Vail: cleaning its energy and its image.

Photo: iStockphoto

The latest step in this effort took place in August, when officials announced plans to offset all of the town’s municipal operations by buying wind power credits from a Boulder-based broker.

It’s a move that will, over the next three years, offset approximately 20 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and prevent 28 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. For those keeping score, excited town officials say that’s the equivalent of removing 2,681 cars from the road or planting 3,700 acres of mature trees. This year, costs for the $12,000 program will be paid out of the town’s supplemental budget, and, assuming it is approved by the town council in subsequent years, the expense will be rolled into the budget as part of normal energy expenditures.

The announcement — which followed closely on the heels of a similar move by the Vail Resorts ski company — was big news for Vail, which became the first municipality in the country to offset all of its energy use with wind power, but it was far from surprising. After all, daily life here is closely linked to the health and beauty of the natural world. No snow means no business — for everyone from ski operators to restaurateurs to booksellers — and as a result, local residents have a vested interest in promoting environmentally friendly policies.

“We believe that protecting Vail’s natural environment is critical to the health and prosperity of our community,” Town Manager Stan Zemler said in a statement announcing the plan. “Wind power is a simple step in continuously improving our environmental practices in the town.” He added that he hoped the town’s decision would stimulate interest in wind power from community members as well.

“We just got through with a community picketing process,” says Vail Environmental Health Officer Bill Carlson, who helped craft the town’s wind-power plan, “and the environment came up very strong among those who attended.” What issues are residents most concerned about? Developing a green-building code, controlling noise from nearby Interstate 70, dealing with a beetle problem that’s been killing thousands of trees in the area, and, in no uncertain terms, making sure their town becomes and remains “No. 1 in environmental leadership.”

Promoting the town’s commitment to renewable energy is a big part of that goal. More important, says Carlson, “it’s just the right thing to do.” In announcing the move, the town and its resort joined the Aspen Skiing Company and Whole Foods, both of which also began offsetting 100 percent of their power consumption with wind credits earlier this year. And since the announcement, a third Colorado ski operator, Triple Peaks LLC, which runs Crested Butte Mountain Resort, has also said it plans to purchase wind credits.

Carlson recently took some time out from his work to speak with Grist by phone about the future of wind power and Vail’s new shift toward civic environmentalism.

So, how did this wind-power project get started?

Actually, I had wanted to promote renewable energy for a long time. Vail Resorts was negotiating with a wind marketer in Boulder and several others around the country, so they were thinking about converting all their lift operations and mountain operations to wind energy. So, I thought, “You know, I think I’m going to investigate this for the town, too.”

What sorts of logistics were involved in making this happen?

I got four or five bids from various marketers. Two of them I thought were very good, and the ski company decided to pick one of them so we did as well. We ended up going with Renewable Choice Energy, out of Boulder, and that was just passed and approved by the council, so we have a three-year contract.

What about the economic cost?

You have to think of it in terms of the larger issues. I’m concerned, as the town’s environmental officer, with global warming — I think that’s the biggest, No. 1 environmental issue right now, and it impacts everything else. And of course we make our living here with snow for five to six months of the year. So I think it behooves the town to take a leadership role and to have strategies and actions that address greenhouse gases and do our part as a world-renowned resort community to be an example for that. Because at the rate we’re emitting carbon off into the atmosphere, we’re going to be in trouble in another 50 to 100 years.

Did you run into any opposition from the board?

No, we didn’t have any opposition. It was supported all along the way.

That’s amazing. Why do you think it struck a chord?

Well, I think the town is moving more toward an environmental sustainability policy, and renewable energy is one of those things that we just want to do. We’re already interested in increasing resource efficiency and reducing greenhouse gases, so I think you’re going to see the town be more environmentally conscious and have more strategies for stewardship actions in the future.

Wendy Brawer with two Green Map
System staffers.

Photo: Paper Sky.

It all started with a map of New York City. With U.N. delegates swarming in for several weeks of preparation for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, Brawer wanted to find a way to highlight the city’s eco-features. Pooling their experience, she and her coworkers came up with 143 sites, ranging from community gardens to bike paths to green buildings — “even the toxic hotspots of the Big Apple.” The resulting “Green Apple Map” was a hit, and by the time the fourth edition came out eight years later, it contained more than 1,000 points of interest.

