Cover Story: The Green Team

Dr. LeRoy Graham

Graham is the real deal. He’s a pediatrician with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, who got fed up watching his patients suffer from air pollution-induced asthma.

While most of us have the luxury of distancing ourselves from the gasoline we burn and the electricity we use, Graham sees firsthand the effects of pollution from cars and dirty power plants. He spends every day making sure that the airways of young asthma patients don’t close — a task that gets harder every summer when smog season rolls around.

Unlike many professionals who stay quiet and “proper” when it comes to controversial issues, Graham isn’t afraid to publicly speak out against power plants and traffic congestion. In letters to the editor and conferences on air pollution, Graham publicly calls out polluters by name. He regularly upbraids the Southern Co. and elected officials for doing next to nothing to fix the region’s air pollution.

Graham is a physician who cares about his patients and a professional who understands the science of air pollution. It’s rare for ethics and credibility to combine to create such an everyday hero.

Rachel Fowler and the Garden Club of Georgia

Most lobbyists have a hard time getting legislators’ attention. And environmentalists find it particularly difficult to chase down good ol’ boy lawmakers who get loads more campaign money from polluters than from greenies.

But the 16,000-member Garden Club has its own weapons of mass intimidation: civically active women, often from influential families, in just about every town in the state. So rural lawmakers regularly chase down Fowler, the Garden Club’s indomitable legislative chairwoman, and ask her if they can do any favors.

The 75-year-old organization has long provided a genteel connection to the South’s rich natural heritage — something Southerners tend to sweep under a concrete rug of roads and malls.

But the group got more political during its epic (and ongoing) battle with the billboard industry, which has used its influence in the General Assembly and the state Department of Transportation to uglify Georgia. In 2001, the club hired former Attorney General Mike Bowers to successfully sue the DOT for charging a minuscule price to billboard companies for chopping down state-owned trees. Last year, Fowler helped defeat a bill that would have allowed billboards to be posted closer together.

That clash with a particularly venal special interest group seems to have activated an activist gene deep within the soul of every steel magnolia. This session, the Garden Club has branched out to tackle broader environmental issues. It’s teamed up with the Georgia Water Coalition to fight for clean water. Next year ... who knows?

Pam Sessions

Few environmentalists realize that a homebuilder has done more than anyone in the metro area to move green home construction into the mainstream. Sessions is one of those rare individuals who — finding herself in a position to do something about the environment — actually ... did something.

In the late ’90s, she helped the Southface Energy Institute devise the EarthCraft Housing Program, which requires eco-friendly materials and construction methods, as well as energy efficiency and pedestrian-friendly design. In 2000, it took real courage and leadership to build EarthCraft homes, much less to commit to building them exclusively. After all, green houses were an uncertain market.

They aren’t anymore. Other builders have followed suit in constructing what has become a seal of safety and quality for metro homebuilders. Sessions’ company, Hedgewood Properties, has built 500 EarthCraft houses. And she personally practices what she preaches: Her own new Forsyth County home is a model of eco-friendly design.

Sessions is even getting national recognition for combining good business with good works. She recently was named Builder of the Year by Professional Builder magazine.

Cathy Woolard

Unlike most politicians, Woolard actually is pressing forward with ideas to improve Atlanta’s traffic and air.

The first-term president of Atlanta City Council also is inching the city toward creating its first-ever energy policy, which is focusing on money-saving steps like efficiency and conservation, and may eventually lead to solar panels on top of city buildings.

But Woolard, a former council member, has made her real mark by pushing for new zoning ordinances that encourage pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods with a mix of shops, offices and homes. Now, she’s championing a so-called “inner-loop” light rail system, which would be built on existing, unused tracks. As more redevelopment projects add buildings, people and a boatload of congestion to Atlanta, Woolard’s inner loop would help the inner city avoid a suburban-style traffic mess. It also would be a testament to her idealistic but no-nonsense approach to solving Atlanta’s problems.

