Found: Wallet in Alpine Landfill
Greg McDonnell doesn’t dig on suits, does
not feel at home swaddled in threads so strict. In fact, he doesn’t even feel
at hotel, not even at slumping tree fort. A suit is simply not the dress code for
his comfort zone.
But this is Beijing, and he has a
presentation to make. So, clad in a blue shirt and tweed-type blazer, his tie
decorated with red spots, the executive director of the Whistler Community
Services Society (WCSS) takes to a podium in the B.C. Canada Pavilion and
begins a stirring talk on sustainability.
This is the second stage of the Whistler
Forum’s Harmony Project, a two-day affair that has a raft of delegates descend
on China to exchange ideas on sustainable and accessible tourism. Yesterday’s
speakers dealt with the latter topic; today’s are on the former.
Think of the Harmony Project as an open
invitation to a massive and burgeoning tourist market some 8,500 km away
— a stroll through the marketplace of ideas before lunch, maybe an
exchange of business cards over dinner.
Slotted near the day’s end, McDonnell is
one of several speakers to take to the mic. He comes on the heels of a number
of presentations, some dealing with community planning, others with leadership
history and progress monitoring. Though McDonnell arrives late in the program,
his presentation serves up an ideal summation of a hazy buzzword:
Sustainability.
Sustainability, he says, is a complicated
fabric, something sewn in social, economic, environmental and cultural threads.
Taken together, those threads produce a warm blanket, something for locals and
tourists alike. Whether Chinese or Canadian, it just makes sense, both for
prosperity and for longevity.
“Currently,” he says, fingers drumming the
podium, “as you all know, the world economy cannot sustain itself indefinitely.
We have this decline in life-sustaining resources, the world’s resources. And
we have an increased demand on those resources. As humans we’re living here
trying to survive this narrowing action.”
His fingers stop their nervous patter and
his arms go momentarily akimbo. All heads are cocked in his direction,
translations chattering through earphones as he goes.
Now, at home with his subject, relaxation
takes hold. “This is really important for me,” he continues, “as a community
development worker and as a social services worker.”
That suit, rich in value, came sweet on the
cheap. The lifeblood of WCSS is the Re-Use-It Centre in Function Junction, and
the heart pumping that blood is something called a cyclic economy.
“The idea on the table was we’d create this
Re-Use-It Centre to recycle the things in our economy, keep them out of the
landfill, sell them and in fact fund social programs,” he explains. “Does that
contribute anything? These are questions I ask myself quite often. And I can
tell you: In a small world, it does.”
That’s a theme McDonnell often hits on when
explaining his work. It’s not a foreign idea to the Chinese – they have a
convention coming up in October – but, at the same time, it doesn’t
resonate in quite the same way as it does with McDonnell. Still, for him, it’s
all about the micro, and, if enough people think that way, changes go macro.
For WCSS, it’s been working well. The
organization funds 75 per cent of its 25 social programs through the Centre. It
diverts 205 tonnes of material from the landfill, raking in $550,000 in the
process. The Centre and the programs it helps fund are invaluable to the
transient worker community that tends to define much of the Sea to Sky corridor,
especially Whistler.
“It’s not unlike the migratory workforce
that I hear about in Beijing,” McDonnell says, “people who come from outlying
communities and arrive in Beijing to help build your hotels and what not.”
Wanted: Used Red Stars
The Harmony Project has two key components.
One is to exchange ideas, and the other is to build relationships. Given that
rapport is almost a natural part of intellectual human interaction, the latter
is less difficult. But the former is far more daunting, especially when
participating histories, economies and cultures are rooted in such different
soils.
The Global Village of Beijing is one of
China’s first non-governmental organizations. It works to bring enterprise,
government and citizen action groups together in shared responsibility for the
environment.
That will be hard work. Seven of the
world’s 10 most polluted cities are in China. Eighty per cent of urban sewage
is pumped straight into lakes and rivers without treatment. Car culture is
crazed and growing, and last year international media reports placed China
above the U.S. as the world’s biggest producer of carbon dioxide. In the run up
to the Olympics, the country’s single biggest tourist event to date, officials
searched desperately for ways to clean the sky, even as 560 million of its
nationwide urban population sucked in air deemed unfit by the European Union.
According to a report by the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency and a handful of consultants, China steers
about 80 per cent of its waste into landfills, only five per cent of which meet
American standards, while 50 per cent are just open, stinking dumps. The
government is aware of the problem and is trying to address it through the
National Action Plan on Urban Solid Waste Landfill Gas Collection and
Utilization.
