The Power of Community

The past week has been thoroughly inspiring and powerful, starting with a waterfront ride along the banks of the mighty Columbia last Sunday. I had been hearing about the reknowned Marine Park ride for years, but finally ventured along the I-205 bike path far enough North to reach the river. The stunning vistas of a snow-smothered Mt. Hood were complemented by a warm evening breeze and honking migratory water fowl. Sheer beauty.

Besides reflecting breathtaking landscapes, the Columbia River has been generating most of the Pacific Northwest's power renewably for over 70 years. Lilly and I love the old Woody Guthrie song written for the Bonneville Power Administration dam construction program in the 1930s:

"Roooll On Columbia, Roll On. ROOOOOLL On Columbia, ROLL On. Your power is turning our darkness to dawn, so roll on Columbia roll on."

She's also a big fan of the Busby Berkeley dance routines from the 1930s. We borrowed an awesome compilation of his film sequences from the library shortly after Buddy Rio's birth. If you're not familiar with his mind-bending set designs, check out this primer from the Magnetic Fields Busby Berkeley Dreams. Busby had a gift for visually capturing the modern era's synchronicity necessary to lead us out of the Great Depression with a hopeful determination. Now, here we are again - deep in the waters of economic recession and hopeful that the power of community will float us back to shore.

Each working day last week demonstrated Portland's strength as we collaborate selflessly to serve the greater good of our community. On Monday, the city's foremost green builders gathered in a renovated hall of the old Henry Weinhard's brewery and collectively imagined our nation's first office building designed to achieve the Living Building Challenge.

If the integrated design team is successful, the building's ecological and social benefits will restore habitat and reverse human impacts on global warming all while eliminating utility costs and raising the productivity, health and happiness of the building's occupants.

On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to present the City of Portland's climate protection steps to a Sunnyside Environmental Middle School Climate Teach-In. The enthusiastic cheers from this eco-crowd reassured me that the responsbility of our children will surely lead us to a stable climate while raising their quality of life to an irreversible standard. Afterwards, I visited Lilly's kindegarten class at Sunnyside where we shared a lego-model of a living house complete with native plant and animal species inhabiting its ecoroof.

On Wednesday, I returned to Weinhard's for a net-zero energy and water technical design sessions for the Living Building ecocharette. Then Thursday, the collaboration continued with the release of a new, local green building standard for small commercial buildings. And finally on Friday, I attended a soft opening for the DaVinci Arts Middle School new music building in our neighborhood -

the nation's first net-zero LEED Platinum freestanding classroom AND a perfectly inspiring intersection between art & science in design. All througout the week, there was a sense of camaraderie and collective accomplishment -- We're all in it together!

The power of Portland's community as we collaboratively bring our sustainable visions to life is nothing short of a design revolution. When shared between like-minded progressive cities, this cultural explosion will surely reinvent how we integrate with our natural systems post-recession.