What does a group of 30 “sustainability” professionals do when they run into a pair of two-story-tall common house sparrows? Most of them admire the anatomically correct metal sculptures; a few wonder what’s happening to the actual birds in this neighborhood. It’s July and we’re in a planned community in the heart of Vancouver: green roofs, solar powered trash compactors, LEED gold and platinum architecture. It’s also a Thursday afternoon and hardly anyone is outside. Even with a building occupancy rate of over 70 percent, there is no public activity. No one is around but us and the two 19-foot tall birds, perfectly scaled sentinels of a morphing city. The visit is part of the University of British Columbia’s Summer Institute in Sustainability Leadership, a week-long course for professional planners in July. We are hoofing it around the grounds of the Vancouver Olympic Village, the largest LEED-certified platinum neighborhood in North America—also called the world’s greenest athletic facility. The group includes planners, environmental and sustainability directors, landscape architects, social planners, energy experts, a coffee services manager, a yoga clothing manager, a Unilever middle manager—most of them from Canada, several from Korea, one from Brazil, and, me, the lone Yankee. The developers and the City of Vancouver are trying to sell Southeast False Creek, the site of the Olympic Village, to a build-out of 16,000 people, with 250 affordable housing units—and ecology is part of the marketing campaign. But the sparrows so lovingly depicted by Vancouver artist Myfanwy MacLeod are also a testament to humanity’s constant threat to biodiversity. Eight pairs of sparrows were first released on this continent in the spring of 1851, in Brooklyn, New York. They are now one of the most common birds in North America, the world for that matter. MacLeod’s artwork—commissioned for the 2010 Olympics and Paralympics—speaks volumes about the state of the planet and the current marketing around sustainability. One of my conclusions from the sustainability institute is that green is in, but greenwashing reigns. James Howard Kunstler, a friend and colleague—and the author of Geography of Nowhere—is working on a new book about the limits of technology. In no uncertain terms, he tells us that inventing and selling us new stuff won’t fix our environmental problems. “The ‘green’ campaign has largely become a money-grubbing project based on extremely unrealistic wishful thinking about technology, along with a sort of therapy campaign to make us feel better,” he says.
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