|
Columnists
Sustainability
and Sustainable Development
Nicholas
R. Hild, PhD Professor ASU
Polytechnic
Nicholas
R. Hild, PhD., Professor, Environmental Technology Management, Arizona
State University College of Technology and Innovation, has extensive
experience in Environmental Management in the southwestern U.S. Dr. Hild
can be reached at 480-727-1309 and by email at DrNick@asu.edu.
Seeing
Spots in the Big Picture
Oct/Nov
2007
Harvey
Mackay recently told the story of a fellow motivational speaker who was
hired by a group of discouraged business people to speak to them on ways
to improve business. The consultant opened his seminar by unrolling a
large sheet of white paper and tacking it to the wall. Then he carefully
withdrew a large Sharpie pen from his pocket and made a small black spot
on the paper. Turning back to his audience, he asked a man in the front
row what he had just seen.
The
man replied promptly, "A black spot."
The
speaker then asked every person in the meeting the same question and each
replied, "A black spot."
Speaking
slowly and quite seriously, the consultant said, "Yes, there is
a little black spot, but none of you saw the big sheet of white paper. You
didn’t concentrate on the whole picture, just the little spot. That’s
my advice to you on how you can go about improving your businesses."
That
little story got me thinking about all the little issues we get bogged
down in when we are trying to encourage the implementation of
sustainability strategies at the local level to help minimize the global
impact of our own actions on this planet. And, further, it caused me to
take another look at some of the sustainable practices that
some of our environmental "experts" have suggested we should be
doing, in a different light.
For
instance, one ‘strategy’ that almost always gets discussed are the
many techniques that can be used to reduce energy consumption within our
work places. Just the other day, a top administrator within the university
sent an email to all employees, saying in effect, that (paraphrasing with
emboldened words)
"…this
year, our combined
efforts will be focused on making our University operate more
sustainably, by reducing the amount of energy we consume
for heat and air conditioning…we will turn the
thermostats down in the winter and turn them up in the summer…and
together, we will reduce our carbon footprint and reduce
our dependence on fossil fuels…etc…etc."
The
language of the epistle on saving energy at the University, sounded very
much like an edict—and, it didn’t sound a whole lot like
‘we’ were going to make it a team
effort at all—-but what struck me most was that the focus was clearly on
that one little black spot that Mackey’s story illustrated and not on
the myriad of methods we can use to successfully reduce our energy use
(i.e. the white sheet of paper). Predictably, the response to the edict,
at least at the worker-bee level where most of us reside, is a (yawn)
hearty, ho-hum. A response that, under Mackey’s illustration, is
entirely predictable when people are told to focus on saving energy by
turning down the thermostats in the winter and turning them up in the
summer—ho hum….as if anyone at the worker-bee level has any control
over thermostats in the first place! Even the facilities department(s) can’t
‘control’ energy consumption by simply turning thermostats up or down;
the whole internal structure of the ‘low bidder-built’ HVAC
"system" would have to be redesigned first.
The
point here is, just because we have implicitly agreed to seek ways
to make the our respective workplaces more sustainable, the places where
those ‘practices’ have to be implemented are at the level
within the hierarchy where the operators have the least control. In almost
all University buildings, thermostats in individual rooms are not actually
hooked up (i.e. do you think they’d actually allow students access to
the HVAC systems?). And, even if you find one that actually
"works," resetting it only causes the "system" zones
to become totally ‘unbalanced’ causing it to demand more
energy, until changes are implemented that require software and/or
hardware installations to remedy—
Of
course, there is no money in the budgets (i.e. a classic illustration of a
trickle-down, unfunded mandate within a University system), so worker-bees
and students will be too hot in some areas and too cold in others, and
inefficiency of the unbalanced system guarantees energy use will climb!
So,
the question is, in a hierarchical system where managers get to edict
and worker-bees get to implement (or not), should the focus
be on the black spot or should it be on the big sheet of white paper? The
only people who will know for sure sometime down the road, are our
children’s, children’s, children.
2008/1234
|
