2005 Rural Partners Forum
Remarks by Storm Cunningham, presented with a PowerPoint presentation
Good morning. I want to thank Billy Ray and the Rural Center for inviting me to come down here. I'm really impressed with the size and the energy of this conference. This is really great. If you guys do this every year, you're really ahead of a lot of states.
I am here to talk about three things, basically. One is to help you become aware of the fact that restorative development is a huge global trend, accounting for almost two trillion dollars a year worldwide; it's the fastest growing part of the world economy. And you can actually ride that trend; there are ways you can actually hitchhike on that trend and harness some of that momentum for your own local revitalization. Second, is to make you aware of two things that sabotage people's ability to revitalize their communities. One is a disability I call "reblindness" and the other is a community toxin called "Cilox." You'll be finding out about them a little bit later on. Last one, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel, thanks to this sudden surge of renovation, redevelopment, restoration, regeneration, reuse, remediation that is going on all around the world, there are new tools available for integrated revitalization of communities. And some of them available free of charge.
Here's the global trend: basically what happens is increasing wealth the traditional economic paradigm that we've been using for 5,000 years on this planet is what I call a pioneer paradigm. It's based on new developments. It basically equates economic growth with conquering new land and extracting virgin resources. Now, it's perfectly natural, nothing wrong with that, that's how civilizations grow in the beginning. What happens is, as you grow into that paradigm, you're getting wealthier but your natural resources are diminishing. And eventually, obviously, logically, you have to reach a point, if you're on a finite planet with a growing population, where that paradigm just doesn't work anymore, and you reach this decision point, which is where we're at right now. You can either continue in pioneer mode, which means your economy is going to decrease because natural resources are the basis of all economies or you can get out of pioneer mode and switch into restoration economy mode which means you can continue your economic growth, but it's going to be restoring your built and natural resources in the process, so that every year will leave you with a better built environment and a healthier, richer, natural environment. That's the overall global trend.
Has anybody not seen any of these activities going on where you live? In that case, that means that nobody in this room is suffering from reblindness. Reblindness is what happens when you don't see the end of the life cycle activities. All you can see is the new stuff, and the middle of the life cycle, which is maintenance of your built environment and conservation of your natural environment. Most people, most governments, most policies, most planning processes are virtually blind to the end of life cycle stuff and everything, built or natural, reaches a point where it eventually has to be renewed, replaced, revitalized, restored, redesigned, and we don't budget for that; it's not in our policy making. As a result, we are blind to it, we don't even report on it. You always hear federal reports coming out saying, "New housing starts last month were ...." When was the last time you heard, "Last month we spent $100 billion on renovating and restoring homes and office spaces"? You don't hear about that end of it, and it's the fastest growing part of our economy. That's reblindness. What happens when you've got reblindness, number one, when around your local community, all you see are problems, you see derelict buildings, decrepit infrastructure, watersheds that are not producing high quality and quantity of water, you see dying ecosystems, you see contaminated lands, you see problems. When you're not suffering from reblindness, what you're looking around and seeing is restorable assets. It's what you've got to work with to grow in the 21st century. You might actually have a restoration economy going in your community already. I know some of you do, from my time in North Carolina and hearing the folks who spoke yesterday, but many times, because of reblindness, we don't even see the restoration economy we've already got.
Now here's the cure. Get this tri-modal perspective into your planning, your budgeting, your policies, formally differentiate your new development, your sprawl, which is sometimes necessary, from your maintenance and conservation from your restorative development. If you budget for them separately, making intelligent decisions comes much easier. If you've got a choice between destroying a family farm or building that thing on a brownfield in your local downtown, it becomes a pretty obvious decision. The nice thing is that as you shift dollars away from new development. This is the natural life cycle that all communities and nations go through. You start off with your new development. As you build more stuff, you get more of a maintenance and conservation economy, and eventually as you start running out of resources, and things get more contaminated and derelict, you have to shift your dollars from new development to restorative development, and the nice thing about restorative development is you can't do too much of it. You can sprawl too much, but at what point are you too restorative, too revitalized? At what point do you have too many jobs, or too clean of an environment, or too much beauty?
