I’ve known for a while now that the real action on sustainability is happening in cities — other than Washington, D.C., that is — but a few months back, it came to my attention that many of the people leading the charge are women, often young ones.

While higher-up positions in city government are still skewed in favor of men, sustainability directors seem to be more evenly split between the genders. Because most sustainability director positions have been created in the last 10 years, there isn’t the same good-ol’-boy hierarchy in place. And due to the fact that the field is so young, so are many of its practitioners. Take, for example, Katherine Gajewski, who was just 29 years old when Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter asked her to head up the city’s sustainability department.

Inspired by the women who are leading the sustainability movement in cities big and small, I created Knope and change, a series named after Leslie Knope, the main character in the popular television show Parks and Recreation. Knope, played by the estimable Amy Poehler, is a mid-level bureaucrat working in her city’s parks department. She loves her city, works tirelessly to improve it, and never lets bureaucracy discourage her.

Over the course of the past five months, I found a lot of Knope-ish energy in the burgeoning field of urban sustainability. Although there are still female sustainability directors out there deserving of a profile, my compatriots and I felt 15 interviews were enough, so with this post, I’m wrapping it up.

I realize how lucky I’ve been to write this series — talking to passionate women from around the country was like taking a carbon-free trip every week to a new city. I wish every young writer could do the same. I wanted to share a bit of what I’ve learned, in case you haven’t read and reflected on every piece. (Of course, you’ve read every piece. Right? Right?)

THE THINGS I LEARNED FROM THEM

1. When you’re building a new field, you need all the help you can get.

“Sustainability” is such a broad term — and the resulting city policies and programs are just as wide. A sustainability director must be versed in local food, energy efficiency, waste management, and public transportation. “You have to be ADHD” to do the job, jokes Oak Park, Ill., Sustainability Manager K.C. Poulos.

Add anemic city budgets and the burden of having a new, sometimes politically controversial, position to the mix, and it’s a lot of pressure. As a result, sustainability directors built up a sharing network, the Urban Sustainability Directors Network. Members compare notes on what is or isn’t working in their cities, share plans, and even use regional networks to approach utilities or test strategies for communicating with their communities.

After all, when it comes to sustainability in municipal government, “We’re all making it up as we go along,” says long-time Minneapolis Sustainability Director Gayle Prest. The resulting camaraderie, energy, and mutual respect is rare to see in municipal government. Several of the interviewees described meeting Prest at a USDN conference in words and tones typically reserved for describing run-ins with rockstars.

2. To get anything done, you have to tailor your approach to your community.

Prest uses the term “Minnesota nice” to describe her approach to introducing new programs and interacting with her community. Minneapolis’ bikeshare is even named “Nice Ride.” Salt Lake’s Vicki Bennett uses Mormonism’s roots as a sustainable, independent community to break through with religious conservatives. Susanne Torriente, of Fort Lauderdale, plans for rising sea levels by pointing out recent flooding, rather than rehashing the climate change debate in polarized Florida. Lauren Riga argues that sustainability can be an important tool to turn abandoned, apocalyptic Gary, Ind., into a lauded example of urban renewal. Lawrence, Kan., Sustainability Director Eileen Horn uses local sports rivalries to convince otherwise-conservative Kansans to try energy efficiency programs.

3. While cities are carrying the torch on sustainability, they can only go so far.

Austin may have a high hip factor and cool new eco-districts, but if Texas continues to dry up, so will the city’s water supply. San Francisco might be bringing down greenhouse gas emissions and shooting for zero waste by 2020, but it won’t matter much if a good chunk of the city is underwater by the end of the century. And even the greenest cities have a long, long way to go. More on that in a minute.

4. Don’t count out people from small towns.

Some of my favorite interviewees were from smaller cities. I’ll never forget Maggie Ullman, of Asheville, N.C., and the groggy chickens. (A resident called to complain that the brighter, LED streetlights in front of her place were keeping her flock up at night. Ullman talked to the woman’s neighbors and turned that streetlight off.) Or K.C. Poulos and her experiments in trying to create a versatile, storm-resistant electricity grid.

While sustainability directors in major cities manage staffs that can number in the hundreds — especially if they are in charge of the waste department — small city departments are tiny. This means that sustainability directors have to be scrappy and buckle down on a handful of issues that are important to them. Plus, they are automatically closer to their communities. Which brings me to my next major lessons.

THE THINGS I LEARNED FROM YOU

1. Read the comments.

There’s a rule that many in online journalism espouse: Don’t read the comments. There’s even a Twitter account by that name that offers justifications for never taking a peek below the fold. Due to the openness of the web, comment sections can brim with racism, sexism, and folks who are the reader equivalent of overzealous Yelp reviewers. Trolls abound. But despite all this, I read the comments. Every one.

When you’re a 25-year-old still struggling to hit her journalistic stride, this can be terrifying. It’s the sort of thing that makes you stumble out of bed at 6 a.m. to make sure you haven’t made a fool of Grist’s good name — and your parents and your editors as well.

But I’m glad I did. While I wouldn’t say it’s gotten easier, it has shown me the value of an engaged community.

2. There’s always more to learn. 

Take long-time commenter Swells22. Swells (I can call you Swells, right?) commented on many of my pieces. His comments often opened my eyes to an aspect of the city I hadn’t even thought of. After reading my article on Norfolk, Va., and its attempts to fight back sea-level rise, he pointed out that the city is built on marshes and so “no matter how much greenhouse gases are stopped, Norfolk will continue to slip into the mud.”

Many of you weighed in on missing pieces of my coverage. For example, Burlington, Vt.’s sustainability director pointed out the issues that stem from trying to plan public transportation in light of low-vacancy rates and sprawl. Commenter ltf wrote:

One thing I always found disturbing about Vermont, and much of New England, was how using aggressive zoning and permitting processes, all the prime areas with decent economic opportunities were reserved for the affluent and the “riff raff” were relegated to the boondocks with long commutes. The social and environmental costs of these practices offset a lot of their liberalism. Burlington does not ‘struggle’ with a low vacancy rate, they deliberately enacted policies which created it.

3. Even the greenest cities have a long, long way to go.

My praise of Portland, Ore.’s green efforts brought out some locals with stronger expectations for their city. From Nagurski:

If we all dressed in repurposed burlap coffee bags and stood outside our houses to pass groceries and other stuff to our neighbors bucket-brigade style instead of all of this wasteful traveling, we’d have hardly any impact on the planet! I get pretty sick of hearing how cool we are while we cut bus routes and build streetcar lines costing hundreds of millions of dollars, but travel at walking speed.

And hmnpwr:

This is truly a tallest midget contest. Perhaps we should call PDX the least unsustainable U.S. city. … Because of the abundant hydroelectric resources in the Pacific Northwest, the single largest contributor to climate change in this region is personal automobile use. If PDX can’t do any better than the rest of the nation does, then it should be ashamed. Some leader.

Snarkist sums it up succinctly:

Its not that we are so great, we just suck a little less than everyone else.

GOING FORWARD

In doing these interviews, I sometimes ended up feeling a bit too much like a self-aware version of Parks and Recreation‘s Perd Hapley:

But as Leslie Knope shows us, doing your job well means knowing your community. It means listening to feedback and not letting yourself make excuses.

Knope describes feedback in heated open meetings as “People caring loudly at me.” And it’s true: You learn from your community, even when it stings. That goes for the women who are leading the movement toward more sustainable cities — and those of us who write about them as well.

The village of Oak Park might seem indistinguishable from its neighbors. A suburb on the western edge of Chicago, it shares a street grid with the city and a sustainability plan with a bordering village, River Forest. But this community of 50,000 people has a historic character all its own — and is the hometown of an impressive range of talent, including Homer Simpson voice actor Dan Castellaneta, Ernest Hemingway, actress Betty White, political advisor David Axelrod, and journalist Tavi Gevinson.

Last year, Oak Park bundled its residential electricity accounts and went out to bid for a new energy supplier. Not only did it end up with a more favorable rate, but the deal included 100 percent renewable energy credits, adding 170 million kilowatt-hours of wind power into the regional grid.

