Mayors from over 45 cities met this week in Sundance — Sundance, Utah, that is — to brainstorm on ways to make their cities greener and build on the momentum created by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels’ recent initiative to cut cities’ greenhouse emissions, which he discussed with Amanda Griscom Little in Grist.
The Sundance Summit gathered mayors from some of the “usual suspects” (Seattle, Burlington, Berkeley) as well as some not-so-usual suspects (Des Moines, D.C., Pittsburgh, and two cities in Texas). The Summit featured talks by Al Gore, a representative from the Chicago Climate Exchange, and an attorney from the NRDC.
From the Seattle PI article:
“All of our major big boxes have to do green roofs,” [Chicago Mayor] Daley said at actor Robert Redford’s Sundance mountain resort just east of Provo. “When big boxes come to see us, we change their architecture. … Everything’s a planned development.”
Making big boxes change their architecture? Imagine!
If these initiatives take root, and if I’m reading Dave’s Sustainablog post correctly, this is an example of ecological “handprint” as opposed to footprint. It’s also probably closer to the order of 1 percent reduction of “insult to the earth” rather than .000000000000167 percent.