As activists in other cities got wind of the project, they wanted in. Using the original map as a template, Brawer and an international group of designers created a set of open-source tools and icons in 1995. Since then, locals in 46 countries have started more than 330 related projects to create their own green maps, and student groups have also gotten involved.

The maps are about bringing people closer to the natural world, Brawer explains, and showing them just how much is happening, ecologically speaking, right in their own neighborhoods. The resources have also proved to be invaluable tools for researchers, students, and conservation advocates by documenting features like hazardous waste sites and sources of pollution.

The stuff of legends.

For its fifth edition, the Green Apple Map has gone a new route, focusing on energy for the first time. The “Powerful Green Map of New York,” released in February, illustrates the city’s energy footprint, with icons for energy impacts, conservation projects, and renewable resources. Brawer hopes the enthusiasm and new ideas surrounding the flagship project will continue to filter down to green maps in other areas. She recently took some time away from her work to speak with Grist by phone about Green Map System and its role as an ecological information source.

So how did the whole Green Map System get started?

The idea, I guess, originally came from helping visitors find signs of progress toward sustainability in New York. But it turned out it was equally engaging for longtime residents as well as newcomers — to see the city in a new way, to connect with the green sites and start using them on a regular basis.

And it all grew out of the Green Apple Map that you created back in 1992?

That’s right. In ’95, we worked with a group of folks from around the world to create a global symbol system, a set of icons that are the same on every green map, so we can cross cultural and language barriers and connect with the kind of sites we’re most interested in. And that’s supposedly the only global symbol system for maps in the world. So that it’s about sustainability is very important.

Where are things now?

There are 236 maps published now and 70 or so of those are online, so there have been something like 3 million maps printed so far. We’re just now publishing 100,000 of the Powerful Green Map of New York, and we imagine that they’ll all be distributed within a year. We’re also looking as a network for options for creating more interactive maps, and right now we’re testing using Google maps for our interface.

One of the things we’re looking at here is, “Who’s not being invited into the conservation challenge locally?” Trying to make sure that all New Yorkers feel like they’re a part of it. Our new website already has up energy- and environment-related information in Chinese and Spanish.

Who uses these maps?

They’re appealing to a wide variety of users — citizens, students, people who’ve been around a long time, people just getting to town. Here in New York, we’ve given them to everybody from hospices and returning prisoner programs to botanical centers, libraries, community centers, and religious organizations.

So you aren’t just focusing on tourists?

Oh, no. People who’ve been in a city a long time don’t necessarily know what’s going on across the tracks. And, you know, many of us are having these “aha” moments, these eureka moments when we suddenly realize that greener living means better quality of living — it’s good for the individual and it’s good for the community and it’s good for the earth.

I know New York is your territory, but who’s creating all of these maps around the world?

This also varies widely: registered mapmakers, it can be a university course, it can be younger students. Oftentimes, though, it is a small group, a not-for-profit, usually in the environmental or planning fields. So there are lots of variations and audiences.

More than a decade into this, is the Green Map System living up to your goals?

I think so. The goal has really always been to connect people with their hometown environment in an engaged way, not in a passive way. So, hopefully, out of it people will find ways to volunteer and get involved, or they’ll realize they don’t have to go very far to experience nature. It can become part of their everyday life. And at the same time encourage them to make choices for their communities that are better for the environment. I guess it’s about seeing yourself as part of nature, especially local nature — the nature that surrounds us every day.

Walking It Off
by Doug Peacock,
Ewu Press, 208 pgs.,
2005.

Think you know Doug Peacock? Think again.

He was the inspiration for George Washington Hayduke, the hard-charging, Vietnam-scarred protagonist of Edward Abbey’s classic environmental novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. But there’s more to the Peacock story than just trashing bulldozers and causing trouble — a truth his new memoir, Walking It Off, makes abundantly clear.

Becoming a spiritual leader for the environmental movement, he says, has been tough to live down. “You know, it’s a terrible thing to read your own press,” he says, “but it’s even worse to live a life of somebody else’s fiction.”

Like his alter ego, Peacock, now 63, is a Vietnam vet, a committed environmentalist, and even something of a misfit loner. The Michigan native, fresh from the war, met Abbey in the late 1960s through a mutual friend. The two formed a fast bond, prowling the desert Southwest and Alaska together for the better part of 20 years. When Abbey died in 1989, Peacock was there, wrapping his mentor’s body in a sleeping bag and laying him to rest among the scrub brush of the Arizona desert.