And now, the village has volunteered to be a testing ground for “smart grid” technology that could someday revolutionize the way we generate, transmit, and use electricity. And we’re not talking about just smart meters here — rather, a thoroughly digitized, completely transformed system that is tied into a network of renewable sources like wind and solar, and is capable of “self-healing” during storms and outages.

“Literally every piece of equipment along the way changes,” says Oak Park’s sustainability manager, K.C. Poulos.

The project, which will include a network of small solar-electric systems on residential roofs, is projected to cost between $5 and 6 million, and half of the cost will be covered by the Korea Smart Grid Institute. Oak Park is working with the International Institute for Sustainable Design to secure funding for the rest.

I talked to Poulos for Knope and change, our series about the women behind green changes in our city governments. Here’s an edited version of our conversation about their smart grid experiment. Hat tip to Oak Parker Doug Burke for the suggestion.

Q. Why are you working with the Korea Smart Grid Institute?

A. They did the demonstration on an island in South Korea called Jeju Island. It’s kind of like their Hawaii — it’s a resort area. They were able to put up a demonstration that showed how distributed generation like solar can be connected to a network operations center. All of these houses got battery storage so when you weren’t using your solar power in the house, you could store it in a battery system. When the grid on that island became overloaded with demand, the network operating system could send messages to those households saying, “You need to use to your battery. We’re going to take all of the energy from your solar panels for the next four hours and put them right on the grid. And then we will send you a check next month. Thank you very much for letting us buy your power for four hours.”

Q. You might not even know your house is making you money?

A. Correct, but the system network operating has the ability to send messages to those houses. So you could get a text message on your phone.

Q. For the Oak Park demonstration, do residents have to pay to install the solar panels and smart grid systems?

A. There’s going to be no out-of-pocket expenses for the homeowner. In return, they are agreeing to have the system put in place, to have workers come and work on their houses, and to also give up their energy information to the operating center and to the people running it so we can study how you use your energy given this new system.

Q. What will you be studying?

A. Minute to minute, this system will be collecting data on which of the 200 houses are using what kind of energy. We’re less concerned with, “Oh so-and-so uses her hair dryer from 7:15 to 8.” [Eds. note: So-and-so is either all of Twisted Sister or needs a new hair dryer.] It’s more a matter of what’s the pattern of peak usage; how is the house reacting to different weather conditions; and is the home owner changing his or her behavior?

Q. This is a Glenn Beckian nightmare. Agenda 21! Chicago political machines! How does it feel to be taken over by a foreign entity?

A. This is a collaboration. It’s not the government itself of South Korea that’s working on this — it’s their research institute and their smart grid companies. Their business mission is to create a business model that would allow for the sale of their products. It’s less about Big Brother “we’re going to watch you use your energy” and more about “Hey, what can we sell you?” It’s very consumer-oriented.

Q. Have you gotten much backlash?

A. No. I’ve received hundreds of phone calls from residents who want to join. Keep in mind we’re still finalizing the project. It will be interesting to see what kinds of questions and concerns come up around that very topic of data privacy. That’s a valid issue.

Q. How will the solar and battery energy interact with the grid?

A. There are a couple scenarios a homeowner can choose in terms of how to use it. The one that we talk about the most is this idea of collecting the solar energy during the day and storing it in the battery and then having the house run on the battery at night so you’re completely offline at night and the battery provides a phantom load — your clocks, TV. Your energy load is pretty low at night but that means you’re not taking anything off the grid. So you’re reducing your bill right there.

Then let’s say there’s an outage in your neighborhood. What we want these systems to be able to do is operate off the battery so these houses can stay somewhat energized. It’s only a three kilowatt system on the house so it’s not like you could have every appliance running at the same time. You’ll have enough for lights, fans, and the refrigerator or A/C. But at least you’re online still and you’re not losing an entire freezer of meat.

Q. How often does Oak Park experience outages?

A. The way the utility provides that number is by average number of minutes out per year per capita. The number for Oak Park is 45 minutes per year. What the number doesn’t tell you about is the stories I hear when [residents] call up on day three of still not having power. Then I get calls from restaurants. You’re talking about an entire week’s or month’s inventory gone.

Q. With climate change, that’s bound to get worse as days and nights heat up and stronger storms knock out lines.

A. This is about climate adaptation too — we’re not just looking at consumer benefits. You want the most resilient local grid system you can get. As temperatures rise, the accumulative effects just keep getting worse and worse. It’s not going to wait for us to make up our minds about whether or not we want to update this stuff. It’s going to keep on coming and we are going to be left holding the bag if we don’t have a system that’s redundant, self-healing, and [monitorable].

Q. Why hasn’t aging electrical infrastructure become a national issue?

A. It’s a sleeper priority that flares up in citizen awareness when something goes wrong. For example, Hurricane Sandy: You’re still hearing about sections of Long Island that are not receiving reliable power. Long Island suffered for days and days and days and there are some irate residents out there. But as the power is restored and you get back to your normal life, it goes into the back of your mind again until the next emergency hits. We can’t live like that.

For me, from a national perspective, we need an energy policy that prioritizes infrastructure rehabilitation and reinvestment. Smart grid investment and infrastructure have the potential to provide even more savings and even more efficiency for business owners and residents beyond what you can do in your own building in terms of smart appliances and energy management and putting renewable energy on the building. Having a whole smart grid infrastructure is just like what we went through in terms of changing from landlines to cell phones. Think of all the things we do now with our phones that were not even conceivable in the 1970s.

Q. Why should the average American should care about this stuff?

A. Do I go for the emotional argument? It’s about the children.

Q. It’s always about the children.

A. You want your house to work as smart as your phone works. You want it be intuitive and you want it to be clean energy that’s coming through. We are creating that possibility.

A few months ago, an Austin writer took to the pages of the New York Times to fret about the fate of his city. Austin, it seems, is getting too big for its famously weird britches. Not too long ago, an older gentleman fond of wearing high heels and a thong in public ran for mayor three times, Richard Parker wrote. Now, Austin has a Grand Prix racing track, restaurants teeming with celebrities, and yuppies crowding out families.

“[I]n the wake of the Armstrong debacle, it’s hard not to think that pride does, indeed, go before the fall,” Parker wrote, referring to longtime resident Lance Armstrong, who was stripped of his Tour de France titles last year amid growing allegations that he cheated. “Hopefully, Austin can handle success without letting it go to its head; after all, that is precisely what destroyed the hometown hero.”

Parker painted a lovely, nostalgic portrait that simultaneously made me want to preserve Willie Nelson’s old stomping grounds and move there myself, furthering the problem. And indeed, to use Parker’s analogy, Austin is growing like it’s on steroids. The city’s population increased a whopping 51.1 percent from 2000 to 2010.

Is it possible for a city to grow quickly and retain its character? Can they keep Austin Austin? Lucia Athens, the city’s sustainability director, hopes so.

A Texas native, Athens grew up going to Sierra Club protests and outings with her father, who was chair of the San Antonio chapter. She learned the necessity of community organizing and why it’s important to get out in nature. “If you’re never out engaging with it, you never understand what you’re in danger of losing,” she says.

While she was well-trained in the old green tactics of protesting and planting trees in front of bulldozers, she saw a chance to effect change in a new way. “The green building movement became an opportunity to leverage something that was going to happen already in a better direction,” she says. She helped craft Austin’s first green building program in the early ’90s before spending 10 years turning Seattle into a LEED case study. In 2010, she returned to Austin.

I talked to Athens several times over the phone for Knope and change, our series on the women working hard to green our cities. Here’s an edited version of our conversations:

Q. With SXSW’s ongoing success and Austin’s perennial national reputation as a contender for coolest city, is Austin a victim of its own success? Is it possible to stay weird while getting big?

