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Feature - The road to sustainability

A year after the launch of Whistler. It’s Our Nature, how far have we travelled?

Remember that information-packed booklet and CD you got a year ago in the mail telling you all about sustainable living?

What, you don’t think you got it.

Oh, you did, but you can’t remember what you did with it.

Did you read it?

Titled the ‘Household Toolkit’ it hoped to tweak your curiosity about how to meet your own needs and society’s needs while also maintaining the integrity of the ecological systems our very lives depend upon.

Wait!

Don’t turn that page. I know it sounds boring but this is important stuff.

It is so important that the leaders of Whistler are committed to working toward sustainability as a goal for the community.

As part of this journey a new community program was developed, Whistler. It’s Our Nature , which developed and produced the toolkit.

Members of the program include the municipality, Whistler-Blackcomb, the Fairmont Chateau Whistler, Tourism Whistler and the Association of Whistler Area Residents for the Environment.

The program relies heavily on the Natural Step, a framework developed by Swedish scientist Dr. Karl-Henrik Robert, in response to growing concerns over health problems resulting from increased environmental toxins and current resource use practices.

In fact, proponents of the framework in Whistler are now sought-after to give lectures and advice on how other communities in Canada and around the world can get on board.

Dave Anderson has lived in Whistler for 10 years. He got the toolkit last February when it was mailed to everyone on the municipal tax list.

"I did read it," he said.

"I think what we try and do personally in this house is try and comply with everything that was in the book."

Anderson was aware of the various responses to the booklet – everything from rave reviews to fury over wasting "tax-payers dollars."

But he felt, as did many others canvassed locally as they shopped, that anything which can be done to educate people on the subject is worthwhile.

"I think everything you can do to raise awareness should be done," said Anderson.

"But you have to realize that some people will look at it and others won’t. Was (mailing it out) the best way to reach people? Well, it’s a moot point as different people will respond to things in different ways."

For Felicity Smart, a Washington resident who shares a condominium here, the tool kit was a wasted effort.

"It’s not that I don’t think protecting the environment and using things well is important," she said.

"But now I think about it I remember looking at the stuff and being overwhelmed.

"It was just too much.

"I think we just put in a drawer somewhere."

There were four toolkits produced: a household kit, a small business kit, a kit for schools and a community sustainability toolkit, which was produced with the Natural Step of Canada.

The household toolkit cost about $9 a copy, including the CD. It was funded by the Resort Municipality of Whistler and AWARE, which got its funding from the Whistler-Blackcomb Foundation, The Community Foundation of Whistler and the Ministry of Community, Aboriginal and Women’s Services Greening Communities Initiative.

That cost did not include any of the volunteer work done on the project.

"We got a little bit of comment and a lot of rumours," said Dave Waldron, former co-ordinator of Whistler. It’s Our Nature and currently a sustainability advisor for the RMOW.

"The comments were generally supportive, but there were a few which were generally very unsupportive and those were the letters to the editor."

Any time public money is spent on something there are people who demand accountability.

But when sussing out exactly what impact the toolkit has had on Whistlerites a year later is difficult to determine.

No tracking system or survey was put in place to investigate its efficacy. But then, according to its supporters that wasn’t the point.

"The overriding purpose was to raise awareness about sustainability and provide some avenue for those who did want to participate in a practical and simple way," said Waldron.

"Not everyone had been introduced to the Natural Step framework and that was a big reason why we sent them out.

"The household toolkit raised awareness to a certain level. Was it a quantum leap and a huge breakthrough? Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell.

"It certainly wasn't ever meant to be a quick and simple thing, like, oh here is the solution and we have fixed the world and aren't we lucky.

"It was meant to be an introduction and as introductions go you don’t really know sometimes, until years later, how well they worked.

"We essentially wanted to communicate that this is what we are working on and this is something we have encountered that we think has a lot of merit, that is the scientific consensus of the framework. And in terms of bringing it home here are a few little tips.

"It was meant to be a way that everyone had the opportunity to be informed and involved."

According to the RMOW’s five-year financial plan, which started last year, the top priority for each department was adopting Natural Step strategies.

Mayor Hugh O’Reilly said each department is working on it but the focus right now is on winning the 2010 Winter Olympic Games and completing the Comprehensive Sustainability Plan.