Restorative development comes basically in eight flavors. You've got four sectors of restorable assets that focus mostly on the natural environment: ecosystems, watersheds, fisheries, and agricultural, and the other four are mostly on the built environment; brownfields, infrastructure, heritage and catastrophe damage. At the very end of the talk I'll mention the trend within this trend. The biggest exciting opportunity for you to tap funds and expertise to get your restoration economy going is integration. Integrative restoration projects and integrative revitalization programs. Ecosystem restoration: there are hundreds of different kinds, because there are hundreds of different kinds of ecosystems, ranging from deserts to Arctic Circle stuff. Here's just one example of a new wrinkle that's come about in the last decade. Previously, when they've dredged harbors and rivers for boat traffic, they've just taken the dredge out to sea and just dumped it, killed all the corals and the wildlife out there. What they're doing now is beneficial use of dredge. They are actually using it to create islands that have been destroyed in hurricanes, islands that were destroyed as a result of dredging. They've recreated a whole new island, Poplar Island in Chesapeake Bay; they've created this whole new island out of dredge material and it is now providing habitat for fish spawning, migratory birds. This is an example of ecosystem restoration. Not just trying to protect what little we have left of healthy ecosystems, but actually reversing the process and increasing it, having more healthy ecosystems with each passing year. That's a totally different approach.
Let's move over to watersheds. Now, sometimes, to restore a watershed all you have to do is get rid of the problem. In one case in New Mexico, they just fenced up the cattle that were destroying the river, they gave them an alternate source of water and in 14 years, the river restored itself. Other times you have to get a lot more hands-on. We've got 77,000 dams in this country, over 90 percent of which are decrepit, obsolete, or never had a good reason to be built in the first place. We've now removed about 200 of them in the last five or six years; it's a growing industry. In the process, as they break through, what happens is for the first time, the migratory fish that have been butting their heads against the wall trying to get upstream into their breeding habitat, are finally able to get to their habitat and what you get is this massive return. Millions of fish in a couple of years; the river is just full of fish to a degree that hasn't been seen since the pioneer days. It happens incredibly fast. Another form of watershed restoration is urban streams. A lot of people always think that watersheds are "out there" somewhere, but actually water sheds are everywhere including in our towns. Typical urban streams are straightened out, reengineered according to a process called F.S.E: Extend and Flood Someone Else. The philosophy here is that you straighten the stream out to accelerate the storm waters out of town and then you wrap it in concrete to make sure that none of it gets into the ground, and that makes the flood for the next community down the road ten times worse than what it would've been. It's not always small. In Timonium, Maryland, a company called Biohabitats was given a contract to restore a two-mile stretch of Spring Branch River. They reestablished the native species. If you do it right this actually does a better job of flood control and you can imagine what happens to property values. The view from a piece of property is a major factor in the value of the property. It's not just done for the sake of the critters.
Agricultural restoration, in your case tobacco, refers to where people are looking to decrease their dependence on the tobacco economy. This is actually something people are struggling with all around the world. A lot of countries, a lot of areas, find themselves dependent on a crop that they have been dependent upon for generations, but it's no longer appropriate. It's no longer profitable or it's no longer environmentally sustainable or both. A program has been created to help African and Caribbean nations switch away from bananas - which have recently become very unprofitable for most of them and were never environmentally sustainable - and replace the banana plantations with what we call oil forests, which are a combination of native trees and oil seed-producing trees that allow them to take this oil, produce hundreds of different products: edible products, soaps, things like that, but most importantly, biodiesel. It creates a fuel that you can run in any diesel engine. It runs cleaner, produces more power, lubricates the engine better and helps the country become less dependent on imported oil. That's one example of agricultural restoration. It even restores the fertility of the soil; it restores the watershed.
