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Aaron Perry
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[From Ben Franklin to Modern Cities, the Key to Sustainability is Found in Good Old-Fashioned Prudence!]
Jerry Tinianow (rhymes with “piano”), the former Chief Sustainability Officer of the City (and County) of Denver, and the Founder of Western Urban Sustainability Advisors, shares an abundance of perspectives and wisdom about making our communities – and lives – more sustainable.
Jerry reminds us that much of what it takes to reduce our footprints and to improve our quality of lives isn’t glittery new innovations but older “tried-and-true” conservationism, prudence, and frugality. From urban gardens echoing the “victory gardens” of WWII-era resilience to up-cycling and repurposing materials instead of simply throwing them away, much of what Jerry encourages might remind us of the timeless wisdom of our grandparents and great-grandparents from a bygone era. Indeed, in this interview Jerry shares how his own ancestral lineage has informed and inspired his work today.
About Chief Sustainability Officers
Chief Sustainability Officers – or CSOs – are a recent addition to the C-suite of companies, cities, airports, and other large institutions, and serve as a strategy and policy-setting, implementation, and coordination nexus within the ecosystem (and among its myriad stakeholders) to improve environmental, social, and financial performance. The City of Denver was the second city in the United States (after Las Vegas) to establish a CSO position. Under Mayor Michael Hancock, who emphasized “scaling” solutions and inclusion (“everybody plays”), Mr. Tinianow not only transformed the sustainability profile of Denver, but has also had far-reaching impact throughout Colorado, the United States, and beyond, often in coordination with other Chief Sustainability Officers.
About Jerry Tinianow
Jerry Tinianow is the proprietor of Western Urban Sustainability Advisors, LLC (WestUrb for short). WestUrb assists local governments in creating and improving sustainability programs. It also works with vendors that sell products or services to such programs and interest groups that want to improve local sustainability policies.
Jerry’s work at WestUrb reflects the successes he achieved as Denver’s first Chief Sustainability Officer (2012-19). Under his leadership Denver became the fifth U.S. city certified at the Platinum Level of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED for Cities program (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). During his tenure Denver was also included in the “A List” of top-performing cities in climate change reporting and action by the international climate change organization CDP (Climate Disclosure Project).
Jerry previously served as a national officer of both the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society, and directed the Center for Energy and Environment at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission. The Sierra Club designated him a national “Environmental Hero” during its centennial celebration. Prior to his sustainability career Jerry was a partner and commercial trial attorney with two of Ohio’s largest law firms.
Jerry received his undergraduate and law degrees from George Washington University. He was the 2018 winner of the prestigious Wirth Chair Sustainability Award awarded by the University of Colorado.
Resources & Related Episodes
Web: https://westurb.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jerry.tinianow/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerometinianow/
Episode 141 – Nathan Stuck, CEO, Profitable Purpose Consulting
Episode 48 – Matt Gray, (Former) CSO, City of Cleveland
Transcript
(Automatically generated transcript for search engine optimization and reference purposes – grammatical and spelling errors may exist.)
Welcome to the YonEarth Community Podcast. I’m your host, Aaron William Perry. And today
we’re visiting with Jerry Tinianow, the founder of Western Urban Sustainability Advisors.
Jerry, how you doing?
I’m great. And thank you for the correct pronunciation of my name. You’re a minority
of about 2% of all humans who can do that.
Well I appreciate the acknowledgement and I will cop to having asked you just a few
minutes ago the correct pronunciation because I wasn’t certain. Tinianow like Tiano, it’s
a nice way to think about it.
Yeah. But I’m doing great looking forward to our conversation today.
Likewise, likewise, Jerry. Jerry Tinianow is the proprietor of Western Urban Sustainability
Advisors LLC. West Irb assists local governments in creating and improving sustainability programs.
It also works with vendors that sell products or services to such programs and interest groups
that want to improve local sustainability policies. Jerry’s work at West Irb reflects
the successes he achieved at Denver’s, as Denver’s first chief sustainability officer
from 2012 to 2019, where under his leadership, the city of Denver became the fifth U.S.
city certified at the platinum level of the U.S. Green Building Council’s lead for
city’s program. That’s leadership in environmental and energy and environmental design. And
during his tenure, Denver was also included in the A list of top performing cities in climate
change reporting and action by the International Climate Change Organization, CDP, which was
formerly known as the Climate Disclosure Project.
Jerry previously served as a national officer of both the Sierra Club and the National Audubon
Society and directed the Center for Energy and Environment at the Mid Ohio Regional Planning
Commission. The Sierra Club designated him a national environmental hero during its
centennial celebration. Prior to his sustainability career, Jerry was a partner and commercial
trial attorney with two of Ohio’s largest law firms. He received his undergraduate and
law degrees from George Washington University and he was the 2018 winner of the Worth Chair
Sustainability Award given by the University of Colorado, which Jerry, not all of our audience
will necessarily know about yet, but I will be the first to say that here in the state
of Colorado, this is one of, if not the most prestigious sustainability awards one can
receive concerning especially work within the institutions and institutional level here
in the state. So I’m not, you know, congratulations, obviously, very well deserved.
