The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program (by way of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) will provide over 3 billion dollars to projects in US territories, which reduce total energy and promote energy efficiency. The city of Fort Lauderdale will be receiving $2 Million to put towards energy efficiency and conservation projects.

This grant is rather versatile and will help Fort Lauderdale support sustainable transportation efforts, curb methane emissions and improve renewable energy instillations throughout the city. Along with the eco-friendly benefits, this grant should create much needed jobs in the region as the money is funneled out to recipients. The Department of Energy will be in charge of oversight and help monitor how the funds are dispersed and used.

With all the talk of trillions and billions in the news, it’s hard to remember that 2 million is still a lot of legal tender. The Obama administration is making good on their plan to push our cities forward in regards to sustainability. We eagerly wait to see how the city uses the grant funds, as Fort Lauderdale is in the position to set the example for other cities in the state and nation.

In this interview from March 25, Kimberly Miller speaks with Gil Friend, who will be speaking at the Green Cities Conference taking place May 19-21 in Orlando, FL. Gil Friend discusses his inspiration for founding Natural Logic, the urgent need to act on climate change and how his martial arts training keeps him centered each day. Subscribe to our podcast and make sure not to miss the rest of the interview series.

“Let’s face it; we are looking at the opportunity for nothing less than a reinvention of the industrial economy.  It’s possible and it’s necessary.” – Gil Friend

Transcript of  Interview
March 25, 2009

We can start by discussing Natural Logic.  Can you tell me about some of the work you guys do?
Natural Logic is a strategy consulting firm.  We advise companies and cities and governments in delivering what it’s trying to deliver to it’s costumers to it’s business partners, to it’s citizenry, to it’s constituency.  We are just shy of 10 years old.  We’ll actually be 10 years old by the time of the Green Cities conference in Orlando.  We are having, frankly, a frolicking good time as sustainability gets picked up much more substantially across the economy.

The Natural Logic tagline or slogan is:  Building exceptional environmental and economic performance by embedding the laws of nature at the heart of enterprise.  Do you want to talk a little bit about how you do that?
We look at whether we are working with a large company or a small company or city.  We look at the organization from what we call an “Ecological Web”.  Our framework is the 3.85 billion years, give or take, experience that living systems have in creating systems that are efficient and adaptive and productive and resilient.  As I like to say “Why reinvent the wheel if the R&D has already been done”.  Using nature’s playbook we look at a client’s organization and look at opportunities to reduce footprints by reducing waste, therefore reducing lose, reducing cost therefore improving profit.  We use that perspective as a guide to strategy and to design and innovation.  We apply the findings of that kind of perspective to help engage the entire organization top to bottom and side to side.  Side to side being the whole supply chain, The folks who supply what an organization needs and the customers who buy what it produces.  Trying to get everybody to the table on a common framework.  Shared vision, clear, testable and measurable strategies for implementing the changes that the organization decides to produce.

So, is this some of what you’ll be discussing at Green Cities Orlando?
Yes, we’ll be talking about some of the nuts and bolts of how an organization whether it is business or government institution can look at itself, look at itself in relation to it’s goals, it’s measures of success, it’s resources for accomplishing that mission.  It’s policies and procedures, approaches and practices for how to put that into a built in organization practice.  One thing that we’re very clear on is that as great as it is for an organization to have a profound mission and challenging set of goals unless that can be translated into day to day work, translated into what Bob and Mary do on Monday morning and differently than what they did before, then it’s all just theory and philosophy.  So we’ll be focused on the nuts and bolts.  What do you do?  How do you identify the opportunities?  How do you build them into practice?  And a particular concern of mine, how do you measure results so that you can actually help people see where they are and where they are going and how well they are doing at getting there.  Exactly one of the things we’ve learned over the ten years that we’ve been working as Natural Logics, 37 years that I’ve been working in this field, is that it makes a world of difference when people have good clear relevant accurate feedback on how well they are doing in relation to their goals.  So we put a lot of attention on not only helping our clients set clear and powerful goals, but identify the performance measures that will help them track performance towards those goals and how to drive performance in the organization.  Providing real time dashboards whether it’s if this is a level of a business facility, a home, a neighborhood, a city, a county, an industry.  Providing that kind of real time feedback showing an organization’s progress and showing how its doing compared to others like it.  We find its one of the most powerful tools in the toolkit for embedding consistent change in an organization.

