I once had to answer this question in the midst of a very frustrating work day, while in the most exasperated of moods. I was busy and snapped out a smart-assed answer, but truly, the answer gets to the bottom of the reason why I think we often act as individuals in many small ways to protect the Earth, and as citizens to advocate for better state and national policies, but neglect to act on some really big results we can achieve locally. So I think I’d like to repeat it on this Earth Day.
In 2001 I was working as the director of a preservation-based downtown revitalization group in a small city. We were locked in a negotiation to save from demolition a downtown building – I’ll call it the Smith Building - with a double-wide storefront, while simultaneously trying to distribute as much preservation information as we could.
In a community with no preservation ordinance or history of preservation effort, this is always a tough sell. As is common when someone first utters the phrase "preservation" in any public forum, pretty much anywhere, there was a lot of immediate knee-jerk reaction frequently containing the words "hysteric preservationists" and "property owner rights" so our office was bombarded with calls and visits from unhappy citizens – and one very unhappy property owner.
Into the midst of this one day, strolled Larry, the city’s communication director, who was working on the city newsletter. He said he knew I was really busy and would just take a second. He was doing a lot of fast interviews about recycling for a piece in the newsletter, since the city was undertaking a major recycling push.
He just had one quick question, he said: "What do you recycle in your office?"
"Buildings, Larry," I snapped. "We recycle buildings."
"No, not preservation," he said, "I hope you do save the Smith Building, but I’m talking about recycling, you know, like cans."
I’d meant the answer to be snarky, but after thinking about it for a minute, I stuck by my answer, telling Larry that was the one I wanted him to print. I pointed out that since keeping a single building’s worth of building materials out of landfill would pretty much swamp the environmental impact of recycling every can I ever touched for the entire course of my life, completely aside from the impact of not producing new materials to replace it with a new building, I did, indeed, consider preservation a vitally important form of recycling. And I promised to e-mail him a link.
Here’s a good one though I’m sure it didn’t exist at that time, as it’s from a speech at the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 2005 Conference:
The author of the speech, Donovan Rypkema of Place Economics, is an internationally recognized expert in the economics of historic preservation.
In the speech Rypkema briefly describes the concept of "embodied energy" as the total expenditure of energy involved in the creation of a building and its constituent materials and points out that:
"In Australia they’ve calculated that the embodied energy in their existing building stock is equivalent to ten years of the total energy consumption of the entire country."
.
Then, being the forcefully candid person he is, he says:
Razing historic buildings results in a triple hit on scarce resources. First, we are throwing away thousands of dollars of embodied energy. Second, we are replacing it with materials vastly more consumptive of energy. What are most historic houses built from? Brick, plaster, concrete and timber -- among the least energy consumptive of materials. What are major components of new buildings? Plastic, steel, vinyl and aluminum – among the most energy consumptive of materials. Third, recurring embodied energy savings increase dramatically as a building life stretches over fifty years. You’re a fool or a fraud if you claim to be an environmentalist and yet you throw away historic buildings, and their components.
I’d urge you to go read the full speech, because it speaks to some of the other, perhaps more ephemerally important reasons to actively support preservation. It also offers a very practical take on preserving building components that we should all consider. Those of you who are preservationists will recognize that Rypkema uses the example of window-replacement precisely because these are the most-often replaced element on historic buildings: window-replacement companies make a lot of money convincing homeowners they are being energy-conscious, and thus ecologically conscious, to make these "improvements" but it’s not necessarily so.
I work more peripherally in this field now – occasionally as a consultant for some of the National Trust’s Main Street community programs, and among other clients, so I’m not directly working for any preservation group at the moment. Yet I am a preservationist. Wait a second, let me re-phrase that: I am a proud preservationist.
When I first started working in this field, I came to it by way of economic development, and attended a mandatory training session full of others, like me, who knew little at that point about preservation. The session was entitled something like: Yes, you ARE a preservationist. It made us all nervous, because that really is one of those labels (sort of like liberal!) that mean a host of good things, but has had a lot of implied "touchy-feely" irrationality unfairly attached to it. But the session was designed specifically to get to the facts – economic, ecologic, and otherwise – that convinced virtually all of us in that session that, much like "tree-hugger" and "liberal" some people (bet you can guess who) have worked overtime to make preservationists look unrealistic, unreasonable and not grounded in reality. Yet in the end all of us left that workshop proudly calling ourselves preservationists.
Oh, and those cans? I do recycle them, but here’s Rypkema’s take on that:
We all diligently recycle our Coke cans. It’s a pain in the neck, but we do it because it’s good for the environment. Here is a typical building in an American downtown – 25 feet wide and 120 feet deep. Today we tear down one small building like this in your downtown. We have now wiped out the entire environmental benefit from the last 1,344,000 aluminum cans that were recycled. We’ve not only wasted an historic building, we’ve wasted months of diligent recycling by the people of your community.
Since I am more practical-minded than touchy-feely, I’ll do a little pimping and add links for the
National Trust for Historic Preservation
and the
National Trust for Historic Preservation’s National Main Street Center
You can join or contribute to the Trust, or simply access their information.
The Main Street Center site has links to local Main Street communities throughout the country. Local Main Street programs are truly grass-roots, receiving technical services advice, but no funding from the Trust. They are always in need of contributions, volunteers and advocates from within the community, so if your community has one, you may want to check it out.
Main Street programs have been working on strengthening community centers, creating walkable neighborhoods and fighting sprawl on the front lines of towns in all fifty states for more than two decades. They have a record of achieving such stellar economic development and job creation results that the approach has been nicknamed by some "preservation that works."
Even the smallest support for preservation efforts, whether repairing before replacing the windows or doors on your own home or volunteering for a couple of hours at a local Main Street event, can have an enormous impact.
Happy Earth Day - May we all find new ways this year to preserve both our local heritage and our local planet!