Connie Tucker

Tucker directs the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice, a civil rights group that fights for environmental justice. She’s kept the spotlight on an oft-ignored aspect of environmental issues: Power plants, chemical plants, landfills and other polluting sites typically are found in poor or minority communities. That doesn’t just affect property values; residents near such facilities typically have higher rates of asthma, cancer and other health problems.

Tucker doesn’t just talk the talk on environmental justice. SOC and its attorneys — the Georgia Center for Law in the Public Interest (see below) — are going head-to-head in court May 12 against Waste Management Inc., the owners of Southeast Atlanta’s Live Oak landfill, which is appealing a state order to stop accepting trash by December 2004. Live Oak is part of a cluster of growing landfills that sit in the midst of predominantly black neighborhoods.

Last year, Tucker and her staff, namely second-in-command Jackie Ward, also placed grassroots pressure on the state Environmental Protection Division to host three public hearings on pollution coming from Georgia Power and Savannah Electric plants.

On both the power plant and landfill issues, Tucker mobilized a group of Georgians that often isn’t deeply involved in environmental issues — but which suffers the consequences of pollution disproportionately.

Jennifer Kaduck

Rare is the bureaucrat who can tiptoe through the minefields of Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division and keep heading effectively toward the real goal of, well, environmental protection.

For 11 years, Kaduck has headed EPD’s Hazardous Waste Branch. It’s an office that faces constant lobbying pressure and legal wrangling by corporations that want to weaken environmental rules and avoid having to pay for cleaning up their own messes.

But Kaduck’s steadiness, expertise, straightforward style and principled approach have won her the respect of adversaries and the quiet allegiance of many powerful people. Last summer, her ability to negotiate the tricky turns of environmental politics served her well; she successfully defended cleanup standards for the state’s 534 state-level Superfund sites after some lawmakers cynically attempted to portray the program as too expensive.

EPD leans heavily toward polluters at times. But Kaduck offers a beacon for scores of agency employees who work hard to serve the public’s interest.

Kay Beynart

Beynart is one of the most ubiquitous and least heralded citizen activists in metro Atlanta. She began her activism by fighting the extension of Ga. 400 south of I-285, but wasn’t content to just be a naysayer. She studied up on alternative approaches to transportation and land use, and continued her advocacy long after the 400 fight.

While continuing to work on behalf of her North Atlanta neighborhood, Beynart broadened her focus: first citywide, then regionwide. She’s served on numerous task forces and committees, including the ARC’s Environment and Land Use Committee.

She’s also one of the “connectors” talked about in Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book, The Tipping Point. She knows everyone, and everyone knows her, and she makes sure that people who have something to offer one another know each other as well.

John Sibley

People used to joke that if the Georgia Conservancy didn’t exist, Big Business would have invented it. The granddaddy of the state’s green groups simply was too willing to compromise with polluters.

That was before Sibley worked to reinvigorate the organization. No firebrand, Sibley’s a silk-stocking lawyer, a friend of former Gov. Roy Barnes and an influential member of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority. His careful, courtly manner engenders trust among insiders. But it’s also made him a disarming advocate on controversial issues.

Sibley, the Georgia Conservancy’s president since 1998, not only has staked out strong stands in a number of big controversies but he’s placed his group out front on issues ranging from the big business push to buy and sell water withdrawal rights, to the Northern Arc, to the larger debate over managing the state’s out-of-control growth. That’s important because the Georgia Conservancy is the state’s oldest, most broad-based environmental group and in many ways its most influential.

Charles Brewer

For a couple of years, Brewer revolutionized the way big companies did business. The Internet service provider he founded, MindSpring, which evolved into EarthLink, actually treated its customers and employees like people.

Brewer’s switch to the development business has people wondering if he can change the way communities are built also.