"Those are two very significant initiatives that are taking resources and energy," said O’Reilly.

"Everyone understands and supports it."

Community leaders want the whole town to embrace sustainability as they decided to do following a series of inspiring local lectures on the Natural Step by Robert, founder of the framework, in March of 2000.

The Natural Step program is a science-based systems framework to help organizations and communities move toward sustainability.

Robert’s presentation brought together a group of Early Adopters (Whistler-Blackcomb, Fairmont Chateau Whistler, RMOW, Tourism Whistler, Whistler’s Fotosource and AWARE) who embarked on an ambitious project: to make Whistler the first municipality in North America to adopt the Natural Step on a community-wide basis.

Since then each of the Early Adopters has been spreading the word and working quietly and diligently to make the Natural Step and the quest for sustainability part of the way they do business and live life.

At the Chateau Whistler more than 600 people have taken sustainability training through the hotel. Hundreds have also gone through training at Tourism Whistler and Whistler-Blackcomb.

Last year the Chateau, the only hotel chain to be a certified Power Smart partner with BC Hydro, did a lighting retrofit with electrifying results.

"That project reduced our emissions by about 50 tonnes of greenhouse gas (annually)," said Dan Wilson, sustainability co-ordinator for the hotel.

"Our solid material to the landfill dropped by about 50 per cent last year and right now we are at about 80 per cent diversion from the landfill.

"That was through recycling and purchasing different products that can be recycled and building better systems in the hotel and composting."

Throughout last year Wilson charted the hotel’s progress on sustainability and this week he launched a "sustainability wheel" for the hotel, which will give staff an easy way to visualize how they are doing.

But to live sustainably it is not just enough to use resources wisely and protect the environment. People must be socially responsible as well. It’s a responsibility taken very seriously at the Chateau, which raised $30,000 last year through events and staff fund-raising for local organizations.

"The goal this year is to raise $40,000," said Wilson.

The move to thinking about living sustainably has not been without its challenges. At the Chateau Whistler it has meant attacking some of the entrenched beliefs about focusing on nothing but environmental stewardship.

"Environmental stewardship has the goal of protecting the environment for the environment’s sake," said Wilson.

"Whereas sustainability is really about the quality of life for us and while the environmental system – the natural system – is very important to that so is the human system and society.

"That earlier message was entrenched from the beginning and so we have had to spend quite a lot of time and energy in the last six months on changing our orientation and then communicating sustainability in a different way to drive that change in understanding."

And it is not just the staff at the Chateau who are being indoctrinated into sustainable thinking.

The hotel is launching guest services to help bring clients on board too. A recent survey carried out by the hotel found that 90 per cent of guests felt the hotel should be doing something to support sustainable living but only 5 per cent knew anything about the initiatives the Chateau has already adopted.

Most recently the Chateau launched the EcoMeet program. It offers a combination of services from cuisine choice, to room services, to guest speakers on sustainability, for conference and meeting bookings at the hotel.

"Guests are a very important lever to the whole sustainability equation," said Wilson.

"I think if our guests coming to Whistler were really demanding lots of programs over and above a fantastic experience at the hotel that would definitely drive the program so to communicate to them what we are doing and what options they have is important."

Tourism Whistler is right beside the Chateau Whistler when it comes to bringing tourists along on the resort’s journey to sustainability.

"One of things we are working on is how to start to engage the guests in this whole process and that is something that will happen over the next several years," said Michel Comeau Thompson, manager of communications for Tourism Whistler.

"The starting point is how do we communicate this to people. We don’t want to go out and say, ‘We are great. We are doing this.’

"It is more that we want to bring people along with us on this journey to preserve this experience for them the next time they come and sort of integrate them into the process.

"We want to find ways to engage people but not overwhelm them. The underlying idea is to make it part of the experience they already love and offer a little bit of an education process and hopefully they can take that away and use it at home too, if they are not already."

There is no doubt that more and more tourists are looking for eco-tourism experiences and most, given a choice, would rather stay in a place committed to environmentalism at the very least.

From coffee shops to Carney’s Waster Systems measures to move toward sustainability can be seen everywhere in the community.

