in a scree field. If any of you have been in the mountains, and you hit one of these shale, loose scree fields, you spend two or three times more energy to go the same distance. It’s demoralizing. If you have to spend too much time in it, people give up. At the bottom of one of these things, you have to completely recalibrate your thinking. You’re not gonna get the same return on investment from effort, money invested, energy, in the future, at least in the next period, as you used to. So as you came up that trail, you’re on solid ground. Now, every step you take, it slides back. It’s just as much work. You have take three steps to make one step’s progress. It requires a recalibration of your mind.

It’s also, before I go into these challenges we’re facing, it’s really important, when you’re confronting a problem, whether it’s personal or societal or it’s a business problem, especially when that problem rises to the threshold of threat. The older you get, frankly, the more things are threatening. I can talk about that, too, later. Basically, how your mind deals with a problem you’re confronting—namely, are you dealing with it as a threat, or are you dealing with it as a challenge—is crucial.

If you’re looking at it as a threat, and if it’s being processed by your brain as a threat, you’re dealing with it here in the amygdala and the limbic system. It’s where your memory is, it’s your emotional system. The amygdala is your fight or flight. If you're down in here, your brain’s being flooded with cortisol. What happens is, there’s not enough. This requires too much energy, and it basically shuts off the corpus callosum, which kinda does all the kinda switching to make sure each part of the brain’s getting used in the right place. Corpus callosum shuts off the prefrontal cortex, which is where all your creative thinking is, language. All of your abilities to innovate, process, and analyze is basically shut off. You can’t turn it back on if there’s too much cortisol in the brain.

What happens is, when you go, oh my god, the economy’s gonna unravel, and all that money I have in the stock market’s gonna go away, or I’m gonna lose my job, and you have these pangs of fear, it’s—if you did a image of the brain, this would all be lit up. This would be dark. The problem is, it’s very difficult, and it takes a lot of self-control to actually hold a negative view of the future and a positive view of the future in your head at the same time. That’s essentially what you have to do, in order to reconcile all of the feelings you’re getting and basically present the prefrontal cortex with some choices you can make.

Whenever you’re feeling, whenever you’re confronted with a problem that looks desperate and you think is gonna frighten you, if you’re thinking about it and it’s kinda worrying you, and a red flag oughta go up, monitor how you slept that next night. If you wake up at 2:00 in the morning and can’t go back to sleep ‘til four, your brain’s flooded with cortisol. You are not gonna, until you rinse the cortisol out—exercise and helping someone is how you do it. You help somebody in a charismatic relationship, you’ll wash the cortisol out in a second. Enough of the right kind of exercise will do the same thing.

If you aren’t, you know it. You wake up at 2:00 in the morning, you’re worried about something. You’re uncontrollably worried, and at 11:00 later on that morning, you’re going, what the hell was I worried about that for? It was your amygdala. It’s just now, you’re getting the prefrontal cortex involved again. The reason, those of us that are, say, over 55 or 60, the reason old people’s brains deteriorate quickly after 65 or so is lack of sleep, induced by a stress.

A lot of it, they think now, is a result of, when your parents die, there’s no one watching your back. Your cortisol level goes up not a lot, just a little bit. Enough to keep you from getting through your restorative sleep cycle. You don’t get through the restorative sleep cycle, prefrontal cortex doesn’t get hooked back up. You wake up in the morning worried, anxious, reacting, and cortisol kills brain cells and doesn’t allow 'em to regenerate. It’s what PTSD is. Multiple threat events, no restorative sleep cycles, too many in a row, permanent wiring of the person’s brain to here. Cannot engage, the prefrontal cortex is basically shut off.

They’re learning a lot about how the brain works. In the next five years, it’ll be two or three more times basic knowledge about how the brain works. Ultimately, all the things we’re talking about trying to do on a community level to make things better is gonna depend on what’s happening in the collective brains of the people that you’re working with. If the economy gets worse, people get more anxious, their behavior on the freeway doesn’t improve. It gets worse. Their behavior in the office gets worse. Their behavior towards their spouses and their kids gets worse. Their behavior towards the environment gets worse.

Just try to be more and more cognizant about where your head is on this stuff, and as I’m gonna go through some pretty daunting headwinds that we’re facing from an economy, and then at the end I’m gonna try to turn it around and say, okay, here’s how these things may work in our favor down the road.