How did you get started doing this kind of work?
I got started doing this kind of work way back in the last century.  Early 1970’s, Stafford graduate at college I spent a month in the summer at Southern Illinois University in Carpendale, Illinois working with Buckminster Fuller’s World Game Workshop.  Bucky Fuller is probably best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome, but he was also the force behind World Game, sort of the inverse of war games.  He thought that we have very highly developed technology for training armies on how to be more effective armies.  What if we used the same kind of gaming approach to help us figure out how to have a world that works for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense without a disadvantage to anyone?  I heard that and thought:  “My My. That sounds pretty juicy to me”.  I spent a month in a deep dive design shrift for the planet looking in a very rigorous whole systems analysis at the state of the world and state of the needs of the world around energy, food, housing, healthcare, transportation, communication and a host of other areas.  The lesson out of that month long intensive was that there is no necessary physical obstacle to the planetary success.  More a question of what we choose to do and how we choose to organize ourselves to do it.  So that’s what set me on this road to do what I could to contribute that vision that Bucky laid out forty something odd years ago.

How did Natural Logic then spring from this inspiration of Buckminster Fuller?
The quick trajectory is from BM Fuller cofounding the Institute for Local Self Reliance.   A think-and-do tank headquartered in Washington D.C that still works on urban economics that are ecologically rooted.   So the Institute for Local Self Reliance has worked on urban food systems, distributed energy production, waste reduction and recycling as an economic development strategy.  I did that work through the 70’s.  I spent four years working for Jerry Brown, who was governor of California, trying to bring some of these ideas into California state policy.  I ran a marketing communications company in the 80’s and since about 1990 I’ve been doing this work of looking at the intersection of business and environment, because it seemed to me that is where the leverage was both in terms of the change that was needed and the skills that I bring to the game.  Since the early 90’s I’ve been advising companies on these strategies.  In 1999 I created Natural Logic as a corporation that could do what I had been doing as an individual, but at a much more significant scale with bigger clients and the capability of building tools we could leave behind with our clients so they can actually do the work without us as they go forward.  As you could imagine, over that time I’ve had the opportunity to see the sustainability movement really mature and take root as not just a social movement into something that is a major trend in business in the U.S. and worldwide.

What are some of your hopes with the new administration?  Do have any thoughts maybe about the stimulus package or how the economy is going?
Well one of the things that is striking about the new administration is that we have for the first time in a long time political leadership that not only understands these issues and understands the risks and opportunities around sustainability but, that is also committed to a science based, facts based approach to this work.  We’ve seen what I think are stunning appointments at the Department of Energy and the environmental agencies; a real commitment and understanding that shifting the energy economy in the U.S. is key part of the recovery strategy.  Moving from a pollution based fossil fuel based economy will improve the economics  in the U.S. it will improve our balance of payments in the most obvious way.  It can help improve the efficiency of businesses and communities across the country.  It can reduce the so-called “external economic cost” of health and environmental damage.  Particularly important for the stimulus package is the investment in new infrastructure and the investment in new energy economy I think is going to be one of the levers that powers us out of the pit we are currently in.

You recently spoke about Masdar City, which is the world’s first car free, zero CO2 city. To be completed in 2016. You said “I see on one hand Masdar City as a playground for the rich, but on the other hand as an R&D opportunity to deploy and test out technology that if things go well will show up in other cities.”  My question to you is:  What do you think we can end up learning from Masdar City and what do you think is a better approach to sustainable building?
I think what we can learn from Masdar City is the value of the comprehensive, integrated approach.  The advantage that Masdar has is that since money is no object they are able to put everything on the table and say:  “How do we do this in the most comprehensive, systematic way that is can be done now”.  No other city has the money is no object approach, but any city can take that comprehensive approach.  We find, frankly, whether it is the scale of cities or the scale of a building retro fit project, that the projects that put everything on the table that look at every aspect and interconnection, bring all the stake holders together and do this as early as possible in the project have both much greater likelihood of success and far better economics.  The greening projects that sort of slap green on as an afterthought or as an add-on of say “We already got a design and now we want to make it green as possible.”  Tend to be more expensive than the projects that start at the beginning and say:  “How do we identify all of our concerns, the concerns of all of our stakeholders have those as the framework and the context and the drivers of the design process and develop design solutions that integratively address all of those  and produce results that are more economical, have lower environmental footprints and make for much happier residence and constituencies once the project is developed.  The no budget limit of Masdar is a rare event.  The comprehensive approach is something that is within reach of every community and we really encourage communities and companies to think that way.