A. I think that’s the big conundrum. We’re experiencing very significant growth and we will be into the foreseeable future. That’s partly because we do have a very high quality of life here and a pretty good hip factor. We have a lot of young people who want to move here. We have a lot of jobs. With all that, it’s good for the economy, but we have to manage that increase in growth and population. That’s where we are going to be butting up against issues related to mobility, transportation, air quality, water. We’re trying to do a good job of balancing economic development and [population] growth with environmental protection and measures for quality of life. But there’s a long way to go. We just adopted a comprehensive plan that uses sustainability as its core principle, [and] it’s a pretty significant guiding document, [but] there are cranes all over town. We’re really trying to focus on steering that new development in the right direction and figuring out how we’re going to maintain the quality of life we have now with such a big increase in our population.

Q. How have you been able to steer development and population growth?

A. Because of my green building background, I definitely have a couple of key projects that focus on urban redevelopment. One is this big neighborhood on the edge of downtown [where] we’re applying the ecodistrict concept. The Seaholm Redevelopment District is a large multi-tract area that’s just west of downtown and overlooking Lady Bird Lake. The heart of it is a historic decommissioned power plant building called the Seaholm Power Plant. It used to provide steam power. It’s been used on a temporary basis during SXSW. Kanye West played there. [There's] incredible volume inside. That’s going to be completely redeveloped into a multi-tenant facility that’s going to have an office, restaurant, and a sustainability information center. There’s a really interesting rainwater collection system that’s being integrated that uses old existing vaults underneath the building, turning them into cistern storage.

We’ve talked about bringing this kind of eco-connoisseur concept into [the sustainability information center] where we would have a community hub with a cafe and an information center where people could come to learn about sustainability. I keep calling it the Green Genius Bar, like the Apple Genius Bar. You go there because you need something or you think you do but you’re not really sure what it is. You need someone who really understands all your different options to guide you through to your choice because it’s overwhelming and you don’t have the time to learn about all of those things. It’s going to be a social hub for the sustainability community and people living in the neighborhood.

There’s another parcel just to the east of it that’s going to include our new downtown library. It’s being designed by Lake|Flato. It’s intended to be the best daylight library in the world [PDF]. It’s got amazing screened-in porches where people will be able to go out and read. It’s going to have a huge bike barn facility, a restaurant cafe, and a lot of public meeting space.

There’s going to be a lot of PV and solar. With the eco-district, we’re looking at, How do we bring this overlay in to create a connective tissue between all of these project elements, and create a community identity?

Q. Have you experienced significant NIMBYism with the project?

A. No. I think everybody in the community is very excited about it. These parcels have been latent and underutilized and sitting there for a really long time. There’s a big appetite in the community for this project to happen.

In addition to initial design, there’s a big focus on the ongoing life of the community and how we can work with residents and tenants and educate them and create behavior change. It’s natural with design and the building industry — we tend to focus a lot on the design and construction of buildings, but we haven’t focused as much on what happens when people are living and working in these buildings. You can design a very green building but if you have people living and working in the building that don’t understand that and don’t match their lifestyles and behavior, you’re not really going to be able to achieve your potential.

Q. What other redevelopment projects are you working on?

A. We’re doing something called a Green Alley Demonstration Project. We’ve identified one alley in a neighborhood of the city that’s experiencing a lot of gentrification. … On this block, we’re trying to increase the density in a micro-density approach by adding all of these additional living units along the alley, then completely redoing the alley right-of-way with natural drainage, maybe food production, solar energy; a whole bunch of different things to take the alley and turn it into a community asset.

One of the first projects that we built in this neighborhood, the grandmother is living in the little alley flat in the back. She gets to live close to her grandkids. So it addresses a lot of social sustainability issues. That’s been my other focus area — making sure we’re really casting the net broadly in terms of how we define sustainability to include social and community issues. Even though everybody talks about the triple bottom line, there’s still a tendency to focus on the environmental area. We’re really going to have to tread carefully on this project to make sure we’re not creating more gentrification.

Q. How does working in such a creative community affect your work?

A. We have a lot of challenges accommodating our vast creative population in our city. How do our codes keep up with all that stuff so that we don’t squash it? Fostering a creative community is one of the core parts of our comprehensive plans. …

One of the things I love about Austin is our food truck culture. We’re really known for that. And I think that’s a part of the Keep Austin Weird focus. … It’s a very lively scene. Because we have good weather for a lot of the year, there are sites with multiple trailers and picnic tables. We’ve got apps that tell you where to go. We have a Gypsy Picnic food festival. Some of the small food trailers have been able to grow into a micro-enterprise and eventually open a restaurant. Another cool thing about it: When a city’s in a progression of redevelopment, you’ll end up with underutilized properties. Since it isn’t permanent, since it’s a trailer, there’s a lot of flexibility. You can enliven those sites until something else comes along. It gives us that ability to evolve and grow and change.

Q. Your state recently cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. Part of your governor’s drought strategy included praying for rain. How does being in such a conservative state influence your work?

A. It doesn’t affect us all that much. There’s so much local jurisdictions have control over. We do have to be careful about not getting too aggressive and pushing the boundaries too far because it can create repercussions at the state level. Sometimes we need to tread carefully if we’re trying to advance something innovative because if we go too far, sometimes the next legislative session, there will be new legislation to tamp down what we’re doing. …

We just passed a single-use bag ban. Two other cities in Texas have [done] that and quite a few other cities are considering it. Right now, I don’t know if we’re going to see any repercussions [at the state level], but if there are, we will probably try to coordinate with people in the other cities.

Q. How will climate change affect Austin?

A. Increasing the severity and length of droughts and high temperatures. We had incredible record temperatures the summer before last. That was the same summer we had wildfires at a level we had never experienced before in Central Texas right on the edge of the city limits. We lost a massive forest to the east of the city. Even though we’re not on the coast and experiencing rising sea levels, there’s an increasing recognition that we need to be thinking about adaptation and whether or not our infrastructure is resilient, including roads, bridges. We experience periodic flash flooding. … The other place it plays out: As an example, when Katrina happened, we had a lot of refugee population come into Austin. We had to accommodate and house, provide social services. So we also experience climate impacts that happen in other places.

Q. Are you worried about water shortages?

A. Water is going to be one of our biggest issues. We did just get a lot of rain this past week but we’ve had a very dry winter. Two of our big cultural barriers: One, everybody expects to be able to get into a single-occupancy vehicle and go wherever they want and find accessible cheap parking. And two, the expectation that we will have ample water available to irrigate ornamental landscapes, including turf.  Really, if we’re looking at a well-adapted plant palette, we’re going to have to ask ourselves whether we can have ornamental lawns anymore. That’s a big cultural hot-button issue here. People don’t want to talk about giving up their lawns.

Q. What does Keep Austin Weird mean to you? I know it means different things to different people — anti-corporatism …

A. One of the fundamental components of Austin’s identity is freedom of expression. We really believe in people’s right to express themselves. Everybody’s OK, whoever they are, whatever they look like, however they are dressed. There is a very high level of tolerance in Austin. I love going to the night club the White Horse. You’ll see someone in their Wranglers and their cowboy hat. You’ll see someone looking grunge in flannel. And then you have steampunk people. It’s just a huge cross-section and people are pretty comfortable with that.

Kansas was once a very progressive — radical, even — place. Before and during the Civil War, the state was a hotbed for the anti-slavery movement. In the late 19th century, the leftist, pro-labor People’s Party took root in the wheat-filled plains.

Things have changed a bit since then. In the past 100 years, the state has gone for the Democratic presidential candidate only three times. And now, “If you want to know what a Tea Party America might look like, there is no place like Kansas,” writes Annie Gowen in the Washington Post. Kansas even has an “Office of the Repealer” to offer recommendations on laws and regulations to cut.

Despite the change in political mood in the rest of the state, Lawrence held onto its progressive roots. In the 2012 presidential election, not only did Douglas County vote blue in a state that overwhelmingly went red, it matched the state’s zeal for Romney (59.7 percent) with how strongly it went for Obama (60.5 percent).

Eileen Horn, a native of the sunflower state, became the city’s and county’s first sustainability director in 2010. Her position was funded — as was the case with those of many small cities — through the Energy Efficiency and Conservation block fund, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the stimulus bill. (Last summer, representatives voted unanimously to fund Horn’s office on a more permanent basis, through the general fund.)