One more kinda philosophical stake. I believe that civic morality is the management of three complex systems: your ecosystem, your social system, and your economy. None is more important than the other. You neglect one, it unravels everything else. If you look at the people in a community, you can separate almost everybody that’s an activist as a champion for one of those sectors. They’re, for the most part, subordinating the other two that they’re not the champion of, to lesser status.

These are profoundly different world views of how things work, how the world works. It’s why you can’t communicate with people in the business community if you’re an environmentalist. Why environmentalists come—there’s a lot of people in the environment community who could care less about people. They think people are evil. They think that we’re ruining the planet. Less of us would be great, so a pandemic might not be that bad a thing.

Then you have people that are running businesses that are, they have 100 people working for 'em, and they know what’ll happen if they have to lay off half their workforce. They know what’s gonna happen to those families. They’re genuinely worried about that. Then you have people that are in education and in healthcare and social work, who are taking care of human beings, and they see the business community as exploiting 'em.

These groups have polarized and are not talking to each other. One of the things that has to happen soon, to get real traction on this stuff, is we have to have a way for these people to reconcile their world views and have real conversations about tradeoffs and how this stuff’s gonna work. It’s a lot easier to do it when you’re at 1980 in Pittsburgh than it is if you’re in 2004 in Phoenix where everything’s booming and cranking and going great. It’s really hard to get people to change.

I’m gonna come back to this one in a second. Here’s how you think. This is important. This is how you think about economies. This is the most productive way I’ve found to explain why the economy is important. You have, essentially the economy of your place has to grow faster than the population. Your population can shrink, but the economy has to shrink more slowly. How much revenue per person to serve do you have? More revenue per person to serve, or less revenue per person to serve? Revenue of your school system to service burden.

Almost any function of the community can be expressed this way. What you’re trying to do, what economic developers are trying to do, is grow the economy a little faster than the population without damaging the population or the ecosystem. The way you get at, and a way that will help you think in a way that’ll allow you to prioritize is, there’s two kinds of jobs in the economy. There are jobs where the products and services produced are sold to other people in the economy. We’re washing each other’s laundry. You can’t grow the economy by adding jobs in the service sector.

There’s another set of jobs where the products and services produced by local residents are being sold outside the community. It’s bringing new money in. All the money—so, Intel makes computer chips in Chandler, and then most of those chips get purchased and used outside the state. That money comes in, so everybody at Intel gets paid from sources outside. It actually makes the pie bigger. Otherwise, if it wasn’t for the difference between these two, you could solve all your unemployment problems by opening up 10,000 laundromats.

This is probably the most important concept to get down in the economic development business. When you’re trying to grow e greater than p, this group, this red part is really the part that has to grow faster than the population. What you do is, you take, if you’re a designer, if you’re an economic architect, you go, what are the industry sectors that make up the economic base of our community? Which ones are gonna grow? Which ones are likely to shrink? Which new ones could we go after? Let’s make plans accordingly. Let’s design a future economy.

Once you have those targets picked, you have a rationale for organizing your discretionary resources. If you lose your mining industry, you lose all the service sector jobs and the visible means of support for all these dependents. This is the framework we use to think about what’s gonna happen in where you live. You keep an eye on that economic base. If it goes up or down, everything else goes up or down.

It’s a scary movie we’re looking at. Here’s a graph of all the recessions since 1948. This is the one we’re in now. This is not a normal recession we are in, and we’re not anywhere near back where we were in ’07, ’08, when this all started. It’s not a v pattern recession. It’s an l.

Audience: Just wondering. You were saying that maybe we need to crash. Do you think also in the societal base that, because of the systems that we have with the SNAPs programs, that we’re not able to see those crashes quite as much because it’s hidden within the debit card systems and things like that? You don’t see those food lines anymore, even though they are there in the stores, standing next to you—

Mark Lautman: The food lines aren’t there like they were in the ‘30s. We had almost the same amount of unemployment that we did during the Depression. We have a safety net now. You didn’t have one back then. You also had, you didn’t have anywhere near the same power at the federal level to stop the crash. They actually halted the collapse of the banking system by printing two point seven trillion dollars in new money and putting 'em in the banks. It’s like triple the money supply. We used to freak out if it went up five percent.

