Energy, Environment and Resources Center

Jack Barkenbus EERC Executive Director

FROM THE DIRECTOR………

Untapped Human Potential Key to Environmental Improvement

Editor's Note:
The following essay was selected as one of three finalists for the recently created St. Andrews Prize.

The international competition, sponsored by St. Andrews University of Scotland and Conoco, sought innovative solutions to environmental problems. Sponsors received submissions from 240 individuals, including scientists, academics, politicians, and others, from more than 40 nations. The winning essayist, whose paper explored a plan to reverse urban environmental damage from mining in South Africa, received a cash award of $25,000.

The framework or concept of sustainable development has been widely embraced globally, yet no one knows quite how we're going to achieve it, even if we adopt only the most modest definition of sustainable development-environmental sustainability-as the desired outcome. Powerful forces in society appear to be leading to an unsustainable future. Nevertheless, this essay holds out hope.

This optimism is not based upon current trends or technologies, but, instead, on a fundamental reconceptualization of what constitutes useful technology and an unprecedented mobilization of human and organizational resources at the community level. Sustainable development will need to be achieved from the bottom up rather than today's top-down orientation.

While we continue to have serious concerns for our diminishing natural resource base, we are curiously overlooking and underutilizing our substantial human resource base. The potential encapsulated within these human resources is remarkably large and dynamic. A strategy to tap this vast potential is long overdue. The underutilized human resources that could be mobilized on behalf of the environment are youth (ranging from elementary school students to first- and second-year university students), seniors (however a society defines its retired workforce population), and university faculty.

By combining these human resources, equipping them with simple technologies, and assigning them the task of monitoring and characterizing community environmental indicators, we can set in motion a process whereby every community can track and improve its environmental health. This proposal seeks to combine what are normally thought of as "community service" and "environmental education" to produce tangible benefits for the community and the participating individuals. The power of this concept resides not in the technologies themselves, but in the citizen learning and political mobilization that accompany use of technology.

Need Meets Opportunity

The expected output from this community mobilization would be a series of brief reports based on youth environmental monitoring that begins to portray the status of each participating community's environmental health. Surprising as it may seem, most communities have not undertaken comprehensive environmental assessments. Any monitoring that does take place usually emanates from regulatory requirements tied to a restricted set of environmental laws. Monitoring over several years can produce a complete picture of environmental health and reveal important trends. Widespread publication and communication of the results are likely to lead to concerted efforts to improve the environment.

University faculty and staff would design a core of hands-on monitoring activities and serve as project organizers and advisors in each community. The kinds of core activities appropriate to each community will vary; it is expected that once out in the community, youth and seniors will think creatively and identify new monitoring opportunities that go beyond these core activities.

Faculty would work directly with community seniors in training-the-trainer sessions. These hands-on sessions would familiarize participants with necessary equipment and protocols to ensure monitoring quality. Faculty and interdisciplinary university units would also be heavily involved in administration and evaluation.

Educated and technically oriented seniors are an underutilized community resource. Nearly any community has a cadre of seniors capable of guiding students' monitoring efforts and willing to contribute time to community betterment. Seniors represent a key link between youth monitors and university faculty. Seniors would organize monitoring activities, provide monitoring instruction to youth, ensure that monitoring results are recorded and compiled, and serve in a quality-control capacity.

The centerpiece of this concept is, of course, youth serving as environmental monitors. Their involvement will achieve the community's goals while contributing to environmental education. Young people, from elementary school to first-and second-year university students, could be tasked with specific and quantifiable environmental monitoring responsibilities. Efforts would be made to involve a significant number of young people, but goals of involving a large number of student participants should be secondary to the primary emphasis on the quality of both the learning experience and monitoring efforts.

Water, Soil, Air

Low-cost or no-cost technologies and procedures, designed for relative ease of use and to fit the skills and capabilities of youth monitors, would be preferred. Examples abound of low-cost equipment that can be used for monitoring. A host of commercially available water-quality monitoring kits would fit the capabilities of youth. These kits monitor for phosphates, bacteria, pH, and dissolved oxygen, among other characteristics. Other procedures and equipment can gauge the level of biological activity.

Lead-detection packages are available for indoor air-quality monitoring and can be supplemented by hand-held x-ray fluorescence spectrometers to assess the amount of lead in soils. Kits that detect radon and carbon monoxide are also available for measuring indoor air quality. Simple traps can ascertain the extent of animal diversity in the community. In many cases, equipment or hardware may not be necessary at all; for example, observation, using a strict and standard protocol, may be all that is necessary for such things as bird counts, vehicle counts, and energy efficiency audits.

Clearly, these monitoring activities cannot substitute for ongoing regulatory monitoring that might, for example, measure water pollutants in parts per billion. Youth monitoring is intended to provide additional insight into environmental conditions that goes beyond simple regulatory compliance.
The key factors involved in unleashing the potential of these resources are time and rewards. There is reason to believe that both could be marshaled in sufficient quantities.

Youth are primarily engaged in education. To the extent we envision education as simply classroom- or textbook-based learning, time may be seen as too precious. There is convincing evidence to show, however, that out-of-classroom experience-especially when it involves individualized, hands-on activities-can present powerful learning experiences.

