BURLINGTON, Vt.-Nothing particularly momentous marks your arrival in America''s
greenest city.
A visitor to Burlington might expect a giant recycling bin on the interstate ramp, perhaps an emissions control welcoming station. Or why not a billboard trumpeting this achievement?
Well, the third option is a non-starter. Highway billboards have been banned in Vermont for almost four decades.
And that''s a reminder that quirky Vermont, the tiny strip of fresh-air, left-wing sympathies and counterculture lifestyles snuggled up against the Quebec border, has been hard at work at this
Green thing for a long time.
It''s in residents'' DNA. If you''re born here, you''re born green. If you''re born elsewhere with unusually active environmental genes, you gravitate here.
Had Burlington not recently been bestowed the honour of "Best Green Place," topping 378 other municipalities, the good denizens would surely have demanded a recount.
But now, with green the new chic colour, the tiny state with the tiny carbon footprint is looking a whole lot less quirky and a whole lot more ahead of the global curve.
Burlington''s anointment as King of Green – by Country Home magazine in conjunction with researcher Bert Sperling – surprises no one. While a nice touch, says
Mayor Bob Kiss, it reflects an authentic way of life and isn''t something to add to the tourist brochures.
Republican governor Jim Douglas – a man who hangs his laundry out on the clothesline, uses energy-efficient light bulbs in his home, and has reduced his state fleet of cars (his official entourage consists of an Impala tailed by a single state trooper) – wants to turn Vermont into the country''s capital of environmental industry.
Douglas says he will lure wind-power and alternative-fuels-development industries the way California''s Silicon Valley used climate and lifestyle to court the high-tech industry.
Some people here will tell you the Vermont legislature spends more time debating global warming than property tax rates. In fact, the state has drafted vehicle-emission laws, to take effect in 2009, that have the U.S. auto
industry up in arms. Vermont and a half-dozen other states have adopted the carbon-dioxide standards set by California, which are more stringent than federal standards. Automakers are challenging those California standards in lawsuits, the first of which is scheduled to be heard starting tomorrow in Burlington, in a court case that will be watched across the country.
A U.S. Supreme Court decision last Monday, which held that the federal Environmental Protect Agency had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases from vehicle emissions, appeared to give the state a huge boost in beating down the automakers'' challenge. If the state is allowed to enforce emission regulations, warned one auto industry lawyer, manufacturers will drive prices up in the state to the point that everyone will be riding bicycles by 2016.
A lot of them already do.
According to Bert Sperling, best known for his studies of the best places to live, Burlington is greenest because 5.6 per
cent of the population walks to work, 4.6 per cent work from home, and 12.3 per cent carpool when they commute.
A
city compost facility collects food scraps from restaurants, supermarkets and food manufacturers and sells the compost to farmers and landscapers.
The metropolitan area of about 147,000 has 16 farmers'' markets, five organic producers and three food co-ops.
Mayor Kiss, now de facto America''s greenest mayor, points to other initiatives, including an $11 million (U.S.) bond issue passed in the 1980s and aimed at
energy conservation, which is now returning $6 million in energy savings per year. He also cites the number of hydrogen and natural gas fuelling stations in Burlington, and a law that compels rental housing to be immediately brought up to the city''s energy code upon sale.
Then there is Vermont''s annual Green Up Day in May, when tens of thousto clean up their roadsides. This initiative, the first of its kind by a U.S. state, has been an annual rite for more than three decades.
Kiss even boasts of Vermont''s bottle and can recycling – a common facet of Canadian life, but strangely a rare phenomenon in the U.S. where only a handful of states have "deposit laws" that encourage citizens to return containers to be re-used or recycled.
Meanwhile, the Vermont Weatherization Program pays 100 per cent of the cost of energy-saving improvements in the houses of people whose income is less than 60 per cent of the state median. Crews visit residences and do an audit to analyze furnace and appliance efficiency and identify savings.
The state senate is looking to create a $5 million (U.S.) per year fund to build on that and provide energy efficiency improvements across the state, regardless of income.
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