When the going gets tough, the first target that gets shot at seems to be the environment. Aren’t we really cutting it close, shaving away sustainability. The new governor of Maine, my governor, Paul LePage, is a “Lightning Rod for Critics” as headlined recently by Jenna Russell in Boston Globe. And among other things, “…the new governor has offered up a more substantive cause for controversy: a plan to streamline state environmental protections, eliminating or reducing more than 60 regulations on pollution and development.”
I’m not going to get into a political debate, here, and whether or not you are a “tree hugger”, doesn’t really make a difference. Is this true? “The governor is not suggesting we turn our backs on what makes Maine great,’’ said Demeritt. “It’s about finding middle ground and the right protections, and why it takes a million dollars to get a project approved.’’ I hope so, but there are some concerns.
“It’s a wholesale retreat from the values Maine people hold dear,’’ Mike Belliveau, executive director of the Environmental Health Strategy Center, a statewide public health organization, said of LePage’s proposal. “Everyone knows the essence of Maine is the quality of its environment. It resonates deeply in the psyche of Maine people, and it’s the backbone of the economy, drawing tourists from all over the world.’’ You have to realize that Maine benefits from tourism to the tune of $15 billion per year, which makes it a leading industry in Maine. Do we want to jeopardize that? It’s not tree hugging it’s dollar hugging.
Now I’m all for reducing redundancy within the governmental departments. I believe there probably is quite a bit of that. Depending on what statistics you use, between 34% and 45% of those employed in Maine work for some sort of federal, state, or local government.
There is some precedent for this scrutiny according to Ms. Russell. “In New Jersey, to similar outrage from environmentalists, Governor Chris Christie previously introduced many of the same proposals put forth by LePage: establishing a fast track to approval for development proposals, shifting authority from environmental boards to administrative judges, and prohibiting state standards that are stricter than federal regulations, as well as reducing governmental job redundancy.
Florida’s new governor, Rick Scott, used his recent budget recommendations to eliminate funding for the state’s land conservation program, Florida Forever, and to drastically downsize the state agency in charge of managing sprawl, the Department of Community Affairs, by slashing its budget from $779 million to $110 million, according to Sarah Bucci, a field associate with the advocacy group Environment Florida.” One size does not necessarily fit everyone. What one state does doesn’t necessarily meant it is relevant to another.
One of the more controversial remarks from LePage, couched as a “joke gone awry” by the governor’s office, was linked to the “proposal that has received the most attention would suspend the Kid-Safe Products Act, a law overwhelmingly approved by legislators in 2008. The law, which has yet to take effect, would ban the sale of baby bottles and other products containing biphenyl A, or BPA, a chemical compound linked to health concerns in animal studies. Supporters of the law say LePage is catering to out-of-state corporations who helped fund his campaign. Demeritt said the governor simply wants “sound science’’ to be the standard for state regulations, and with BPA, “the science is not there.’’ The worst side effect of exposure to it, he (LePage) asserted at a press conference, might be women growing “little beards.”
“State Senator Peter Mills, who ran against LePage in a seven-way Republican primary last year, said the governor’s deregulation plan contains important, necessary changes at its core, some of which are likely to be approved. But he criticized LePage for taking a “slash and burn’’ approach instead of focusing strategically on key reforms.” We need to use a pair of scissors, not a straight razor to make cuts.
“You need to get people used to your perspective, instead of throwing everything against the wall,’’ said Mills. “It creates huge resistance and doesn’t get it done. . . . All he did was get environmentalists fired up.’’
We, as project managers, know that change is difficult, but something that is constant, and the primary reason we exist. Everything we do involves change of some sort. There is a right way to manage change and a wrong way. We agreed with Senator Mills, your need to find a way to minimize resistance, not galvanize it. Perhaps, as John Greenleaf Whittier, a poet who hailed from an almost neighbor of ours, Massachusetts said; “Tradition wears a snowy beard, romance is always young.” Let’s keep our traditions and continue to woo sustainability.
Project managers, already managing scarce resources, may be put in the untenable position of using those scarce resources for issues that may not appear to be directly related to the project’s success. As I said, that is some of the push back, certainly not our position. We’ve always 
That was the subtitle on an article, Building Green, by Dave Choate (dchoate@seacoastonline.com) in one of our local papers. The article focused on a local project, a newly constructed shopping center with 4.5 acres of porous asphalt and “an innovative gravel wetland that filters nutrients, oil, and metals out of the stormwater at the site.” The construction was controversial at the time because of the proximity to an already “impaired” stream. To some, protecting the environment is the most powerful driver, to others it is economics, to us they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. We consider both to be limited resources that project managers protect.
With all due respect to the musical South Pacific, we were reading the Boston Globe the other day and saw an article on a technology that makes a lot of sense. Why not get rid of the problem before it becomes a problem. It would seem easier than trying to get rid of it after. It’s like we say about 
Do Our Green Projects Hurt the World’s Poor?
This is an interesting question we’ve paraphrased from a great article by Peter Singer in a recent Wall Street Journal. Peter considers that we will not hurt the world’s poor as long as industrialized nations are willing to make sacrifices. Bjørn Lomborg answers that we will harm the poor if we listen to the “green extremists”. Who has the best argument?
This, to us, is a potential conflict with one of The Natural Step’s sustainability principles. Principal Four states “eliminate our contribution to conditions that undermine people’s capacity to meet their basic needs.” While “eliminating our contributions to progressive buildup of substances extracted, and chemicals produced, and physical degradation” are we depressing people’s ability to make a living? That is the dilemma. Can we stimulate those economies while trying to green the world?
The answer may truly lie with our ability to do both, and that we must. It will be a vicious cycle if we don’t do both. According to the article, industrialized nations must make sacrifices to lift the world’s poor. If they don’t, then all of the issues that make things worse for the environment will continue. The premise is that the poorer nations are the ones that have the most significant population growth, which put more pressure on the environment. We pointed that out in our book as one of the “problem drivers and indicators” of the green wave, along with rapidly developing nations and resource degradation and loss of biodiversity. These are all related. Rapidly developing countries are where the poorer people are, and the pressure to harvest rain forests, for instance, to provide firewood, income, and farmland, is felt the most. SO according to Peter, the easy answer is to reduce poverty. The difficult question is how.
If we stimulate growth and we stimulate employment, we create projects that may be in conflict with environmental concerns. If we build schools and housing, we take away land; maybe wetlands, old growth forests, and critical habitat. If we stimulate farming to help people feed themselves, again, we potentially can destroy entire ecosystems. Peter points out that “…there is no single currency by which we can measure the benefit of saving human lives against the cost of destroying forests that provide the last remaining refuges for free-living chimpanzees, orangutans, and Sumatran tigers.”
We can see that here is a bitter pill, here, to be swallowed universally, wherever you are on what we like to call the “Hugger-Hummer” spectrum. Less is what we need to strive for, “less energy from fossil fuels, use less air conditioning and less heat, fly and drive less, and eat less meat.” When we say universally, we mean the developing countries may need to compromise on what they are striving to do, too. It is a global issue and needs to be dealt with, globally. Green projects, or greening of projects if you will, go a long way to helping. By leading the efforts to increase a project’s greenality, green project managers will increase efficiencies and reduce the use of those scarce resources we talk about in our book. Remember, it is not just projects that are green by definition, developing alternate energy sources, as an example, all projects can benefit by viewing it through the green project manager’s environmental lens.
More about Bjørn Lomborg response in a future post.