6 December 2011

As the largest Town in Virginia, and the home of Virginia Tech, Blacksburg has demonstrated time and again that collaborations and civic engagement are keys to bringing together segmented areas of a community to make great things happen.  Whether collaboratively working to restore a historic downtown theater, or finding ways to creatively fund, build, and operate a new Farmer’s Market, the terms Sustainability and Livability have become inseparable community values that drive decisions and mobilize support for programs.

One such program is called Sustainability Week, an annual, series of events designed to celebrate Blacksburg’s environmental successes, educate our citizens, highlight sustainability practices, and motivate change.  What began as a Town sponsored Environmental Awareness Week in 2006 has since become a joint effort of the Town, Virginia Tech, and the non-profit organization, Sustainable Blacksburg.  Five years later, Sustainability Week is now a valued community tradition embraced by the residents of Blacksburg and the surrounding region.

Each year, Sustainability Week offers a variety of opportunities for people of all ages to participate.  Popular outdoor activities have included tree plantings, sampling the early fall harvest at the Farmers Market, lunch time Walk and Talks, and a children’s bike rodeo.  Tours have been particularly popular and have included visits to community gardens, sustainable farms, co-housing developments, and an edible forest garden.  Practical how-to workshops have also been offered on topics such as building your own rain barrel, growing your own green roof, winterizing your garden, beekeeping, vermiculture (worm cultivation) and installing residential wind, solar and geothermal systems.  

An integral part of Sustainability Week is the inclusion of well known and respected keynote speakers such as Mike Tidwell, Executive Director of Chesapeake Climate Action Network; Robin Chase, Founder and CEO of GoLoco; Joe Salatin of Polyface Farms; and renowned author Barbara Kingsovler.  Documentaries including An Inconvenient Truth, Who Killed the Electric Car, Flow – For Love of Water, No Impact Man, Gasland, and The Last Mountain have also been shown at the historic Lyric Theatre.

The culminating event of the week is the Sustainability Fair, an opportunity for the community to engage directly with educators and vendors offering information and products such as home energy audits, photovoltaic solar systems, geothermal systems, non-toxic household products, and more.

The success of Sustainability Week can be measured quite simply. While it takes time to educate citizens and change habits that are so engrained in our daily lives, one doesn’t have to look far to see that Blacksburg is a community now focused on the environment. While strolling through any residential area of the Town it’s common to see the use of rain barrels, rain gardens, and other low impact development measures. Residential curbside recycling has also been in place for years. 

There have been notable successes in the participation of local businesses in statewide programs such as the Virginia DEQ Fluorescent Lamp Challenge and the Virginia Green Lodging Program.  Go Green NRV (New River Valley) is also a business product of Sustainability Week. Go Green is a non-profit organization that encourages local companies to establish and increase sustainability practices in their operations. There are currently 45 businesses participating. 

A unique aspect of Sustainability Week is that each year organizers come up with a community pledge or similar take-away idea to promote during the week as a way to engage the community.  One year there was a pledge to say “neither paper nor plastic” at grocery stores and included a partnership with local Kroger grocery stores to promote the use of re-usable bags and tracked participation by their patrons.   Another year, the pledge was to read Daniel Goleman’s Ecological Intelligence as a community book and this past year the community pledged to reduce their home energy consumption.  How well the community does at reducing their residential energy consumption will be evident from the community greenhouse gas audit performed each year for Blacksburg’s climate action program.

One unmistakable success of this annual celebration was the formation of the local non-profit group, Sustainable Blacksburg.  It was conceived as an informal community partnership during the original Environmental Awareness Week of 2006 and grew into an official 501 (c)(3) and co-sponsor of Sustainability Week.  Today it has a Board of Directors representing all sectors of the community and their adopted mission is to facilitate environmental stewardship in the Blacksburg area and to enhance the region’s livability by reducing our impact on the local environment. While Sustainability Week is their signature annual event, Sustainable Blacksburg also sponsors educational forums and events throughout the year.

Creating a community non-profit such as Sustainable Blacksburg and organizing an annual Sustainability Week is not an easy undertaking as it requires a cadre of dedicated individuals and organizations with a shared vision. Fortunately, all communities have environmental champions who are simply waiting for the opportunity to step up. Likewise, all communities have governmental, business, and community entities with the capacity to form a partnership and the ability to engage citizens. It all starts with a vision, a few leaders, and a lot of enthusiasm, so get started.