I talked to Horn for Knope and change, our series on the women working to green our cities and towns. Here’s our edited conversation on the power of a little good-natured competition, the food movement in the bread basket, and why the country can’t move forward without a constructive conversation with the Midwest.

While progressives might be tempted to write the state off and pray for the good folks in Lawrence, Horn says, “Ignore Kansas at your own peril.”

Q. How often have you heard the joke, “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”?

A. Oh god. All the time. I grew up here and moved away for 10 years. Everywhere I moved to, I was always the token Kansas girl for that joke. Then I played into it one year by dressing up like Dorothy for Halloween. Tragic error on my part.

Q. Why is Lawrence so much more progressive than the rest of the state?

A. There’s a snarky bumper sticker people have around town that says, “Lawrence: 34 miles of sanity surrounded by Kansas.” The University of Kansas is a big influence. It gives us access to all the great things that a university town has. Kansas had a history of being a battleground state before the Civil War. Lawrence was the epicenter of a lot of those battles. Lawrence was willing to take a stand on slavery and that’s the story we tell ourselves about who we are. We tend to have an ethic of being trailblazers.

But Kansans have a conservative ethic, in a good way. Small c. Those firmly held, stalwart Midwestern values of thrift and prudence and making common-sense decisions are very much alive throughout the state. That’s what’s made Kansans highly skeptical of climate change. There is a healthy skepticism in this state but it’s also made talking about solutions remarkably easy, because the solutions — energy efficiency and growing food closer to home and [renewable energy] — are very pragmatic. So while Kansans may be slow to embrace the science, we’re not having any problems embracing the solutions.

Q. So how will Lawrence be affected by climate change?

A. Climate change is a water issue in Kansas. We’re in about 18 months of drought. The last measurable rainfall in this region was in June of 2011. Climate change, as it’s doing everywhere, is wreaking havoc with the way rainfall patterns have historically happened across the state.

Unfortunately, we’re used to extreme weather events. We’re in tornado alley. We’re in the middle of where the two major weather systems of the country converge and rain grapefruit-sized hail on us. We’re used to being beat up by Mother Nature. So it takes a really extreme weather event to get our attention. It takes an 18-month drought for people to be like, “Hm, this is a little bit strange.”

Q. Due to your original job funding coming from the Energy Efficiency and Conservation block grant, you’ve been doing a lot of work on energy efficiency. Tell us about some of your projects.

A. We’ve done two really successful competitions between city staff. Fire stations competed for energy efficiency and we called it the Energy Smackdown. We ran a four-month contest over the summer. The fire station that won reduced their energy use by 20 percent compared to the summer before. We did a similar contest with our rec centers. They got really creative. One of them started offering hot yoga in the morning so they could delay starting to cool the building.

Last year, the Kansas Energy Office used their Energy Efficiency and Conservation block grant to start a home energy audit and retrofit program. Citizens could get on-bill financing to do a retrofit project. They were really trying to push that so they launched a statewide energy contest with the Climate and Energy Project called the Take Charge Challenge. Lawrence competed against the city of Manhattan which is where Kansas State University is. Kansas State and University of Kansas are big rivals so we got to do a lot of trash talking.

Q. So did you end up winning?

A. [small voice] No. And I’m just able to say that thanks to a year of therapy.

Here’s my excuse, get ready: It was on a per-capita basis and Manhattan only has 60,000 people and we have 95,000. We saved more energy but per-person they saved more. But full disclosure: I created the Take Charge Challenge when I was [working at the Climate and Energy Project] and ran the first pilot. I got asked to compete in it when I came to the city. I even stood up in front of the commission and said, “We’re going to win this cause I wrote the rules.” I didn’t even win my own campaign. Just pitiful.

Q. You’re much more into competitions than the average sustainability director.

A. Most Kansans have decided that a way to frame their identities is “I’m not an environmentalist.” It’s kind of a dirty word here in the state. Countless times during the Take Charge Challenge, I would be sitting in a booth and I’d be passing out light bulbs and say “Do you want to save energy?” People would keep walking by on the sidewalk. I’d say “Do you want to save up to $75 per year?” People would continue to pass. Then I’d say “Do you want to beat K State?” People would literally do a 180 to come back to talk to me for 10 minutes and then sign up for an energy audit.

Q. Being in America’s breadbasket, has it been harder or easier to get a local food movement going?

A. When I talk to colleagues across the U.S. who are working on urban food policy, a lot of what they are doing is going back and rewriting zoning to allow chickens or changing ordinances to allow food production within city limits. Most Kansans are really one to two generations off the farm … So we never wrote those ordinances banning that stuff in the first place.

The challenge for us is that Kansas grows grass and beans really well. We do wheat, we do corn, and we do soybeans. We saw a precipitous decline in the 1950s and ’60s of truck farms and smaller market farms that were selling fruits and vegetables. We have that same hill to climb in terms of getting those small farms back and getting young people interested in growing fruits and vegetables.

We did a program last year that we stole from Cleveland. We surveyed our vacant city- and county-owned properties and created a program to lease them for free to community gardeners and urban farmers. This is the first growing season since we started it and it’s been really successful. We had four gardens and farms get started. Two are traditional community gardens but one’s a community orchard and one is a student farm that’s a collaboration between a middle school and a junior college.

Q. Extreme weather. Extreme conservatives. You guys have a bit of a bad rep here on the Left Coast.

A. I went to school in D.C. and lived in Denver for a while and then did my grad school work at the University of Vermont. I got really used to the snarky “WHAT you’re from KANSAS” remarks. I think the thing that people are forgetting is that we are where your fuel and your food comes from. You better figure out how to talk to and engage us on this. We need to engage in a really constructive, authentic conversation on values that matter to Kansans and in a framework that makes sense to Kansans and Midwesterners. The same motivating language that’s working in coastal communities really doesn’t matter to us. What we think is, “Great, our real estate values are going to go up. When the rest of you get flooded out, you’ll come here.”

Q. Do you think Kansas will ever become progressive again?

A. I don’t know if I would hazard a guess. Our legislature is the most conservative it’s ever been right now. We had a lot of moderate Republicans unseated by Tea Party rivals. We’re in a historical moment of being really, really conservative but we haven’t always been this way.

Q. So technically, it could swing back around someday.

A. Especially when all you liberals get flooded out and move here.

Norfolk, Va., offers a hint of what’s to come for many coastal communities as climate change pushes tides higher and storms continue to worsen. Norfolk sits at the southeast corner of Virginia, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Chesapeake Bay. Surrounded by water on three sides, the city of 243,000 will experience more sea-level rise than other locales, scientists say. Some areas of the picturesque old city — home to a major Navy base and full of old houses and cobblestone streets — already flood regularly.

Agencies, residents, and businesses, have already banded together to weather the rising waters, says Norfolk’s manager of Environmental Protection Programs, Denise Thompson. “We all speak the same language,” she says. “Everyone tends to help each other out. People might say to their new neighbors ‘You need to move your car up the street’ or ‘The city’s getting ready to open up the garages. You’ll be able to move your car there for free so that you won’t have to worry about flooding your vehicle.’”

Thompson, an environmental health scientist by training, has been looking at the way humans and the environment interact since the 1970s. The issue first piqued her interest in high school, when her debate team was discussing whether the federal government should regulate pollution. In her research, she came across DDT and pesticides and closed beaches. “The light bulb went off for me,” she says.

Thompson says there were times in the 1980s when she wondered “if the environment was a good place for a career,” but today, “sustainability really has become the lens in which businesses and governments are starting to view the world.”

Norfolk, for its part, opened Virginia’s first light rail system (called The Tide) a little over a year ago, and daily ridership is already up to 5,000. And the Navy has turned out to be a swell partner in going green — it just launched Virginia’s largest solar farm and the base has a green roof and LEED-certified aircraft hangars.

Of course, it all comes too late to stop the waters from rising — even with drastic cuts to our emissions (cuts that seem improbable, even impossible) sea level will continue to rise for the foreseeable future. What is Norfolk doing about that? I talked to Thompson for Knope and change, our series on the woman working to green city governments. Here’s our edited conversation about coping with the current and coming floods, cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay, and why she feels optimistic about nature’s ability to recover from all the damage we’ve wrought.  