Audience: But by not seeing that crash, and not seeing that desperation, that we haven’t really gotten it into our heads that we could do something to change [trailing off].

Mark Lautman: I think it’s the inability to project. We are the only species that can actually look ahead and imagine what the future’s like, but not all of us do it. Not all of us do it with the same clarity. What’s happening is, people are using cycles they saw happen before in their lives, and understandings that they’ve developed about how the economy works, and they are applying it to now and the future, when they think about the future. That’s why I’m gonna try to crush any notion that you can rely on your past calculus for how the economy works. We’re in a whole new ballgame now.

Number one, it’s not a v, it’s an l. Number two, probably 20 percent of the US economy was fake. It was built on consumption, financed by debt no one had any intention or capability of paying off. In order to get back to where we were in ’08, we’ve gotta go back through this fake part of the economy. We haven’t done it. We haven’t even started to do it yet. Don’t expect a big flood of new demand to put us back on this growth path again.

That’s probably the biggest one. Federal government’s broke. If you took eight zeros off the federal predicament and put it in framework for a household, 21,000 in income, 38 in expenses, so you’re down every year 16,5. You put it on your credit card. Here’s what your credit card’s carrying. The sequester they’re talking about, this doomsday draconian sequester, is a $385 reduction of this overhead. I’m not kidding. The sequester that’s gonna doom the economy is just a drop in the bucket.

What this means is the federal government is permanently—the rest of our planning cycle, for the next 20 years, federal government’s not in the game.

Audience: Isn’t the federal government so broke because they took over the debt of the banks? They took on that debt, the [speaker too quiet] debt?

Mark Lautman: A part of it. If you’d let the economy collapse, you’d probably be in worse shape than this. Ultimately, the problem is this, and we haven’t, we let the wars and the financial crisis basically push this number up to where it’s twice as big as it should be and it would still be manageable. It’s not just us. It’s all of Europe.

The reason this slide’s important, it means federal government isn’t coming to your rescue at the local level anymore. Any funding you think you’re getting from the federal government is at risk, first time in our lifetimes. We used to, they used to spend more every year per person for the whole time I’ve been alive. It’s over now.

This is the thesis of the book that I wrote. I saw this before the recession started. Here’s the demand for jobs. Here’s the supply of workers in the US. That’s 2007. They crossed. Now the recession is pushing this blue line down, so we’re in 2013. It’s still below, but nobody’s birthdays are being postponed. Ultimately, this is a result of boomers not having enough kids to replace ourselves.

Audience: If this is case, why hasn’t the labor markets’ wages grown? Because if you could put supply and demand, shouldn’t our wages be increasing, as opposed to staying level?

Mark Lautman: It’s going up in certain areas, but right now, the economy, there’s no inflation or no growth in wage income, because the economy’s still not demanding more people than we have.

Audience: What’s that occurring before the crash?

Mark Lautman: No. We’re just getting there. There are other forces on wages that factor in, but basically—before I go to that, there’s four problems. We didn’t have enough kids. We used to have four to six kids. We’re having one point seven. Two point ones break even. We didn’t educate half of 'em. Everybody you’re gonna hire in the next 25 years already been born. We know how many took algebra two in ninth grade and which ones didn’t.

The boomers are this huge slug of workers that are gonna suddenly bail out of the productive part of the economy and become the most expensive dependents in the economy. It puts a—you know, if you could solve all those other problems, you would still have this as a iron-clad metal box around any prospects of trying to grow your economy like we used to during my lifetime. This is the one that potentially is the most dangerous to what I think is the sustainability movement. If you don’t have enough qualified workers, if you don’t have enough qualified workers to staff this part of your economy, you can’t grow. Your unemployment rate’s irrelevant. It’s how many people qualified to do the things that the economy needs. Most communities in the country are out of that labor.

Here’s the prospects. If you’re living a community, or you’re trying to—if you’re the sustainability manager, or you’re the architect of sustainability in a place, and you are currently looking like this. Here’s your least productive person, here’s your most productive person. This is the total number of people in your economy. These guys are dependents. Too old, everybody’s dying and getting born here, and then getting through school and coming into the workforce.

