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03/13/2006: "PW Director On Sustainability In SJC"

(Shannon addressing the San Juan County Green Party)

The Green Party held their monthly meeting on Saturday and heard featured guest speaker Jon Shannon, Director of SJC Public Works present a talk entitled "Toward a sustainable San Juan County. Shannon told the group that he was not speaking for San Juan County, and then worked the group though a model of sustainability in the negative, a model of a community that would have a low sustainability score, a model that, coincidently appeared to look a lot like San Juan County.

Shannon told the group that all systems have in-flow and out-flow, and as an engineer, if he wanted to develop a community that was not in balance in the in-and-out flow rates, there are a number of things that he would do. Some examples that count against having a balance, he said, would be to have a community isolated as much as possible; it would be a suburban area, and not primarily rural or urban, and if the community was divided by natural barriers, like water, then it would be even more out of balance. In other words, a place like San Juan County.


(continued from front page)

One of the reasons places like San Juan are, by their vary nature, not efficient in terms of sustainability, is partly because of the expense and difficulty of transport. It is less efficient to share goods and services, it is more difficult to obtain and ship goods and services. And demand can be a large factor. There is greater incentive to supply demand than there is a desire to provide an infrastructure to dispose of the results of the demand, and to do so it in a manner that increases "sustainability".

He said the studies have shown that there is a direct correlation between the consumption/generation of energy and a land mass; commonly referred to as a "foot print". He said that the foot print for energy production in Africa is 1.4 Hectares (i.e. 2.5 acres), in Asia it is 1.3, Europe is 5.0, and in the U.S. it is 10. But he believed that in San Juan county it might be as high as 20 or 50 Hectares per capita. This level cannot be sustained if the goal is to be "sustainable" as a community. He also believed there is a correlation between the wealth of a community and its consumption rate. San Juan County, he informed the group, has the highest per capita rate of wealth in the state.

In the question and answer period, some of the common issues came up, and in response to questions and statements on the ferry system, Shannon said that the on-going discussion at the local and state level about reducing the so-called "dwell time", that is, how long it takes a ferry to unload and load. The only goal is to add one more run from San Juan to Anacortes. This is a wrong priority he said, and asked the question "is more better, or is cheaper better"?

In response to questions of what can we do as a community to increase sustainability, Shannon gave examples of what we are not doing. Instead of hauling our septage to the mainland -at great cost- we could be processing it and using it for compost; and we could add wood and forest material to it as well. He related his experience that as the director of Public Works he heard many voices that were negative. He heard that "you cannot put that in my neighborhood", and "that we cannot allow that, or the regulations will not allow it", or "we don't have the money to do this, even if it is good idea"; but what he would like to do is "develop a voice in the community to forward sustainability, that is, a program that would go on indefinitely…land use issues stop things that we could do to work toward sustainability", and "the voice I hear is always ‘No'" he said, and added that "communities that thrive are those that say ‘Yes!'"

In closing he stated that the ideal situation is for nothing to leave the island, but "there are land use issues that make it difficult", and the first question we have to ask is "will we have a transfer station on each island, or not. The old vision was each island would have a re-cycle location, but there is no way to know which way were going to go now".