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Jiminy makes sure every Disney facility is cricket-friendly.Jiminy Cricket meets the bureaucracy
The highlight of Day II of the White House Summit on Federal Sustainable Buildings was a presentation by Kym Murphy, SVP of Corporate Environmental Policy at Walt Disney Co. He’s been with Disney and Disney Imagineering for more than 25 years, and was responsible for designing and building the Living Seas exhibit at Epcot.
You could tell right away that Murphy wasn’t a government suit. He was the only person in attendance wearing a sweater—not to mention tinted sunglasses. The audience loved his casual California style, his warm humor, and his inside stories about the Mouse Empire.
As to Disney’s approach to sustainability, Murphy noted that the company has not sought LEED certification for its buildings. “We use our own standard, ” said Murphy. “We take LEED and go up the next step, to such things as sub-metering. ” Disney created its own proprietary Green Building Goals & Guidelines, now in its second edition. “It’s regularly updated by our engineers, designers, and procurement people, ” Murphy told his audience of federal employees.
Under Disney’s Project Conscience, project managers must demonstrate how sustainable design can save costs on a life cycle basis. This is being implemented at Hong Kong Disney, the first Disney project where sustainability was employed right from the start.
Other sustainable design and operations strategies at Disney include: use of low-VOC materials; Green Lights and Energy Star appliances; sub-metering (“This allows us to ‘tune’ a building’s energy use,” said Murphy; it is now being applied to water use); recycling programs for guests and employees (“We really love the letters from kids telling us how much they recycled”); water use reduction (“We recycle 11 million gallons a day at Walt Disney World”); and sustainable sourcing.
Murphy’s issued this recommendation to the government officials at the summit: “Sustainable development must be adopted by and committed to by senior executives.” To which I would add: That advice applies to both the public and private sector.
For being good Mouseketeers, we all got caps with Jiminy on them. Full disclosure: I glommed two for my grandchildren.
Click here and here for more on Disney corporate environmentalism
What next for sustainable design and construction?
First, it demonstrated how far the federal government has progressed in green building—even if they insisted on calling it “high performance and sustainable” building. Certainly it was the case that those government officials present at the summit were pretty much all members of the choir, but it was remarkable to hear them sing the praises of their agencies and departments with regard to their accomplishments in implementing sustainable design and construction.
Who would have predicted five years ago that the Defense Department would be one of the most aggressive green building entities in America? Or even that the General Services Administration would cast off its sometimes archaic standard procedures and embrace LEED as heartily as it has—for better or worse. With its purchasing power and political leverage, the federal government has become arguably the prime mover in green building in this country, perhaps even superseding the U.S. Green Building Council itself. I don’t know whether to be elated, or frightened out of my wits.
Second, the summit reinforced a fact that many in the environmental movement (and I include myself here) have trouble swallowing: that, despite the current administration’s generally abysmal record on the environment, the Bush White House has somehow allowed the green building efforts begun during the Clinton years to sneak under the radar. Although the administration has cut deeply into the budgets of agencies like DOE’s Federal Energy Management Program, Mr. Bush has not rescinded the key Executive Orders put into effect by his predecessor—and the bureaucracy, particularly at the mid-level where the real spadework gets done, somehow keeps plugging along. As taxpayers and citizens, we owe these civil servants a great deal of gratitude for fighting the good fight under adverse conditions.
Moreover, it could be argued—and many of the loyal appointees at the summit certainly tried to make this case—that, by attaching rigorous metrics and reporting requirements to the Clinton-era Executive Orders, the Bush Administration has made them more effective. Now, every agency and department gets measured once a year by the OMB on energy, transportation, and environmental performance, and they take those ratings—red, yellow, or green—very seriously, as they should: in some respects, their jobs depend on them.
In a way, it makes sense, because the current administration, harking back to the main theme of the Reagan era, wants to decrease the size of the federal government. If one manifestation of lesser size is a smaller (and more measurable) energy budget for federal buildings, that’s acceptable to the Administration. As long as the champions of green building within the bureaucracy keep emphasizing the measurable dollar savings of their efforts, the Administration will probably go along with the program.
Finally, I left Washington with renewed hope for the green building movement. It was gratifying to witness the degree of innovativeness, technical sophistication, and unrelenting dedication that I saw in the people assembled at 726 Jackson Place over the course of those two days. It’s clear that many of our public servants in the federal establishment have gotten the message: The old ways of designing, constructing, and maintaining government buildings must be thrown out, and a new order must take their place. LEED has been the driving force thus far, but already the more experienced players within the bureaucracy recognize that LEED can take them only so far. A much more integrated approach, one that looks toward what the GSA’s Don Horn called “restorative design”—providing 100% benefit to the environment, with no damage or detriment to people—is called for.
Such a transformation will undoubtedly take time to formulate and implement. Then again, look how far we have come in just the last few years.—Robert Cassidy
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for BD&C’s exclusive Special Report from the White House Summit.