Q. Are you ever disheartened that we moved forward on so many issues yet now are stuck again? It seems like the climate movement is going through many of the same motions that you saw in the ’70s.

A. I’m heartened that everyone is talking to each other and working on it. We have a bit of a different perspective in Norfolk. We’ve had a long history of flooding and we’ve had major floods. In 1933, we flooded during the hurricane and in 1960, there was the Ash Wednesday storm. In the late 1960s, the Army Corps of Engineers built a downtown flood wall and flood gates and pump stations to protect the downtown. The idea that we’ve got rainwater and seawater to deal with — that’s not new to us. But I’ll tell you what is new to us: Four of the seven most significant tidal events in the past 80 years happened in the last 10 years. Put another way, more than half of the major tidal events since 1933 all occurred since 2003. [A NOAA tide gage shows] the relative means sea level at Sewells Point has risen 14.5 inches. [About half the rise was caused by land sinkage. NYT breaks down the numbers.] That’s a lot of water.

Q. How are you planning for more flooding and sea-level rise?

A. We realized we could fit everything we’re doing into four parts: plan, prepare, mitigate, and communicate. As it turns out, they’re all just about as important. The planning part includes civil engineering and structural approaches. Floodwalls, installing pumping equipment. We have elevated roads and likely will do more of that. We’re working with a Netherlands company called FURGO Atlantic as well as local engineers to plan. The other part I’m really excited about, having started life as a biologist, is we’re looking at the blue-green infrastructure of trees and rain gardens and even our parks and wetlands. We’re doing a lot of wetlands restoration because those are really the buffers that protect the coastline. It’s pretty exciting because there are so many benefits [to soft infrastructure] — aesthetic, habitat, water quality, livability benefits.

We’re looking at what do we do about development and redevelopment. Does it make sense to build what we’ve been building in areas that flood? The obvious and well-research answer is “No.” And so we’re making changes to our long-range plan as well as to our zoning regulations. In terms of rebuilding or adding on, the elevations of the finished homes need to be higher. Otherwise, you’re building a problem for yourself.

The communicate piece has turned out to be hugely important. Very early on, we set up two committees. One is a citizen and residents committee. The other is an experts advisory committee [with representatives from NOAA, NASA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Navy, etc.]. Those groups meet regularly and it’s provided a way for us to get out the science, the studies, and the information we have out into the community.

Q. How much sea-level rise are you looking at? How far out are you planning?

A. The numbers we are hearing at this point are two to four inches [of sea-level rise] every decade. Generally our long-term planning is 30 years but some infrastructure lasts longer than that. If it’s something that potentially would last longer than that, we’re look beyond that. Most people tend to be looking at 30-50 years out. But they’re not neglecting the 100 years out either because, especially for us, we can walk around and see buildings that were here 100 years ago. It’s not unimaginable that people will be here in 100 years looking at the buildings we built now as well as the ones from 100 years ago.

Q. The Chesapeake Bay has been greatly affected by agricultural runoff and other pollutants. In 2010, it contained the nation’s third-largest dead zone. In 2011, one-third of the bay was a dead zone. What is Norfolk doing to improve the health of the bay?

A. The interesting thing about the bay, you’ve got the 200-mile-long estuary that goes from Maryland to Norfolk. The bay also includes 50 major rivers and streams that go across land, whether it’s farmland or city, and into the bay. We’re looking at the 100-percent solution. Half of [the pollution] is “point-source” which is the wastewater system and wastewater treatment plants. The other half is runoff and “non-point-source,” [the runoff from streets and parks and yards]. We have a couple ways we’re approaching that. One is from the city side — we’re building more swales and more rain gardens and catchment basins. We have a very aggressive street sweeping program. We sweep every street in the city at least once a month. There’s a voluntary program called River Star for homes and businesses. Runoff is a real lot-by-lot, house-by-house, block-by-block approach you need to take.

Q. That’s all very cool, but in the face of factory-style farming growing in the region … can it make enough of a difference? It seems like in recent years, the bay has been getting worse, not better.

A. The last Bay Foundation report showed the bay to be holding its own and becoming a little bit better. … You are absolutely right that you have to look at the whole watershed of 17 million people. We’re 50 square miles maybe, counting water. We have 140 miles of shoreline so of course we care deeply about our water and our shorelines and the water quality of the bay. In Norfolk, we don’t have poultry farms, although we do allow backyard chickens and beekeeping.

If you look at it big picture, possibly the agriculture folks could do more. If you look at the Elizabeth River, at one point, it was very difficult to find any kind of aquatic life. [A 2008] report showed 38 percent of small fish called mummichogs had cancerous lesions. When the Elizabeth River Project started restoration efforts [in 1993], some people thought it couldn’t be done. The Elizabeth River Project says there are now dozens of species of fish, small crabs, shrimp. Of course, there’s still lots to do but that water body is coming back. They even found a little sea horse. The day they found it was very exciting. It was in an area that was considered to be a biological dead zone.

There are so many things that are positive so if you get frustrated, you don’t stay frustrated very long. It turns out nature does respond to restoration efforts.

If San Francisco were a popular band, it’d be Radiohead: Overachieving, arch, holier-than-thou — and yet undeniably well-loved and two steps ahead of everyone else. Plastic bag ban? “Duh – and expanding.” Mandatory composting and recycling? “Everything in its right place — and let’s shoot for zero waste by 2020.” A solar financing program? “Definitely. And let’s model it after Groupon, while we’re at it, to catch the zeitgeist.”

But even a city on the cutting edge has its share of difficult realities to face. The city has the second-most expensive housing market in the U.S. and middle-class families are being priced out. California could see a 16-inch sea-level rise by mid-century and 55 inches by 2100, according to one estimate [PDF]. Surrounded by water on three sides, the city is particularly vulnerable.

Still, San Francisco Department of the Environment Director Melanie Nutter is optimistic. “Cities are so well-poised to take action and make a collective impact,” she says. “That’s one of the reasons I love working on the local level. You can really see that movement and that change.”

Nutter has tried the alternative: She was working for then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi when national climate bills seemed attainable. “It takes so much to try to move policy at the federal level,” she says. “Waxman-Markey was very disappointing to see fall apart.”

I talked to Nutter for Knope and change, our series on the women working hard to green our cities. Here’s an edited version of our conversation:

Q. I recently saw a map of San Francisco looking at possible sea-level rise scenarios. It wasn’t pretty. What are you planning for and how are you planning for it?

A. This is very much on our minds in light of Sandy and the extreme weather events that we are starting to see. Just in the past two weeks, we’ve had torrential downpours in San Francisco. Rain is common this time of year, but there’s been a number of atmospheric conditions that created a [Pineapple Express], which was basically a complete dumping. There are pictures of places in San Francisco where it’s up to people’s knees on certain streets where the storm drains got flooded from what we thought was going to be a simple rainshower. We are reminded again and again how vulnerable we are.

Many different city agencies in San Francisco have their own adaptation programs or projects where they’ve looked at how changes in sea-level rise or climate impacts could affect their agencies. The public utilities commission has been looking at how snowpack is going to affect the water supply as well as how sea-level rise will affect storm drains. This month, the Department of the Environment is launching an effort to bring all of those city agencies together. We know we need a grander, more unified, collaborated effort.

Q. Can you act fast enough? COP18 looks to be another letdown when it comes to international climate change efforts. On the federal level, things aren’t looking very hopeful either.

A. The good news is that San Francisco has already made great progress on reducing our carbon emissions locally. [Editor’s note: San Francisco is working on a review of how much they’ve been able to cut emissions. There's been debate over the numbers in the past.] We’ve done a lot of great work locally and I think we’re on a good track to reduce emissions even more. That being said, carbon emissions do not obey city boundaries.

There is only so much you can do locally, but I’m hopeful about cities in general. Cities account for 75 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and about 80 percent of the energy use worldwide. If cities do act, and we’re not just all recreating the wheel and are instead sharing best practices and taking action and being nimble, cities can really accelerate progress.