Maybe, McDonnell figures, a plan like his
could help. Maybe, if a series of Re-Use-It Centres sprung up around Beijing
and other major urban centres, something special could be sewn from the four
threads of sustainability.
But maybe not.
Lin Wenshan works with the Global Village.
A thin man with slight stubble and greyish clothes, he shifts back and forth on
his brown loafers while talking. There are attitudes to change, he says, a lot
of them – nearly 1.3 billion.
“Here, people don’t separate their trash,”
Wenshan says. “They take stuff and throw it away on the streets. There’s enough
poor people that some of it doesn’t even make it to landfill.”
In China, everything works on a larger
scale. While some waste may not make it to landfill, a good deal obviously
does. Meanwhile, when poor people scavenge alleyways on their bikes, the
socio-economic principles of McDonnell’s sustainability philosophy are lost.
Those principles, at least when manifested in the context of a Re-Use-It
Centre, might not be a fit for China.
“People are concerned about face and the
image they put out,” says Wenshan. “There are some people who would buy second
hand, but those with increasing income would not.”
And others can get it free on the streets.
So, he continues, the government would have to sanction a different approach.
“It’s possible, and it’s something that
should be done. But without the government mandating that people do things, it
would be hard to set up.”
Bend It Like Brown
Bespectacled Bill Brown radiates quiet and
calm. One of the Harmony Project’s key coordinators, he can be seen throughout
the Pavilion, in restaurants or along Beijing’s frenetic streets, here giving
pins to children, there photographing delegates, here listening attentively to
a presentation, there entering a book store in search of information.
He’s the lead planner with the Resort
Municipality of Whistler (RMOW), and part of his mandate in Beijing is to
showcase the Whistler 2020 framework for community sustainability. When Brown
gets in front of an audience, a change comes over him: His personality becomes
more dominant, and his sense of humour shines.
“I don’t really like the word
sustainability very much,” he says. “It’s a concept. It’s difficult to define,
and you can’t really tell if you’ve achieved much. But we use the word anyway.”
Like McDonnell, Brown imagines
sustainability as a layered concept, an idea, however vague, that involves
culture, economics, socialism and environmentalism. Through Whistler 2020,
which, despite the title, aims to have the town sustainable by 2060, Brown’s
department and others in the RMOW work towards a specific set of priorities:
enrich the environment, improve the resort experience for locals and tourists,
improve the environment, partner with others, and ensure economic viability.
“The big thing that happened in Whistler,”
explains Brown, “is the community said we want to do something. If a community
in China says, ‘Yes, we want to buy in,’ then it will be successful. It has to
be grassroots. It has to be the citizens saying, ‘We want to change. We want to
do something.’”
Eventually, says Brown, the municipality
will have nothing to do with Whistler 2020. It will be purely grassroots.
There are two men in black shirts seated in
the audience. One of them is young, the other a few decades older.
Both are white, though they seem to
understand Mandarin as easily as they do English. The older one speaks first.
He is bald and stocky, though his voice sounds soft, almost childish, beneath
the tone of incredulity.
“Nothing happens here without the
government being first, last and always,” he says. “You have this wonderful
idea that people are very excited about, have the government involved all along
and now you want the government out of it.”
The second man also seems sceptical.
“How do you develop these partnerships?” he
asks, noting that his community doesn’t have the educational pedigree that
exists in Whistler.
In short, these two men feel the model of
Whistler 2020 is not applicable to China. It’s too grassroots for a country
with such an unbending bureaucracy. There’s too much poverty to draw in the
plethora of educated minds that bore out Whistler 2020. Further, partnership
opportunities are few.
At this point, another Whistler delegate
pipes up. Dave Williamson is the president of Cascade Environmental, a
consulting company that works with government, developers and resort operators.
He urges delegates to consider the Leadership in Energy and Environmental
Design (LEED) building code, criteria many developers strive towards.
“The templates abound,” Williamson says.
“They’re out there in the world. One of the things we’ve encountered in
Whistler is that LEED is an American model, developed in the Midwest, where
there are no mountains.”
And so some Whistler buildings label
themselves LEED equivalent, meaning builders work with the lay of the land to
achieve what they can. It’s a sort of bending process favoured by Brown.
“You take the ideas and transform them into
something that fits into your culture, time and place,” he says.
Off The Wall
Jim Spear married his Mandarin tutor 27
years ago. So open a new book, a story both convoluted and compelling, one that
took him from California to Mutianyu, with a stop over in the B.C. Canada
Pavilion, where the idea of Whistler 2020 struck him as so foreign.