Now the built environment: brownfields restoration. Back before the brownfields industry got started, about 12-15 years ago, most contamination issues were basically a matter of the industry's job to pollute and the taxpayer's job to clean up. Then the brownfields industry came along after the Superfund got started. Most brownfields are a much smaller scale. A brownfield is simply any property whose redevelopment is being impaired by real or perceived contamination. Sometimes all you need to do is an assessment to find out it's not even really contaminated. Every acre of urban or even small town brownfields that's restored and redeveloped saves 4.5 acres of greenfields, an absolute proven fact.
Moving on to Infrastructure: I've asked groups of engineers to define infrastructure and very seldom do they ever raise their hands. My favorite definition is "it's everything that connects our built environment and allows for flows." Flows of water, flows of sewer, flows of energy, flows of information, flows of traffic - that's infrastructure. Some infrastructure overlaps with heritage. Some infrastructure is just functional. We restore roads because we need to save roads. But most infrastructure isn't even visible; it's underground, for example, the oil infrastructure underneath New Orleans. Now imagine if you were to overlay a map of all the underground water infrastructure, the underground sewer infrastructure, the underground energy infrastructure, what that would look like. This gives you an idea of why we're always underestimating the size of our infrastructure renovation building. We have a $1.6 trillion backlog of infrastructure restoration in this country alone, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. That's just this country. We're supposed to be modern. The average water system in this country is a century old. Here's a typical quote you'll hear from an engineering firm that does infrastructure work, "We're losing six billion gallons of fresh treated water every day because of aging, leaking water infrastructure. That's enough for every man, woman and child in California."
Let's move over to heritage. For example, around the turn of the century, The Jackal Island Club, where the rich and famous came down from New York and Boston in the winter to play around. It was estimated that each winter about one sixth of the nation's wealth was inside these walls. It went out of business after the great depression and it sat there until the 1970s, totally derelict. The only reason nobody had torn it down is nobody had the money to tear it down. Larry Evans, an architect, came along, put together some developer friends of his, bought it, restored it and it's running almost at full occupancy year round at $300 - $1,500 a night. Absolutely gorgeous place but, just like with the ecosystems, it wasn't just done for the sake of making it pretty. It's now the primary economic engine for that whole area, that whole community. So heritage restoration is extremely important. The Oglethorpe Hotel which was the sister hotel to the Jackal Island Club in Brunswick, Georgia, which is not too far from Jackal Island, hosted visitors on their way to Jackal Island. This was a larger, more opulent hotel than the Jackal Island Club. Now, you're probably thinking, because Brunswick, Georgia, has been in economic distress now for decades, they've lost all their industry, they just couldn't figure out how to revitalize themselves. You're probably thinking somebody like Larry Evans came along and restored it, took Brunswick back into economic health. In actual fact, what happened was a developer came in, took one look and said it had to go. He tore it down to replace it with a Holiday Inn, which went belly up about a year later and it now is just a collection of miscellaneous community services inside the concrete blocks. But the good news is this turns out to be a Larry Evans story after all, because Larry came into downtown Brunswick, looked around at this assorted stuff and said, "Dang that's beautiful. I want some of that." And what he did was to restore that and put in high-end retail, office space, professional offices and the restoration of that half of block triggered the revitalization of the whole downtown because restoration is contagious. We actually refer to restoration contagion. When you restore a piece of property, all the property immediately around it becomes more valuable. It's just an automatic fact. In fact, virtually every building in downtown Brunswick is currently being restored. Virtually all the homes are being restored and there's no program; there are no tax credits.
The last of the eight sectors is catastrophe restoration. There are five categories in this area. You've got natural catastrophes, man-made catastrophes, like industrial explosions and oil spills, you've got natural catastrophes that are exacerbated by human influences, people living in the wrong place. You've got socio-economic catastrophes, like a closed military base or a Wal-Mart that sucks the life out of your downtown. And you've got conflict catastrophes.