Q. San Francisco has seen a 10 percent decline in the number of middle-class households. New York is the only U.S. city with a less-affordable housing market. Is your department involved in slowing this in any way?

A. To be honest, housing policy is not something within our purview. There is a lot going on in the city to help increase access to affordable housing in San Francisco. [We] see a lot of families who end up leaving the city and county of San Francisco due to affordability. It’s one thing to move here in your 20s and live in an apartment with lots of roommates. It’s another thing to try to raise a family where you have a lot of additional costs. There are certain populations that are disproportionately affected by issues of affordability. One of the things we really try to focus on is, even if you’re not as concerned about greenhouse gas emissions, we have a lot of programs that can help your family save money on their energy bill. There are ways that we can  ensure that [sustainability] isn’t only about environmental protection and some of these bigger goals but that it’s also about individual lives and how people can benefit.

Q. Your green building labels program is praised for boosting property values.

A. It increases the property values but it doesn’t trigger an assessment, so it’s not going to increase people’s property taxes. And when you think about a green, efficient building, they’re cheaper [to] operate. There’s a direct connection between greening and bringing costs down. The question is “Are those savings passed down from a property manager to tenants in a particular apartment building or commercial building?” That’s of course what we would like to see.

Q. San Francisco has some of the highest parking prices in the nation. One of your department’s goals is to get people out of their cars. Are high parking prices a way to encourage that, or just a budget issue?

A. That’s a budget issue. It’s been a way to generate more revenue for the transportation agency to increase transit. One of the programs we’re supporting is the SF Park Program which is basically congestion pricing at the meter level. MTA is able to see in real time what streets are congested and adjust parking rates based on congestion. That’s very helpful because it decreases idling and circling in very congested areas and it’s a disincentive to bring your car into certain congestion areas. It decreases greenhouse gas emissions and it also helps people think about alternatives to bringing their car into the city.

Q. San Francisco is getting a reputation for parklets, in which a parallel parking space is turned into a tiny park.

A. They’ve been an essential component to greening communities and bringing community members back out into neighborhoods in certain areas where there wasn’t a lot of street traffic. There are certain streets that have greatly transformed. … [On Valencia Street,] you can feel the palpable difference. There’s a lot more thriving businesses, a lot more activity. It’s basically a thriving merchant corridor. It’s something we passively support, but we don’t implement it. The planning department is in charge of issuing parklet permits. But we do our own parking day outside the Department of the Environment. Once a year, we take over the parking spaces in front of our building and do outreach and education as part of raising awareness for the movement.

Q. You’ve topped many a greenest city list. Who are your closest competitors?

A. We like to say we’re collaborators. Competition would mean that we’re all trying to [individually] win. We all want to collectively win. Certainly some of the cities we work with a lot and who are on the cutting edge include Vancouver, Seattle, New York, Chicago. Melbourne is doing amazing work. Sydney, Tokyo — there are so many incredible cities around the world that are doing amazing things. Portland.

Q. You might keep an eye out for Portland. I hear they have a competitive streak.

A. [Laughs] Yeah, I’d say those are the cities that are our “closest allies.”

Q. Where is San Francisco headed next in terms of sustainability?

A. I think the future of San Francisco is really going to be about how all of our individual siloed sustainability initiatives will get connected and integrated. We are working to be one of the first VERGE cities which is a term that was coined by Green Biz. It’s a smart cities concept where you think about how technology can really enable the connection between the building sector, the transportation sector, and the energy sector to have not only a sustainable city but a smart city.

That’s one vision of where we are headed. The other is a future where we don’t have a green job and we don’t have a green building. Sustainability will just be the norm — integrated into all that we do.

Q. Business as usual.

A. Exactly. Sustainability will be business as usual.

In Fort Lauderdale, Assistant City Manager Susanne Torriente is working to get her city government prepared for rising sea levels — and for good reason: Depending on what happens on worldwide climate action, 48 percent of South Florida could end up submerged.

Luckily, Torriente has experience weathering storms. In 2009, County Mayor Carlos Alvarez appointed the 20-year Miami-Dade County employee as sustainability director. Alvarez was the rare Republican who was very supportive of sustainability, says Torriente.

Two years later, the political climate changed. Upset over staff pay increases, property tax hikes, and a new stadium, local billionaire Norman Braman led a wildly successful recall effort against Alvarez and flooded the recall with $1 million of his personal money. “At the end of the day, Alvarez got caught up in an anti-government, anti-tax frenzy from a very conservative community,” Torriente says. After the recall, she decided to cut her losses and move on.

For a little over a year, Torriente has been restructuring and refocusing Fort Lauderdale government. “How do we look at what we do, and in light of what we know [about climate change], how do we need to start doing our jobs differently?” she asks. I talked to Torriente for Knope and change, our series on the women working to green, and in this case, save our cities. Here’s our edited conversation on talking climate in a politically polarized state.

Q. Fort Lauderdale has been called the Venice of America — and in fact, Venice is your sister city. Venice is currently experiencing historic floods.

A. We have 300 miles of canal coastline and 52 bridges in the city alone in 33 square miles. We’re all about the water here. Two or three weeks ago, we had Hurricane Sandy going through the Bahamas and the tail end of that was coupled with our full moon high tide. We experienced major tidal flooding in the city of Fort Lauderdale.

Q. Does your community seem concerned about climate change?

A. When we have situations like we had a couple of weeks ago, we talked about what was happening. We use those things as examples to show and illustrate really visibly: These things are happening and these things are happening more often. We used it as a real-life example to show that we have to start planning and thinking for a future where this is going to occur more often.

Q. Florida is a pretty politically polarized place. Has talking about climate change been controversial within your city?

A. It’s a very diverse community. It’s both sides of the aisle, Republicans, Democrats. So yeah, not everyone wants to have this conversation. When you start talking about cost, you can scare people. Or when you start talking about, “Is climate change real or not?” I tend not to have those conversations. I tend to focus on these things are in fact happening and they are happening to us now and this is a local government issue. So I try not to debate the merits of it or if it’s caused by humans. [Instead,] I point to “Los Olas was flooded two weeks ago and it’s going to happen more often and what are the things we should be doing.”

Q. How are you preparing for sea-level rise and future flooding?

A. Right now, we’re looking at our stormwater master plan: How do we take into account all of this new information and climate and extreme weather? How do we start to look at our infrastructure and plan for the next 50 years, taking into account what the possible sea-level rise scenarios are? Looking at our bridges and our roads and drainage system, what does it mean for all that? We’re in the early planning stages. It’s all about awareness and information so when we start to make decisions about government investments, we make informed and wise decisions about the future.

Since I came from Miami-Dade county, I was very much involved in the planning efforts of the Southeast Florida Climate Compact. When I came to the city, I asked my boss if I could still stay involved in the regional work. I’ve been able to stay on that staff steering committee. Over the past three years, we’ve been working on a regional greenhouse-gas baseline. We’ve been working on a unified sea-level rise projection for the region. All that has been working towards a regional action plan. How do we align our work to really making South Florida resilient to all of these changes?

Q. Your city has a reputation for yachts, tourism, and second homes. Does that affect your approach to sustainability? And how would you respond to someone who’d say that kind of lifestyle is fundamentally unsustainable?

A. We have extreme wealth on the water — beautiful homes. But like any other city, we have extreme wealth and extreme poverty.

There is a huge marine industry that has been our bread and butter for years. I’m not quite sure if we’re doing anything in particular in discussions with the marine industry just yet, but they will be at the table just like everyone else who lives here. I’ve been focusing my energy on the city engineers and the planners and focusing on city services. I’ve really focused the past year on structure and process and getting the right people in the right places. Baby steps.

Q. Where do you hope to see Fort Lauderdale in 20 years?

A. I’m hoping that it will be a city that is able to adapt to these changing times and to really be resilient. We need to make some tough decisions in terms of: Are there places where we want to invest more public infrastructure? And then are there places where we don’t want to invest it, and maybe not fight off what’s happening? I’d like to see a Fort Lauderdale that has made informed decisions and wise strategic investments.