So by Whistler positioning itself on the leading edge of developing a path toward sustainability it may also be guaranteeing its own success in the future.

"It’s not like we produce widgets here," said O’Reilly.

"We are producing an experience that is absolutely dependent on clean air, clean water and pristine living.

"We recognize that we are not without our own set of warts. We have seen what has happened in the forest industry, we’ve seen what has happened in mining, and the fishing industry and how pressure on them to make changes at a pace that is too fast created great problems.

"We don’t want to get caught in that funnel like they did. We are trying to pre-empt it. We are trying to be leaders.

"We recognize that leisure is part of human nature. People need to relax and rest and recharge so there will always be a demand for the product.

"But we also recognize that those who can do it with the least impact will be the product of choice."

This reality, and a decade-long commitment to environmental stewardship, also helps drive Whistler-Blackcomb’s pursuit of sustainability.

World events in the last few years have also had a tremendous impact.

"We are trying harder to build more social value at the local and global level in light of where the world is at today," said Arthur DeJong, mountain planning and environmental resource manager.

"We just sent a container of supplies in partnership with Rotary to Romania and we have another container here at the mountain ready to go to Iraq and we are just waiting for word from the Red Cross.

"They are filled primarily with clothing. Any uniforms that are in good shape but no longer used in our operation now go into this container for second and third world aid."

The approach is eminently logical as under the Natural Step human needs must be met worldwide for sustainability to be reached.

"When people live in fear or want they are not thinking about how to make the planet healthy for future generations," said DeJong.

At a local level the Whistler-Blackcomb Foundation is a well-recognized supporter of community organizations.

Global events have also solidified Whistler-Blackcomb’s on-going move toward being sustainable when it comes to their energy needs and the production of greenhouse gases.

It continues to move ahead with plans for an independent power project on Fitzsimmons Creek, which would produce as much energy as the mountains use each year, and a partnership with BC Hydro has also led to significant conservation of energy.

"We are estimating by January of next year we should see a six per cent reduction in electrical use and that is just through using timers and sensors and switching our light bulbs to energy efficient ones," said DeJong.

"…And the engineering of the run-of-river project on the Fitzsimmons just keeps looking better and better the more we work through the design of it."

Recent research has also shown that the local forests absorb significantly more carbons than the ski operation produces.

The snowcats are also all being upgraded to fuel-efficient engines, which has lowered consumption of fuel by 18 to 20 per cent. And car-pooling is estimated to have saved about 90,000 kilograms of carbon being expelled into the air.

Up to 25 materials are being recycled by Whistler-Blackcomb. Between the end of November and February it recycled 235,000 mixed plastic contains 1.8 million beverage containers, 13,500 tin cans, 10,000 domestic beer containers, and 1,220 bags of mixed paper.

And an audit of the 6,000-hectare ski area also showed that erosion is down due mostly to the $1.5 million spent to stop the process.

"I don’t for a second want to make it sound like we are outstanding because we are not sustainable," said DeJong.

"What operation in North America or the world is? So we are not fooling ourselves here. We are on a journey.

"But I think the Natural Step is a great building block to get us to the next level.

"It is great glue for the community because we are very much partnered in this as compared to a lot of other communities I have been to in the business which are polarized."

It’s keeping the community in the loop and moving ever forward on sustainable issues which prompted the production of the toolkits and keeps community leaders focused on the goal.

"When I think of sustainability and the move toward it, it’s like a hundred mile journey and we have taken two steps," said Mitch Rhodes, treasurer and past-president of AWARE.

"But you have to start somewhere and you have to start with awareness.

"It is just like when I was a kid there was the whole litter-bug campaign going on because people just dropped their garbage wherever."

Rhodes hopes a successful bid to host the 2010 Olympic Games could also raise the profile of sustainability around the globe.

AWARE met with the International Olympic Committees evaluation commission team during its visit to Whistler last month.

"Half of our conversation with the IOC was around sustainability principles," said Rhodes.

AWARE is currently working on resurrecting the Whistler. It’s Our Nature program and is seeking funding to get out there and continue to educate the community about the Natural Step and sustainability.

"I think with sustainability it will also take a long time to change our culture around it and we are just at the beginning.

"We have to face that and we can't get frustrated with it."



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