That’s where Walking It Off, Peacock’s long-awaited memoir, picks up the story, recounting several solo backcountry trips the author took in the early ’90s. The book centers around a particularly fateful experience in Nepal — where he nearly bled to death at high altitude — and unfolds as he tries to make sense of his own mortality: revisiting old stomping grounds and stopping off at old Ed’s grave in the Cabeza Prieta wilderness.

Walking It Off comes across as part adventure journal and part psychology lesson, as the author struggles to explain the opposing forces — Vietnam and the American wilderness — that have shaped his life. It’s refreshing to see the human side of Abbey and his semi-mythic subject. Peacock, who’s spent decades as an outdoor journalist and wildlife researcher, certainly knows what he’s doing as a writer. After all, his Grizzly Years is a veritable classic of the genre.

But as the title suggests, Walking It Off tends to wander a bit. Peacock has traveled all over the world and tells some compelling stories, but the different threads tend to run together. One minute he’s sleeping in a pickup, the next he’s staggering around the Himalayas looking death square in the face. Though it all fits together in the end, keeping up with the narrative takes some flipping back and forth.

Peacock is currently working on a new project in the Yukon, but he recently took some time to speak with Grist by phone — discussing his life, his friend Ed Abbey, and his ongoing love affair with the world’s wild places.

This book draws a lot of parallels between Vietnam and the American West — what’s the connection there?

I was basically never able to separate the landscapes of Vietnam from the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains, and I think that’s guided my obsessions and my passions more than anything. I see fighting for wildness much like warfare.

Is that why you went out into the wild after Vietnam?

That was a little bit different. When I came back from Vietnam, I was like a lot of other veterans: I was really out of sorts, I couldn’t talk to anybody, I didn’t know what the hell was going on. So I went to the one place where I was comfortable in my life, and that happened to be the woods.

Describe your relationship with Ed Abbey.

Well, it was the most difficult close friendship of my entire life. And, you know, I was a real prick during those days: I’d hit the ground at any loud noise or sudden movement, and I’d fight at the drop of a hat. Ed, bless his heart, was and is an eternally cantankerous son of a bitch.

How do you think Abbey would respond to the current state of the environmental movement?

He would roll over in his grave. I think it’s fair to say that there’s never been an administration that’s waged war against life more effectively than the Bush administration — human life, animal life, and wilderness. Everybody has become entrenched — worried about their corporate sponsors and their relationships with the government — and you don’t see many bold voices ready to take on everybody. Ed Abbey did that his entire life.

Is that why his work has endured?

He was a man who wrote about the freedom of dignity, and those were not goddamn empty words to Ed. He deeply cared about the kind of world he was leaving behind for his children.

What are your feelings on Earth First! and other radical environmentalists?

You know, I was never really centrally a part of that. I was too much of a loner. First of all, [Earth First!] was plucked right out of the pages of The Monkey Wrench Gang, and it was a surprisingly, wonderfully effective organization in that it brought a dialogue. All of a sudden, mainstream Sierra Club environmentalists seemed quite reasonable compared with what Earth First! was proposing. Those days were actually a little indulgent, but quite wonderful, too.

How would you define yourself now?

My life is dedicated to saving what’s left of the wilderness, the wild country. But I have few social skills; I don’t belong to groups and I don’t join organizations. So I mainly stand on the sidelines cheering. I know a lot of folk and I serve as a sort of spiritual adviser to some very effective conservation groups.

What about the grizzlies? What drew you to them?

[The grizzly] is the one animal in North America that absolutely rivets your attention. You walk through Colorado, California, and pretty much any other place and you’re top dog, but in grizzly country that is not the case. There’s a fundamental humility you feel in grizzly country that informs us of our organic place in the world: close, but not at the top of the food chain.

Does that mean the years have tempered your view of death?

I had to make a friend of death in Nepal, because I didn’t think I was going to get out of there. Fortunately, I had the great example of Ed Abbey. I mean, I walked with him into death a long ways, but he died such a dignified, wonderful, utterly alive death. Ed said, “The fear of death follows the fear of life” — that a man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. I take a lot of strength from that.