If you said “Salt Lake City” during a game of free association, not too many folks would shout “sustainability” back at you. Unless they’ve spent some time in the burg of 200,000, you’d probably hear a variation on one of three things: Mormons, snow, or sobriety.

The Mormons part is true — this is their promised land and world headquarters — but the city’s politics are decidedly progressive, never mind that over 70 percent of Utah went to Mitt Romney. “Those of us who live here in the city are almost responding to the rest of the state being so conservative,” says Salt Lake’s sustainability chief, Vicki Bennett. The snow? That’s real, too, but wait 40 years — the climate will take care of that. As for the dearth of alcohol, Bennett assures us, “Yeah, you can get a drink.”

And there are serious discussions about what makes a city sustainable here, too. Mayor Ralph Becker (D) is an environmental planner by training, and that, says Bennett, makes her job much easier. “He really understands how this broad term of sustainability can be applied,” she says. “It wasn’t a matter of having to educate an elected official as to why you are there. He’s usually five steps ahead of us saying, ‘Here’s where we need to go.’”

But where Salt Lake needs to go is directly tied to where the greater metropolitan area, population 1 million, needs to go. Between workers at local businesses and students and employees of the University of Utah, the population in Salt Lake doubles during the work day. The city suffers from poor air quality, due in large part to the never-ending river of cars pouring in and out from its burgeoning suburbs. Part of Becker’s, and Bennett’s, job is reaching out to much less progressive populations and governments.

I talked to Bennett for Knope and change, our series on the women fighting the green fight in our cities. Here are some snippets from our conversation about working with Republicans on environmental issues, a climate-changed Salt Lake, and whether or not Jon Huntsman is a freak.

Q. How does Salt Lake’s high Mormon population affect your work?

A. Salt Lake City was settled by the Mormon pioneers, and they came basically as refugees. They were fleeing persecution. They had to be independent. If you look at how they developed this valley for many years, they took a real comprehensive, holistic approach to planning the city. They were the personification of sustainability. They had to survive and work the land in such a way that they could make it from year to year.

In a way, it helps us frame a lot of what we’re doing. We often start with, historically that’s where the roots of Utah came from — the need for a sustainable society. It’s just what we’re trying to do again.

Q. That’s a nice thought, but Utah is a deep, deep red state. How do you go forward on these issues when the Republican Party right now denies climate change and is dead set against environmental regulations?

A. When you’re talking with someone you have to frame the issue in ways that will show them the benefits in terms that they’ll understand. For example, if we’re concerned about climate change, here in Salt Lake City, we signed onto the Kyoto Protocol in 2002 on the eve of the Olympics. In five years, we met the Kyoto goals by reducing our municipal operation climate footprint. We can talk about that climate footprint in Salt Lake and that’s very acceptable.

If we work with other, more conservative cities, then we talk about air quality issues and reducing vehicle miles traveled and the benefits of energy efficiency to minimize how much electricity we’re using and reducing the amount of oil and heating fuel and natural gas we need. It has the same outcome — to reduce people’s use of carbon-based fuels.

I was at a meeting with a group of mayors — one of them, a very conservative Republican, made the comment to me, “Well, I had an energy efficiency audit done on my business so I could save money.” And I said, “That’s great. That’s exactly what we want to hear.” And then he looked at me and said, “Yeah, and I reduced my carbon footprint.” I just about fell off my chair. That’s a lot of how we have to do it. It’s just a framing.

Q. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman was the only GOP presidential candidate to admit global warming is real and human-caused. Is there a history of Utah Republicans accepting climate change or was he a freak?

A. He was a total outlier in the state. He was the most progressive Republican. Those of us who worked with him on the issues really appreciated his stance — boy, if he had gotten the nomination, I think he would truly lead. But the [most staunch] conservatives I think were upset with the fact that he went as far as he did.

Q. New York City is feeling the impacts of climate change. Is Salt Lake starting to see effects as well?

A. We already have data that shows that the changes are hitting us. Seventy percent of our water comes directly from the mountains. Most of the water is stored, over the course of winter into mid-summer, via snowpack. We don’t have reservoirs immediately next to the city. [With climate change], we are getting slightly lesser on-average snowpack and the runoff is earlier. So we don’t have the stored water like we have had in the past.

And we’re worried about the quality of water because we’re beginning to see more and more beetle-kill in our forests. Because of the drier soils and the much higher chance of wildfires, we are [worried about] silt in the water.

We’re also going to have to look at health issues. Our health department is concerned about diseases and vectors [PDF]. So it could be quite a long list. We’re starting our formal planning and looking to see where our vulnerabilities are. It’s really quite eye-opening.

Q. What has the approach on water been? Are you working on reducing consumption?

A. Definitely. That’s something that’s been going on for quite awhile. We had a Slow the Flow Campaign that’s reduced consumption by 20 percent or more citywide. We need to look at other potential sources. Could that be more groundwater? Could we be looking at, if we have earlier runoffs, perhaps we even pump water into an aquifer and store it that way? We’re starting to look at all of those types of possibilities.

Q. I’ve heard talk of Utah making a bid for another winter Olympics. Has climate change affected that conversation?

A. No, they are still talking about “Should we try for one more in the future?” 2026 would probably be the earliest. They think we would be OK then. Manmade snow if we needed it. I don’t think we will lose that much snow by that point. It would be more the earlier melting, change in runoff, things like that. From what I understand, 2050 is the time frame where they are really worried about snow quantities and how it might affect the overall operation of the ski season.

But the ski areas are worried, especially the lower-level ones like Park City and the backside of the Wasatch Front. They have been very active on climate change issues and trying to speak out. Again, with them, it’s almost at the point of adaptation: “OK, so we can’t ski as much? Or do we need to make more snow? Or can we rebrand ourselves more as summer resorts?” The Wasatch mountains in the summer are beautiful, but I don’t think that’s going to give us the same level of economic benefit as the ski industry has. It’s just too big.

Being the sustainability director of Portland is a bit like being the oil minister of Saudi Arabia. You don’t exactly run the place, but you do have the region’s chief export on tap. Portland’s public transit system is held up as a model for the country. Per capita carbon emissions are down 26 percent since 1990. Portland consistently tops lists for most bike-friendly city. The city even has an eco-pub.

Of course, you already knew this, thanks to Portlandia. But show creators Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein should thank sustainability chief Susan Anderson: She’s been pushing the city in this direction since the early ’90s. Anderson started off at the energy office and was a key figure in its first climate action plan in 1993. She’s headed the sustainability department since 2000, and now runs the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, the result of the Bureau of Planning merging with the Office of Sustainability in 2009.

“[Sustainability] doesn’t happen by chance,” she says. “There’s all the stuff that some people think of as the mundane side of city planning. But it’s the bones, the framework for allowing so much of this stuff to happen,” she says.

And just like Saudi Arabia’s future oil woes, Portland’s resources can dry up: The public transportation agency, TriMet, is facing up to $17 million in budget shortfalls next year. Even a place with designated ecodistricts has its challenges.

I talked to Anderson for the latest episode of Knope and change, our series about the women who are leading the charge to green our cities. Here’s our edited conversation about how Portland got to where it is today, some of the challenges it faces, and how it really stacks up against the caricature we see on TV.

Q. Your city will now forever be thought of as Portlandia. What’s the biggest mischaracterization in the show?

A. I always say it’s less of a parody and more of a biography. Our mayor is the mayor’s assistant [on the show]. What’s interesting are the parts that [make] people in other cities think, “Aw, I wish we were that place.” It’s not the over-the-top, goofy parts, but the human-scale part of Portland. It’s really walkable and there are restaurants on the corners and there are food carts everywhere. The air and water are generally very clean. You can recycle everything. Portlandia is a parody but a lot of those things are actually normal here.

Q. I think Portlandia sometimes paints sustainability as just a hipster thing. How have you been able to make sustainability relevant to low-income folks and the unemployed?

A. One: not talking about sustainability but talking about affordability. How do you make places where people can afford to get around without a car? You don’t need to own a car here. [Programs that increase] energy efficiency and water efficiency in households; putting affordable housing on transit lines; integrating sustainable building practices into public housing.