“It’s a very small scale business,” he
says, holding court over lunch. “You’ve heard of chickens with their heads cut
off?”
He’s talking about his own tourism
operation. Mutianyu is a Great Wall town. It’s about an hour outside of
Beijing, a galaxy of calm separating the two. Spear took a shine to it in the
late ‘80s, just a guy roaming around curious. He fell in to conversation with a
merchant, expressed an interest in living here, and was connected with a real
estate opportunity.
“It was still quite a closed society,” he
says.
But he squirreled his way in just the same.
Meanwhile, locals worried for their way of life, much of it hinging on the
flogging of souvenirs to Great Wall wanderers. But tourists were getting
scarce, and young people were leaving in leagues. And so someone suggested
Spear give back at least as much as what he got.
“We came up with this crackpot idea of
taking over the abandoned schoolhouse and starting this operation.”
It’s called the Schoolhouse at Mutianyu
Great Wall. The actual schoolhouse is a banquet hall and art shop, with blown
glass as the focus. Vases, bowls, plates and figurines line shelves in the
gallery, and here and there throughout the courtyard are bowls of water filled
with glass pebbles, all of this crafted in a basement blow room by local
artists. Food is western, though ingredients are sourced locally whenever
possible. Employees are also local.
“We didn’t start off with a big
philosophy,” Spear says. “A lot of you people from Whistler, from what I hear,
you didn’t start off with a big philosophy, either. You started thinking a lot
about what would work. We can learn a lot from you.”
And Whistler stands to learn from them. The
enterprise extends beyond the gates of the schoolhouse, includes three
restaurants and a series of vacation homes. Existing buildings, many of them
run down to ramshackle, are renovated and restored, then rented out to
tourists. Although none of the rental proceeds, which are substantial, end up in
community programming, the operation still draws a crowd. And every crowd has
its spenders, exactly the kind of people village merchants feared extinct.
“One of the parts of sustainability is
using existing footprints,” says Spear. “All these workers are local workers,
and they’re beginning to learn new skills.”
Off the main road, which slowly rambles up
to the Great Wall, workers form furniture, pony walls and other structures, the
air they breathe markedly cleaner than the smoggy fair in Beijing. Also in
contrast to Beijing is the soothing calm of the place, clotheslines shifting in
the wind as villagers amble slowly past.
Energy efficiency is part of the mandate.
The light standards are fitted with solar panels, and most every roof in town
has a black pipe contraption that heats water with the benefit of the sun.
Of course, all this exists only
tentatively. Even though this is a national park, there’s nothing in place to
prevent a resort developer from swooping low and building high. Things could go
Whistler unaffordable at the swing of a hammer, especially if government
mandarins become interested. But Spear shrugs that off; it hasn’t happened yet,
he says. He’s more focused on the present, which, despite his pessimism at the
B.C. Canada Pavilion, is inspired by the same ethos propelling Whistler 2020.
“It’s what we hope to be a model for
sustainable development based on tourism,” he says.
Fitting that all this goes down in the
shadow of the Great Wall. That thing, marvel though it is, never actually kept
anyone out. Rather, it was probably more of a transportation corridor, a high
road across rocky terrain.
Sino Connected
A funny thing? Spear has been to Whistler
– several times. His daughter goes to UBC. But he never knew anything
about the place, just drove through it, took in some scenery and then went back
down to the city. It took a trip to China to point out some of the Sea to Sky
corridor’s more lofty goals.
If it’s all about linkages, and it is,
there are many to celebrate. There’s Greg McDonnell, the man in the second-hand
suit who galvanized his audience, both Chinese and Canadian, probably more than
any other Forum delegate. And then over to Wenshan, who liked McDonnell’s ideas
and struggled to apply them to the world he knows. There are the similarities
between Whistler and Mutianyu, the gentle hills and climbing peaks, the unique
tourist opportunities, and the potential for the whole thing to swan dive at
the feet of irresponsible development.
There’s a group of people coming from one
place, from one history, and making their way to another place, another
history, in the process new people promising to do the same.
And then there’s affable Bill Brown, no
longer the centre of attention and quiet once again. He’s standing in the lobby
of Hotel Beijing. Under his arm is a bundle of paperwork, and the most
noticeable document is his prized planning booklet.
“I’m waiting for someone who couldn’t make
it to the Pavilion,” he says happily. “We’re going to talk about Whistler
2020.”