Now, let's talk about that Cilox poisoning. What happens, since all these communities has all these restorable assets in each one of those eight sectors, why aren't they getting the better bang for their revitalization buck when they restore a building or a brownfield or a piece of infrastructure? Problem is lack of integration. Most communities are taking a project-by-project approach and sometimes a project, even though it's worthy, gets done in the wrong order. Sometimes the lack of restoration for one project, for instance sewer, will undermine the restoration of another project, for instance a river or an estuary. You've got to figure out the right order and you've got to figure out where the efficiencies and synergies are so that they all build the momentum. You take what little money you have and figure out where's the best place to put it that will trigger the perception that this place is coming back to life, because that's what investors want. They don't care what condition you're in, all they care about is what direction you are going in, because that's how they make their money. There's actual theory that we operate on at the Revitalization Institute called theory of integrative revitalization, which simply says that the more stakeholder groups you have involved in your revitalization programs - business, government, academic and non-profit/citizen - and the more of those eight sectors that we just went over that are involved in that revitalization program, the greater the efficiency and synergies you get from each dollar you spend.
The Revitalization Institute is all about integration. That's all we do. We help people come up with visions and programs that shift from that project-by-project approach to the program approach. We're a non-profit alliance for community renewal and natural resource restoration. We've got all the usual stuff. We have a monthly electronic newsletter, a new print magazine coming out this January. We're sponsoring the Global Revitalization Summit in Washington in 2007. We're an organization of organizations. We've got a partner network of nonprofits and you'll see the Rural Center just joined us this week so hopefully we'll be able to work some of these programs in with their wonderful programs, because they've got it all. Brownfields, building reuse, infrastructure, water, you name it. We've got an affiliate network of for profit companies and an academic network of universities and the heart of everything we do is the Integrative Revitalization Initiative, where we create tools in schools. We've got a one- day and a five-day revitalization school that we take to communities and regions. We put together regional revitalization initiatives. We publish an integrative revitalization guide, which you can access free of charge on the Web. Just go to revitalizationinstitite.org and click on the Integrative Revitalization Guide link. You can print it, use it free of charge; it's a public service. In those schools, we teach 12 keys to revitalization that focus on different ways of integrating restoration of all those different assets you just saw. The result, when you shift from that project-by-project approach to the program approach, is that revitalization is faster, better, cheaper. We've put together these schools in a way that allows guest students to come in from other communities and all the organizations in our networks, so you've got guest students and guest experts in there to increase the amount of expertise in the room. You can bring in guest experts, often times free of charge to focus specific technical expertise on the challenges that your community has. What you've got an opportunity for here in North Carolina is to become the Silicon Valley of the global restoration economy. That two trillion dollar economy currently has no center. North Carolina has got leading edge government leadership. You're the only state in the country, possibly the only jurisdiction on the face of the earth that had a net increase in wetlands last year. That's historic. Everybody else is bemoaning the fact that we're still losing it even though we're long into our no-net-loss program. You're the only ones who actually increased it. You're even building your wetlands five to seven years ahead of time so that when they actually are used to mitigate environmental destruction, they're actually functioning already. That's really leading edge stuff. So you've got folks like the Trust Fund helping you do that kind of environmental restoration. You've got political leadership, academic leadership, UNC, N.C. State, Duke. If you read environmental restoration journals, you see those names all over the place. They are really on the leading edge of this stuff. You've got business leadership; Cherokee Investment Partners in Charlotte is the largest brownfields redeveloper in the world. You've got nonprofit leadership with Preservation North Carolina, the Rural Center, which is one of the top rural resources in the country. So you've got it all. There's no reason why North Carolina could not become the Silicon Valley of the global restoration economy and produce the kinds of curricula that you need in your schools to send the kids out into the world with degrees that are relevant to restoring the world, which isn't happening right now. Most people that do restoration were never trained in it in school. So that's your opportunity. Thank you very much.