Q. Portland has had some pretty major struggles with unemployment.

A. It’s lower than the national average now. It’s been dropping in the past few months. I think when it was above the national average, people wanted to make it seem like, “Oh, Portland. You’re just like Portlandia. You’re all selling each other coffee and giving each other tattoos.” There’s probably some truth to that, but …

Q. How did Portland become such a leader in sustainability?

A. Part of it — you open your eyes and look outside and there’s Mt. Hood right there, and amazing mountains and rivers and fish. You want to protect all that. And part of it — we started really early. We had state-wide land-use planning starting in the ’70s, which no other state had. That required every city to do comprehensive plans to look at how jobs and the environment interact. How do you have good housing and healthier people and safer cities?

But we’re not doing [sustainability] just to be altruistic. Part of the reason we’re doing a lot of this: There’s money to be made, to be crass. There are hundreds and hundreds of companies in Portland that are manufacturing or offering services that are sustainable technologies or products or services. They are selling them to the rest of the world now. And most of these things are things we want to do to create better, healthier places anyway — but by doing that, you create a place where people want to live and have businesses. Seattle and Portland have had that as their economic development focus.

Q. Seattle and San Francisco have mandatory composting. It’s interesting that some of your programs, like composting, are optional but successful.

A. They are and they aren’t. For [residential composting], it’s been a year as of [Wednesday]. The impact is a 40 percent reduction in garbage. People are composting. You don’t have to, but we’re only picking garbage up every other week. There are still people complaining, but people adapt and have learned that they can compost or recycle most of their stuff. I’m not against mandates, I just think there’s a lot of opportunity to build partnerships and to work on behavior change.

Q. What are the biggest issues facing Portland?

A. Health and education. We have a very highly educated, college-educated population but most of those people have come from somewhere else. I want to get kids through high school and I want them to go on to college. You don’t think about that as a sustainable issue but everything flows from there. …

How do we get all of the people who care about health to see the connections between healthy people and a healthy environment? Making sustainability about people’s personal health will be an excellent tool. Sometimes talking about climate change and air pollution — it’s scary. It’s the why for why we do these things, but focusing on how those same actions you would take — walking or riding a bike or taking public transit or green building for your home — all those things are about the health of you and your kids. That’s a motivator for more people.

Q. What have you learned from doing city sustainability for so long?

A. What I’ve learned over the past 20 years is America, and the world, is becoming a place where cities are going to make the difference. We can’t wait for national governments and even state governments necessarily to make large legislative changes. Those things take so long. Or they don’t ever happen, as we know with climate change. Because of gridlock and everything else in Congress, if we want stuff to happen, it’s going to be New York and Portland and San Francisco and even some other cities in the Midwest eventually that just jump in.

Q. When Minneapolis stole the title of “most bike-friendly city in America” in 2010, the mayor there was quoted as saying, “Portland is just an avenue in Minneapolis.”

A. Just an avenue in Minneapolis? Bah!

Healthy competition is great. The more Minneapolis bikes, the more we will too. The same with Seattle and San Francisco on any of these issues. I love when Vancouver says they’re the most sustainable city on the planet. Then I can go to my city and my councilmembers and say, “Oh yeah?”

Burlington, Vt.: It’s the land of socialist senators and Ben & Jerry’s, of Phish and Burton snowboards. So it probably won’t surprise you to learn that Vermont’s largest city (at a whopping 42,000) is not new to the sustainability game. Residents voted for a $11.3 million bond for energy efficiency in the ’90s and the city has been working on climate change since 1996.

And while the city already has a lot to brag about (like getting around 8 percent of its food from within city limits), sustainability director Jennifer Green says Burlington still has its work cut out for it — especially if it is going to be prepared for a climate-changed future.

The seventh installment of Knope and Change, our series about the women who are leading the green cities revolution, features an edited conversation with Green about Burlington’s city-owned utility, urban farms, and unique approach to sustainability.

Q. Some folks would say, “Hey, this is the land of Cherry Garcia and Bernie Sanders. Why should we care what a liberal utopia like Burlington has to say?”

A. Burlington has a reputation for being progressive, liberal, and open-minded. We take a lot of pride in our sustainability reputation. We have a new mayor, which is very exciting. He’s up to keep our work up on becoming the best small city in America.

But Burlington has just as many challenges as anywhere else. We have a high poverty rate. We wrestle with how to address transportation. The quality of our air has waxed and waned. We have a lot to learn from other places as well. We are far from being a utopia.

Q. What are the biggest challenges facing Burlington?

A. The transportation piece. Because we are a small city, we don’t have the density or the volume of potential passengers that drive a really robust public transportation system.

The other thing Burlington wrestles with is a very low vacancy rate. [The vacancy rate hovers between 1 and 2 percent; far below the national average of 12 percent.] Housing costs are high. With high housing costs, people are more inclined to look outside of town for housing. This results in sprawl.

Q. How have you been able to keep your energy-consumption level since the mid-’80s?

A. That’s pretty amazing when you think about all the things that have come online since then, from cell phones to laptops. Even microwaves weren’t as ubiquitous then.

We have a municipal energy department. The citizens of Burlington voted for money to allow us to implement energy efficiency measurements. On my electric bill every month, there’s a small surcharge and that goes to energy conservation stuff. Burlington Electric has been to my house and they looked at my energy use and gave me recommendations on how to improve. Because Burlington [owns its own utility], we’re in charge and have access to information easily. It’s public domain. If I want to know what a business is using in terms of energy, it’s a simple call to BED.

We can keep pretty close track of our greenhouse gas emissions from energy. Unlike other cities who are really having a hard time getting complete and timely energy information, it’s very simple for us.

Q. I saw a figure claiming Burlington gets almost 8 percent of its food from inside the city limits. Is that true and if so, how is that possible?

A. I guess that’s the number we’re going with. The exact number is really hard to capture.

It’s luck of the draw. We have a floodplain. The Winooski River runs through the city. It floods on a regular basis which means it’s not suitable for housing. Historically, it’s always been an important farming hub. In the Intervale, [700 acres of bottomland within city limits], there are several dozen community-supported agriculture endeavors, and what’s grown in the Intervale is sold in the city market which is our downtown supermarket. It’s a cooperative. A fair portion of what the kids in Burlington eat [in the school food program] is locally sourced. It’s always been a struggle for the food service director. Because Burlington has a fairly high poverty rate, he really depends on federal food dollars. That money can be constricting for him. But whenever he can, he sources locally. He’s very creative.

Q. Instead of a sustainability plan, you have a legacy plan. How are they different?

A. Oftentimes sustainability plans are limited to the environment. In Burlington, we think sustainability is connecting the four Es — environment, equity, education, and economics. That’s why our plan is different. It’s very comprehensive and understands having a clean environment is more than just fresh air and a nice place to swim. It means attracting a workforce that appreciates the quality of life, educational opportunity for our kids, etc. We see these things as really interconnected.

Q. Vermont is a leader on environmental issues, but there are some issues that are beyond local control, like climate change.

A. Under Peter Clavelle, our mayor two terms ago, we built the first climate action plan of its kind in the country. It was a little bit like pulling stumps because no one had ever done one before. The calculation part was tough. Fast-forward a decade and we have ICLEI software to help us.

Vermont as a whole is starting to think a lot more about the adaptation and resiliency piece. The Institute for Sustainable Communities, which is located in Montpelier, our state capitol, is a fairly prominent nonprofit in the realm of climate change … They are starting a resiliency project in Vermont. That’s a good sign. In Burlington, we’ve yet to have a really concerted discussion around resiliency but I’d say it’s starting to percolate.

Q. How do you think climate change will affect the city itself?

A. The river runs through this major farming hub for the city. It flooded twice last year. It really impacted the farms in the city. In turn, it impacted access to local produce in our city market. Last year during Hurricane Irene, much of the bike path was destroyed. The bike path is a defining piece of the city. It runs along the lake and tourists come to visit but it’s also an important recreational piece for our city residents. I see infrastructure challenges in our future.

Q. Sounds like you’re already starting to see some effects.

A. I think we’re really starting to live it. We should probably start thinking about our stormwater systems.