What are you hoping happens in the environmental/sustainability/building movement in the next 5-10 years?
I’m looking forward for the opportunity in the next 5 to 10 years in the sustainability movement, which you talk about, to put their money where their mouth is.  To take all these ideas that we have been cooking and testing and developing and refining over the last several decades and give them a real run for their money.  Do it with realism and practicality and measurement and testing, but with a high aspiration that is matched to the scale of the challenge that we face as a country and a world.  Let’s face it; we are looking at the opportunity for nothing less than a reinvention of the industrial economy.  It’s possible and it’s necessary.  We need to move from a pollution based society to a carbon free society.  To one that has been profligate with resources, to one that is efficient with using resources for human needs.  I think what is exciting now, and we will see this at the Green Cities conference, that there are enough people now with decades of experience and testing and building these ideas, that have ensured the strategies and techniques and their own capabilities so that we will be able to make a big difference in the quality of life in this country and around the world in the next 5-10 years.  And big differences in the quality of the economy and how that grows and how that moves forward from a new ecological base.

Who are some of your heroes and maybe even some people you hold in high regard that are in your field?
My mentors somehow all seem to have names that start with “B” the people I have really learned a lot from here are:  Bucky Fuller, who’ve I mention before.  Gregory Bateson the anthropologist and cybernetician and Stafford Bier, Welshman who is one of the leaders of both management cybernetics and  this approach to real time reporting as a way to transform organizations.  Those three really stand out a lot for me.  You are asking about the sustainability field per se.  The list is too long and really any list would be too long, because I will probably leave somebody off.   This is a highly collaborative field.  None of us have done this alone; we are standing on the shoulders of other people.  In fact as a measure of that, some of my best friends in this work are my competitors.  We don’t see this as a dog-eat-dog, beat each other out for jobs opportunity.  We see this as an opportunity to grow a pie rather than fight over pieces of a pie.  Even as we are each running our own companies we are all committed to this larger transformation in the economy and society so there’s much more common interest in that than competitive interest.  So there is rich dialogue and a rich exchange of ideas and rich learning from each other and in fact really funny phenomenon any time any number of thought leaders in this field hears another speak there’s a sense of “Wait a minute wasn’t I just thinking that yesterday.  I should write that.”  It’s not anything like plagiarism; it is just that people are developing a shared framework and a shared way of looking at these issues that is very powerful and is really taking root more and more broadly.

I think it’s important to progress collaboratively, because it’ll make it stronger.
Collaboration is one of the messages of the movement.  It’s not collaborative instead of competitive; we find them both in nature.  Back to what I was saying before about nature’s playbook as how we’ve learned to do what we need to do.  We see in living systems we see both collaboration with competition, both aspects are necessary for evolution and success.

You talked about having a house as a regenerative element on the landscape; I thought that was pretty interesting.  So how would a house be a regenerative element on the landscape?
In the same way that a tree is.  Instead of thinking of a house as something that you could build from materials brought in from far away, that you support with energy brought in from far away, water brought in from far away and produce waste of various kinds that have to be taken far away.  We can think about a house that functions much like a tree; sustained by ambient resource flows and the energy that falls on it, the water that falls on it, and the wind that blows through it.  That is made of materials that are at least not toxic and ideally beneficial to the people who live inside the house.   That produces so-called waste products that are edible by living systems.  In other words, that can become composted and soil building or transformed into other useful products through recycling or remanufacturing processes.  We can envision houses that are zero net energy as the city of Austin is going to require as the state of California is soon going to require.  Even houses that are net energy producers, that capture more energy from the sun and the wind than the residents need to sustain the house.  We can envision houses that are net water zero or net produces of clean water.  Here’s the thing; if a tree can produce food and clean air, powered only by sunlight, why can’t we?   If a chicken can produce another chicken with no waste in the process at all, why can’t we be as smart as a chicken?  The lessons are there and now it’s our challenge to adapt to those lessons time tested and to the complex systems of modern industrial society.  The big difference, I think, between this movement now and the land movement of 60’s and 70’s is now we are not talking about sacrifice.  We are not talking lowering standards of living.  We are not talking about doing without the modern amenities that we’ve come to know and love.  We are talking about how we do this in a much more intentional, wise and design elegant way so we can meet the need of more and more people with less and less stuff.