Green Street Properties’ first project is an ambitious attempt to do just that — on the grounds of a shuttered cement factory just south of I-20. Ground already has been broken at 28-acre Glenwood Park, where plans call for what Brewer describes as a “finely grained” mix of offices, shops, apartments, condos, town homes and single-family houses. There also will be a private elementary school with a six-acre campus and several small parks.

It’s the kind of project that people want, but that banks tend to be too conservative to finance. Brewer’s decision to back the project shows that he walked away from EarthLink with more than a vast fortune: His vision and his willingness to take a risk on the right cause were intact as well.

Dennis Creech and Southface Energy Institute

Creech and his Southface staff lead by example — and by training. For more than two decades, Creech has used his nonpolitical nonprofit to show builders, planners, architects, executives and elected officials how to save money and energy through green construction methods and through the use of a variety of eco-friendly gadgets. Most of metro Atlanta’s compact-florescent light bulbs probably owe their illumination to his salesmanship.

Creech’s ever-present smile and can-do attitude has helped Southface avoid getting mired in controversy. While standing firm for environmental principles, he’s built bridges to polluting industries, like homebuilders and even Georgia Power; he’s helped those businesses figure out ways to get on the green side of at least some issues.

The Southface house/office on Pine Street, near the Civic Center, is a model of high-tech green construction. It’s where the EarthCraft environmentally certified home concept was hatched — both because it served as an example and as a friendly place where homebuilders, engineers and environmentalists could hammer out the details of the program.

This year, Southface is expanding its do-as-we-do concept of environmental evangelism: The organization is breaking ground on a new building that will serve as a similar model for offices.

Ray Anderson and Interface Inc.

Anderson set the American business world on its ear nearly a decade ago when he announced that the carpet-making firm he heads, Interface, would follow the principles of “The Natural Step” — a radical philosophy that holds that companies can produce without polluting.

While the road has been tough at times, Anderson remains committed to converting Interface into a totally sustainable company. These words, from Interface’s website, hint that the company isn’t there yet: “Our vision is to lead the way to the next industrial revolution by becoming the first sustainable corporation, and eventually a restorative enterprise. It’s an extraordinarily ambitious endeavor; a mountain to climb that is higher than Everest.”

Some of Interface’s accomplishments aren’t mind-blowing. For instance, energy use has declined only 9 percent since 1996. But other achievements are extraordinary. Carbon dioxide emissions are down 29 percent; the water used to make a specific amount of carpet has been cut by more than two-thirds; and the company’s carpet recycling program kept 5.4 million pounds of carpet out of landfills last year — up from 3.3 million pounds in 1998.

Just as importantly, Anderson is one of the few CEOs to publicly acknowledge the inevitable: American business needs to revolutionize its industrial processes if we are to avert global environmental problems in the 21st century. With leaders like him, that revolution has a chance of succeeding.

The Georgia Center for Law in the Public Interest

Executive director Justine Thompson (left) and staff attorneys Robert Ukeiley and Kasey Sturm have built a legal clinic that routinely takes up the slack left by state regulators. They work — free of charge — for a dozen environmental groups statewide. What’s better: They get results.

The center has successfully sued some of the state’s biggest polluters, among them Georgia Pacific, Amercord and municipal governments that don’t feel like spending money on their aging sewage systems. In the last two years, the center got Oglethorpe Power to reduce its emissions of nitrogen oxide pollution and Duke Energy to reduce harmful emissions at a plant under construction in Murray County.

All told, the center’s lawsuits have forced the installation of more than $50 million worth of equipment to protect Georgia waterways, and led to air pollution reductions that equate to taking all the metro area’s cars off the road for five days.

How will they follow that act? Ukeiley’s trying. He’s suing Georgia Power over air emissions from Plant Wansley in Heard County and is helping Southeast Atlanta residents in their effort to shut down Waste Management Inc.’s Live Oak landfill.

The results:
??The Dirty Dozen
?Earth Day related events