What you want is, you want this quadrant to shrink, this one to grow, this one to shrink, and this one to grow. It’s the opposite. What’s happening is, this unqualified sector is exploding, cuz we’re dumping kids unprepared outta school into the market. The economy’s, the work is getting more sophisticated, requiring higher level skills, so people that used to be qualified are now dropping back into this unqualified sector. We’re gonna lose a huge chunk of these most productive part of your economy. The boomers are gonna bail into retirement. You have a shrinking qualified workforce.

The day you were at full employment at this group, you’re done. Your economy can’t grow any faster unless you import people or you mine talent out of this category and in, or you get boomers to go back into the workforce. This is as profound a problem as what’s happening with climate change and carbon footprints. You can look at the social services side of things. You look at what’s happening to the people that are here and here, that are dependent on systems, need the government and the delivery systems to be way more efficient. Those are all problems in scale.

I propose that you can’t solve the ecosystem problems any faster than you solve these. When you contemplate what needs to be done in the way of sustainability, that you temper it with or scale it to what you think’s gonna happen to the economic base of the place you’re in, and what’s gonna happen to, what’s happening to the demographic mix. I’ll stop there.

Actually, lemme make one more point [laughter]. Here’s how it changes the game. Through my entire career, economic development was about—my middle daughter Megan told her fifth grade class one time, when they had to stand up and tell their classmates what their parents did for a living, she said, “My dad tricks companies into moving to New Mexico.” [Laughter]

That’s what it used to be. The game used to be, could your governor and your mayor and your economic development group have the right kind of rapport with the CEO of a company you wanted to attract, and get a deal done, and get 'em to come here rather than Las Vegas or Phoenix or Albuquerque or someplace else. It was essentially a deal, and the employees of that facility would have to go wherever they decided to move the facility. Everybody’s moving around.

When I was growing up and moving through my career, every time there was a good job someplace, there’s ten of us boomers in the lobby filling out applications, hoping we’d get the job. They’d say, “Lautman, we’re gonna give you the job. It’s half the money, and you gotta live in Cleveland.” Okay, great! Honey, I got the job, we’re moving to Cleveland! Everybody was happy.

Today it’s the opposite. There’s ten companies chasing the lone qualified worker. She is—especially since there’s more women in college now than men—the sought-after, scarce, qualified worker says, “Robert, I really like your company and I think your values are great, and I get to work with some of the best people in the world, and I’m just thrilled. But if you could get me a condo under chair number two at Breckinridge and double that signing bonus, I could give you two years.”

The power is shifting from the people that run the businesses. In order to grow, they're gonna have to steal talent from their competitors. They’re gonna have to go places where they know they can steal talent, get 'em to your location, and keep 'em there, keep 'em from being picked off two years later. It’s now a contest of the quality of places. You can start designing—if you have a place, you're gonna need the workforce. It’s now a talent attraction game. It’s not an employer attraction game. It’s a talent.

If you can get boomers that are still thinking and healthy, and you can get the people that are mid-career change candidates, and you can get students, more kids through school, and they wanna stay there because of the community you’ve built, you don’t have to worry about the economic development part of this nearly as much. You don’t have anywhere near as much power as you used to, as a mayor and a governor trying to get a company there. It’s now about, you should be worrying way more about who do you want to move. Who do you want to live in your community? What kind of values do they have? What do they wanna see in a place? Almost universally, they wanna see places that are sustainable. They wanna live in places that are sustainable.

The last thing I’m gonna say is, what this does is it changes your pitch from: hey, this is good for the planet and we’re idiots not to do it. We can’t keep pumping carbon into the air. It’s bad. We’re gonna go, we’re all gonna die. Instead of that, it’s: you wanna have a sound economy, if you’re a business guy, if you’re an employer, if you’re a city government official trying to keep e growing faster than p. It’s a workforce attraction game now. Maybe not the number one, but it is in a lot of cases, number one thing is, I wanna live somewhere. These people wanna live someplace where it’s sustainable and they feel good that they’re not spoiling the environment. It’s a value that they hold, that this cohort of people that you want to attract and hold.

All of a sudden, sustainability isn’t a moral rationale. I mean, it is, but it’s got the addition of—even if you don’t buy in, if you’re a denier of global warming, you need to have a sustainable community, because if you don’t, these people aren’t gonna wanna move to your community, and your economy won’t work. You have a new pitch to make. This is a lynchpin, one of the lynchpins to, can you grow your economy faster than your population? That’s the lever you use to bring in the business community and the social services and political people.