You recently sat down with some other leaders in sustainability for a piece in Natural Home Magazine.  You talked about being both hopeful and concerned about the future.  What are some of your hopes and concerns?
My hopes are that we can do what we were talking about during the course of this interview.  That we can actually invent and promulgate the kinds of technologies and infrastructure and economic systems that can support the kind of vision we’ve been talking about.  I think that possibility is within reach.  We know a lot of what we need to know to do that.  Technologies have advanced enormously.  The economic challenges have opened a lot of ears to these issues and opportunities.  I think we have a good shot from that perspective.
My concerns are that we are in a world of hurt.  We are not just in an economic meltdown and a credit crisis; we’re facing a whole series of crises behind that.  It is like a series of hurricanes stacked up off shore during hurricane season.  Where each storm isn’t the last, there may be another coming to hit you in a few days.  In addition to the immediate financial crisis we have the big question of climate change.  Whether the world will act with enough coordination and enough speed and enough seriousness to mitigate what could be a profoundly dangerous crisis for us.  Behind that we have the challenges of peak oil and peak water and peak uranium. The decline soil fertility and fisheries.  Issues of toxic accumulation and challenges to biodiversity and not to mention that a billion of us go to sleep hungry every night and two billion of us live on less than a dollar or two a day.  Untold numbers of children die every day of preventable diseases.  We got some big problems.  I think we have the knowhow and the skills to address them the question is do we have the will to address them and are we willing to muster that will in a coordinated and political/economic force.

That’s a lot to be concerned about, but I think you are right.  We have the tools to make it happen.
I think we do.  Again the question is do we want to make it happen?  Are we willing to commit ourselves at the level of personal lives and personal practices and the work we do at our jobs and our companies and our voting and our purchasing patterns to actually put our ideals to work in the world?  It does no good for people to know all this stuff and care about it and not act and say “Gee isn’t it horrible.” And “Gee what if those people did that?” and “Gee what if I did this?”

To wrap all this up I’m going to ask you about your black belt and how that helps you.  This is a question from Twitter.
(Laughter).  My martial arts practice is in an art called Aikido.  It’s of Japanese origin and bares resemblance to Tai Chi and other arts that are often called internal.  There are not just about the technique of the attack/combat that someone is engaged in, but also the state of mind and state of being that somebody brings to the work.  The training in Aikido in addition to the visible techniques and grappling and throwing and parrying is really centered on…centering.  Helping you to learn to be centered and balanced and at peace in any situation, including situations of conflict and threat.  The response when someone comes at you with an attack.  The first response is the internal response not the external.  If the internal response is fear or attention or locking up of the muscles then you lose degrees of freedom and you lose the ability to move effectively and respond effectively.  As you can learn to be calm in the face of conflict and centered in the face of conflict you have more degrees of freedom in your motion.  You can move more effortlessly and more effectively and in more appropriate response to the situation that you are facing, rather than any ideas that you may have about the situation that you are facing.  I find this to be enormously effective certainly in the dojo in the training center, on the mat, grappling and throwing and so forth.  Also on the highway, dealing with crazy drivers in big cars.  Also in relationships between people dealing with conflict and stress.  Also in business and negotiations, because  the same phenomenon of being present, being centered, being engaged and being open seems to work very well in all those arenas.

Terrific. Well Gil, thanks so much for talking with me today and I look forward to seeing you at Green Cities.
It’s been my pleasure.  I’ll see you there soon.

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In July 2008, Al Gore challenged the U.S. to generate 100% of the electricity we need using clean, renewable, sustainable sources within 10 years. “When you connect the dots,” he said, “it turns out that the real solutions to the climate crisis are the very same measures needed to renew our economy and escape the trap of ever-rising energy prices.” Gore connected the dots to the crises we face and drew a picture of nonsustainability. We could meet the “Gore Challenge” via the deployment of 250 gigawatts of wind generation capacity and 50 gigawatts of solar, and it would cost approximately $911 billion. But is “clean, renewable, and sustainable” energy really necessary?

[http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/feb2009/db2009024_215385.htm]