Greening Your Green Zone

Greening Your Green Zone
by Stephen A. Perkins

Think of your congregation or parish as the focus, the heart of a Green Zone which envelops the church members, the church building, and exceeds far beyond to encompass the goods and services consumed by the local community. Imagine this Green Zone as a closed system which must provide all its raw materials and dispose of all of its waste. Finally, visualize this Green Zone as an economic system in which purchases by the church and its community ultimately shape the production process itself.

Such an understanding of a Green Zone parallels the situation of our planet - in microcosm. The earth is our ultimate closed system. We are responsible for what we consume, and we must live forever with all our waste products. By learning about our church-based Green Zone, we can shape a new consciousness about our relationship to the earth itself, as well as build a creative new set of economic relationships close to home.

Green Zones are very much about "place:" a specific congregation, its members, its immediate neighborhood. The wonderful thing about places is that each is unique, with its own problems and opportunities. They are an antidote to interchangeable products and services, marketed to a faceless mass. Knowing and honoring our own place is the first step in honoring the earth.

Green Zones need to be defined at a scale that average people can claim and within which individuals and their institutions, like churches, can bring about change. What makes the zone truly "green" is that it is a sphere in which citizens have a heightened consciousness of the local and planetary environmental effects of their decisions and act collectively to shift them in a green direction.

Within Green Zones, scarce planetary resources are appropriated for individual and collective purposes. We use energy, water, air, minerals. We need to become more conscious of the amount and efficiency with which we use these resources - and for what ends. A Green Zone analysis needs to address waste, but also consumerism.

Green Zones are also economic zones, where monetary decisions have both immediate and far-ranging impacts on the environment. The purchasing power of the congregation and its community can be a potent force for reorienting economic priorities in an environmental direction. Within the Green Zone, families also save and invest money; what are the environmental impacts of these decisions? Because of the importance of "place," a green approach to economics embodies a bias toward small-scale enterprise, towards face-to-face economic exchanges between neighbors, and toward production methods which respect the local environment.

A Green Zone needs a boundary which reflects the community's definition of itself. It must be large enough to capture a significant percentage of the community's economic exchanges, but not so large that it is hard to understand and organize.

Within the Green Zone boundary, one then needs to carry out an environmental inventory on two tracks simultaneously: first, a resource analysis on how the church, its members and its community use scarce planetary resources; second, an economic and jobs analysis which focuses on the purchases by the church, members and community, modeling purchases and the flow of dollars to identify opportunities to redirect those dollars to green alternatives that create jobs for local people who need work. For both the resource and economic analysis, one can use the church as the model, and then expand what is learned to the broader community.

California uses more gasoline than any country in the world except the United States and the Soviet Union.

-- California Energy Commission

Resource Analysis
The resource analysis looks at energy and materials entering the Green Zone, and then tracks the waste stream leaving the Green Zone. The objective is to minimize real inputs and to minimize waste outputs. Promoting a resource conservation ethic is essential: "How can we achieve the same benefits but with fewer material inputs?" But the congregation and community need also to reflect on the benefits that it truly wants and needs. If the congregation or a family has three vehicles, it is certainly important that each is as energy efficient as possible; but can one get along with only two?

The following outline presents questions worth asking. It leaves to the church and community the issues of relevance, value and priority.

Land

Economic and Jobs Analysis
Each congregation has a budget, with revenue coming in and expenses going out. The congregations budget should be seen as an important opportunity to promote the objectives of the Green Zone. The membership, collectively, has a much larger budget, and the neighborhood has one larger still.

Step One: A "Typical" Family Budget
The first step in this analysis is to create a "typical" annual family expense budget, a family with an average income for the congregation or neighborhood. The budget needs to break out housing costs, transportation expenses by mode of transportation, food purchases, etc., including the among of money saved.

Step Two: The Gross Neighborhood Product
The second step is to determine the Green Zone's Gross Neighborhood Product (GNP), the dollar value of the gods and services produced and/or consumed within the Green Zone. Although a "green economic analysis" can be carried out for each family and for the church and other institutions, the Green Zone's Gross Neighborhood Product is the most useful level of analysis because it identifies opportunities for collective action on a scale which can make an economic difference. Calculating the GNP is simple: just multiply the typical family budget by the number of families in the church and/or community. One then has an estimate of the resources in the community available for greening. Then multiply each of the items in the typical family budget by the number of families to determine the specific expenditure on each component. The more detailed the original typical family budget, the more illuminating the community members become. It is startling how large the neighborhood GNP numbers can be - even in the poorest community. And the resources spent on such basics as food and transportation often reach significant values. So can the community's monthly savings.

Step Three: Opportunity Analysis
The third step is where creativity and ingenuity come into play. The more detailed the original family budget, the more helpful the community-level expenditures are in identifying economic opportunities. And, as potential opportunities are identified, Green Zone activists will need to revisit the family budget to get a more differentiated picture of expenditures. How much does the typical family spend on light bulbs, for example? What does that turn into at a neighborhood scale? The following are some of the many ways this shift can be promoted:

Your analysis of the Green Zone's GNP should demonstrate that substantial resources are flowing through your community and promote a sense that greening can be a source of jobs and economic opportunity.

Stephen A. Perkins, Ph.D., is the Associate Director of the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago. He is the author of several publications of the Center for Neighborhood Technology including Working Neighborhoods: Taking Charge of Your Local Economy and Good Enough Jobs for All Chicago.