The educational establishment should, therefore, be open to allocating time to real-world problem solving and student participation in environmental sciences. Even where educational establishments resist, youth could still be utilized through other organizational forms on weekends or after school.

Students not only contribute motivation and excitement, they also have a stake in the outcome. After all, because they represent tomorrow's full-fledged citizens, their environment is at issue. Internally driven rewards, however, may not in all cases be sufficient to mobilize a critical mass of youth to participate in meaningful environmental activities. Additional rewards, including peer and community recognition, may ensure adequate participation.

Seniors have perhaps the greatest motivation to participate, assuming that they are in good health and possess a modicum of technical expertise. They have time, by virtue of their withdrawal from the formal work world, and a significant percentage wish to remain engaged in civil society long after they have retired. It would be foolish not to think of ways in which these underutilized resources could contribute, both to satisfy their personal goals and the goals of civil society. The good news is that demographic trends point to the availability of growing numbers of seniors with skills, good health, and a desire to serve.

University faculty face the most daunting challenges to participation, but large numbers are not required for the tasks envisioned. Currently, rewards for work usually grounded in sophisticated, state-of-the-art research methods consists of publication of results in narrow, disciplinary journals. Community service is frequently a subsidiary goal carrying few if any rewards. This could be changing over time, however, as universities are increasingly challenged to make their skills and specialized knowledge available to the societies that pay their salaries.

Environmental Commitment

The elements that make up this initiative already exist throughout parts of the globe. They simply need to be creatively merged and implemented in a limited number of communities globally and then communicated to a wider audience.

In the United States, tens of thousands of volunteers are already monitoring water quality through state-based programs or community organizations affiliated with the Adopt-A-Watershed program. Students are actively involved in these efforts, many associated with the Global Rivers Environmental Education Network (GREEN).

Numerous students and schools are also contributing to the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program, an endeavor engaging students in environmental and scientific observations under the guidance of trained teachers.

Seniors are also organizing to work on behalf of the environment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has applauded and recognized the volunteer work of both the Environmental Alliance for Senior Involvement and the National Senior Service Corps.

Though few universities in the United States have sought to elevate service activities above teaching and research functions, numerous institutes and centers within established universities have done so. The concept of "service universities," which is now being implemented on a small scale in Scandinavia, may have global resonance in the future.

This proposal to use monitoring to derive environmental indicators builds upon the strong and growing environmental indicator movement taking place on local to global scales. Leaders are seeking to transform the characterization of environmental health from measures of inputs (e.g. dollars spent on environmental programs) to measures of outputs (e.g. performance indicators). This latter approach places increasing priority on sound information, much of which can only be derived from new monitoring initiatives. Communities seeking a performance-based assessment of their environmental health, therefore, could benefit from implementing the concept set forth here.

Rewards

On a community basis, a host of benefits could result from this initiative, including:

A bridge for youth-senior interaction in a world where such interactions, in a nonfamily context, are all too rare;

A sense of empowerment among currently underutilized human resources-youth and seniors;
An innovative and exciting educational opportunity for youth, both to learn through service education and to contribute to community betterment;

A valuable opportunity that allows the university community to contribute meaningfully to its public-service mission;

The realization that the conduct of meaningful research need not be an elitist or governmental activity.

The consequences of community-generated reports, at minimum, will be a better-educated public. The impact, however, is not likely to stop there. If undesirable features in the environment are uncovered, the public is likely to ask who is responsible and seek political action to rectify the situation.

Clearly, solutions to all important environmental matters do not reside at the local level. Indeed, widely used technologies having local impacts may have their origins in corporate boardrooms on the other side of the globe. Even in these cases, however, identifying the problem, communicating the findings, and mobilizing the community can, when multiplied across numerous communities, have a significant and disproportionate impact.

Untapped Communities

The enormous challenge of sustainable development requires us to think creatively. Much of the thinking thus far has sought only to advance our technical capabilities in the context of a static societal and institutional milieu. This essay claims that by changing the institutional mix, through drawing on our enormous and underutilized human resources, we can begin to visualize a desirable path to sustainable development.

It must be acknowledged that this seed of an idea will, initially, grow only in fertile soil. The envisioned community environmental monitoring presumes a strong ethic of voluntary service that is not currently evident in all societies. At present, we seek only a "proof of principle"-that is, evidence that under the right circumstances it can succeed. Having reached that stage, we can begin to think about how it can be disseminated more widely. As the concept is developed and disseminated, it may be altered in creative and progressive ways that we can scarcely imagine today.

Widespread dissemination, over time, is possible because this is a low-cost approach to sustainable development. Most of the labor-intensive monitoring and reporting is voluntary, requiring only that administrative costs be covered. Low-cost or no-cost technologies allow necessary monitoring to proceed at minimum cost. Economic barriers that thwart many other approaches to sustainable development, therefore, do not appear insurmountable in this case.

Finally, while the immediate outcome of monitoring efforts is the production of reports, we hope and anticipate that something far more substantial and long lasting will be taking place. Brian Trelstad, director of the San Francisco-based Center for National Service and the Environment, touched on this when he stated, "The process of building a constituency of young people who understand environmental problems at the community level may turn out to be more important than the scientific advancements that we also need to reverse our present and unsustainable course."

We owe future generations the opportunity to participate in building the kind of future we all seek.