I moved from Portland, an epicenter for the Green Building Movement’s early days, to Tucson in 2006, primarily for my wife’s health. Arizona hadn’t yet fully embraced the movement and I was determined to bring what I had learned in Portland to this new territory. I knew that green building represented the future of commercial property development, but there was very little construction going green in Arizona when I arrived in the spring of 2006. Here’s the sixth of seven excerpts from my latest book, The Godfather of Green: An Eco-Spiritual Memoir.
By year-end 2006, there were 3,156 LEED-registered projects, an increase of 7,700% from year-end 2000.
“…One day, two young employees from a large Phoenix developer came to a talk I gave at Arizona State University. I spoke about how green building represented commercial development’s future, specifically how it was going to be important for people’s careers to get on board now with this trend. A few weeks later they invited me to talk to the company’s owners.
One sunny fall morning in 2007 I found myself in the company’s boardroom in a new and decidedly upscale office building on Camelback Road in Phoenix. Six skeptical “suits,” the partners in the firm, sat across the table. I wasn’t intimidated; I had given these presentations for several years and, like them, I had gray hair, so I didn’t look like a young revolutionary or someone at his first rodeo.
I enjoyed these encounters. I had a convert’s enthusiasm, but I could talk like a businessman. With as much meditation as I had done for thirty years, I found it easy to handle their skepticism. I saw other people, even those who questioned or doubted what I was saying, as playing roles assigned to them, as I was. I could sense the same intelligence working within me was also in them. That bred respect, Baba’s essential teaching for dealing with people, which they could sense and appreciate.
With research data and related examples, I explained to these executives the business case for green building: Higher rents + faster occupancy + higher resale value = greater profits: facts, facts, and more facts.
I threw in everything I thought would appeal to developers making multi-million-dollar business decisions. They listened, posed some questions, and thanked me for coming. I accepted this role, feeling like those two young men in white shirts and dark pants—Mormon missionaries—you see pedaling bicycles around cities and suburbs, explaining their religion to non-believers. I found joy in making the right effort, not in getting immediate results, seeing it all as spiritual work.
A year later, I received a call from the developer. They had a shopping center under construction in Oro Valley, ten miles north of Tucson, and wanted me to help get it LEED-certified, so they could acquire some “green cred” with local officials and pave the way for approvals of future developments in the area…”
To learn more about my new book, The Godfather of Green: An Eco-Spiritual Odyssey, go to https://jerryyudelson.net.
In Part 7 of my experiences as a leader in the green building revolution, in next week’s blog, I’ll share what happened when I began to speak about green building in various countries around the world.