For May, green is sexy caught up with Peter Farrelly, a leader of C3PO, to hear how they came together and what the committee has been up to recently.
A little over a year ago, members of the Portland State Office Building formed an energy committee, C3PO. The group focuses on office building practices – recycling, working towards LEED EB status, reducing energy consumption, and implementing existing policies workers aren’t aware of. Their efforts are inspiring and show how folks working in the same capacity with similar interests can go the extra mile by driving awareness to environmental issues.
You seem like you all have different backgrounds - how and when did you come together?
Orginally, Kate Toepel put C3PO together after watching a Howard Frumkin talk. Howie’s one of the 5 directors at the CDC (Center for Disease Control), and he was our first big speaker on our speaking series in November. That was more than 1 year ago. Kate left town in summer double-o-seven and I offered to take over, so we worked out a rough vision & goals and we went on from there.
The lesson here was that at the time I didn’t know other folks that I worked with. Once I began connecting to folks in my office (of Environmental Public Health), options and opportunities began popping up. We quickly found a niche to fill.
On April 22nd, C3PO had an “Impact Day”. I love the idea of Impact Day. Why did you choose to do such an event?
Impact Day is a day we encourage an 11-story building-full of our fellow cube-farmers to take a moment to consider their impact in the world. We keep the focus small, however, so we focus on one daily action that folks can wrap their head around and concentrate on.
What was the focus of this month’s Impact Day?
April 2008 focus: ELEVATORS
Elevators consume 10-15% of our building’s electrical use. For this month’s Impact Day, we invited all those who are able to use the stairs as much as possible. We tracked the electrical savings to see how the healthy action of taking stairs impacts the building’s use and there were prizes for staff who used the stairs throughout the day.
Why did you choose to do such an event?
The big problem with climate change is that there are so many problems with climate change. Early C3PO meetings were distracting because they had a tendency to diverge into double-siding paper-printing, plastic water-bottles, and everything Al Gore, Ed Begley Jr., and Earl Blumenauer mention. We needed to help people take baby-steps to sustainability. “A thousand-mile journey, begins with the first step …”
Impact Day builds awareness, it is quantifiable, it accomplishes and publicizes our brilliant Governor’s executive order, it stimulates the conversation.
What do you intend to do with the results?
I think it helps overcome that inertia if people see results, and are incentivized on some level, like the Governor’s order.
What other kinds of activities do you sponsor?
- Speaking series: We are educating Public Health employees and the community to the realities of climate change by hosting a monthly speaking series on climate change, peak oil, ecosystems services-based solutions, etc.
Our agency is designed to focus on the adaptation half of the climate change impact, but we at C3PO are perhaps more driven to provide the mitigation solutions to the public as well. The old “ounce of prevention …” quote is clutch in our collective mind. - Lobbying managers to institutionalize policies
- De facto representing Public Health in local & regional Climate Change Initiatives.
- Partnering with other local climate change organizations
What effects or feedback have you noticed?
Good feedback. Not a lot of negative, actually, and somewhat surprisingly. I am definitely looking to seek out in a non-confrontational way the doubting Thomases among us. It feels slow to navigate human inertia and the bureaucratic morass, sometimes, but I think that’s natural. If it were easy, it’d have been done already.
As far as the most positive-vibes I’ve witnessed from the community, it is really great and inspiring to gain incipient but broad recognition in the city and state. I like public health at the table when our city’s solutions are getting mapped out legislatively and in wickedly brilliant efforts like the Western Climate Initiative (WCI).
C3PO recently put on a panel discussion around the link between public health and the conditions of the climate. “Seeing climate in Human Terms,” says the article in the Oregonian. Have you seen the public health angle to Global Warming generate a more immediate response, considering it’s more immediate?
The benefit I see this week about the public health angle is that citizens see public health as a trusted messenger. We aren’t the oil companies, we aren’t a regulating agency, we aren’t thought of as a political agency that is mired in controversial issues. We are concerned, very simply, with the public’s health, without the ulterior motivations that motivate a Dick Cheney, for example. So the public and other institutions are apt to listen and take our suggestions to heart, and our local health organizations are able to implement those strategies across the state.
What are your plans for the future of the C3PO?
- Continue educating ourselves by hosting great speakers in the community, until we reach a critical mass and an ‘aha!’-moment where we pull our head out of the Mesopotamian sands to realize that we are the solution we have been waiting for. No one else is coming, and we are a lot cooler than we think.
- Continue reaching out to partner with other groups in the state, and region. There are legion, but we need more of them, and more coordination between them.
- Continue pressing our own governing institutions to recognize how acting sooner on climate change solutions rather than later is infinitely easier, cheaper, smarter, and more kid-friendly in the long-run.
- Keep pushing.
Keep up the great work, C3PO!