Thank you and it’s kind of interesting because the award is named after former Colorado
Senator Timothy Worth, who was elected in the Watergate year in 1974 and oddly enough, in
1975 when I was in college and started working part time on Capitol Hill, I met Senator
Worth when he was just a congressman, when he had just been elected. So it’s funny, I met
him in 1975 and then 2018 suddenly I get an award named after a long time in between.
Wow, that’s great. I love the how that’s full circle. So Jerry, you know, I first became
aware of you, your role with the city and county of Denver, your work as a chief sustainability
officer, which I may refer to as a CSO through the conversation here. When I was working
in the food arena, running a food hub here in the state and boy, you’ve accomplished
so much in that arena and touched on so many different industries and lives and sectors
of our economies, our communities. And I want to make sure I think many of our audience
are very aware of what chief sustainability officers are and do. And thankfully this
has become a major trend in movement in the world. But for those who maybe aren’t as
familiar, could you just describe for us what is a chief sustainability officer and what
were you doing when you’re in that role for the city and county of Denver?
It’s a term that’s really come into vogue in the last 10 to 15 years, let’s say. It’s
relatively new in that when I was appointed in Denver in 2012, there were only two cities
in the United States that had a chief sustainability officer, Denver and Las Vegas, which was
the first, interestingly enough. It’s also a term that’s made its way into the corporate world.
Many, many companies now have chief sustainability officers. Many local governments now have them,
not so much at the state level, but particularly at the local level, cities, counties, towns,
you know, have them. The role differs in different communities. In the case of Denver,
it was in the mayor’s office. And so there we were working with all of the different departments
and city governments in our city government. And we have a combined city and county government
to 13,000 employees. And we were working with them to implement the mayor’s sustainability
vision, which was that everyone would have access or affordable access to the basic resources
both today and tomorrow. People define sustainability differently. That’s what I say. It’s
different depending on which community you’re in. In some communities, the office is programmatic,
meaning that they are running actual programs out of that office. They might be, for example,
doing a recycling education program or a program on energy saving in the home. That’s the way it
structured some places, other places like in Denver, all of the programs were out in the city’s
departments. We didn’t run anything out of our office. We worked with them to do it. And the
mayor structured it that way, because he wanted sustainability to be a core business value
of the entire city government, all of the departments. He did not want to segregate
the sustainability programs in our office, because then we’d be the little green ornament on
the tree. That’s where the sustainability stuff is happening. Everyone else was doing business
as usual. And our mayor, Michael B. Hancock, did not want to do things that way. It is on that way
in some other cities. And then in corporations, you know, it’s different there, because corporations
really are just looking inward to their own operations. And so there, this piece of sustainability
officer again can play many different roles depending on how it’s structured. Sometimes it comes
out of the marketing department, and it’s mainly a marketing tool. Other times, it comes out of
product development or engineering. Sometimes it comes out of governance. There may be a board
position and so forth. So it doesn’t mean the same thing everywhere, but generally seeing
you’re looking across that broad range of issues that you mentioned a moment ago. You’re looking
at energy and you’re looking at waste and you’re looking at food and you’re looking at water
conservation and pollution and mobility traveling around and and later resources and things like
that. You work with all of it. That’s why sustainability as a profession is so wonderful if
you’re a person like me who really wants to be into everything, basically. Loves to see how all
the dots are connected. Lo is a very interesting approach to decentralize the mechanisms and
empower a whole bunch of others in the fabric of the community. Right. And you know, I always tell
people when they say, well, that sustainability officer, that’s a new position. Look, the reality
is that cities have always had huge sustainability officers for decades. They just don’t call them
chief sustainability officers. Sometimes the head of the city public works department is
effectively the chief sustainability officer. Sometimes it’s the head of the planning department.
You know, there’s always someone who’s doing this, you know, acting in this capacity. And the
reason for that is in my opinion, sustainability really goes back to Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin
was the founder of sustainability in the United States and he wrote about it in poor Richard’s
Almanac. He wrote down a lot of the principles that we use today like a penny save as a penny earn
or a stitch in time saves nine. You know, really these concepts have been around for decades and
decades. The term the title is new, but the principles of sustainability have been around for a long time.
So wonderful. It’s amazing to me how much our modern world despite all of these technological
advances has been profoundly influenced by Ben Franklin in particular among many of the
framers from that time. Yeah, that radical guy Ben Franklin. Yeah, if I have it correctly,
I believe that he was instrumental in establishing a postal system, the idea of community
firefighting capabilities, even forms of insurance that helps spread risk in the community. I mean,
he does so much. Right. Yeah, and those principles have come down to us, although the term sustainability,
even when I was in college in the 70s wasn’t really around yet, but the idea that it’s been around
for a long time. And often when you’re looking for programs and sustainability when you’re
thinking about what could we do? What would really work here? You don’t have to invent something new.
You have to go back to something old that worked for a long, long time and that we got away from
and forgotten about. You know, when you look at a lot of cities, part of their sustainability
program is urban gardens. Well, urban gardens are gardening, you know, publicly is not a new thing.
It’s been around for a long time. And World War II, you know, 40% of produce in the United
States was grown in neighborhood gardens. And so we’d have to invent something new when we
created urban gardens. We have to go back in time to things that worked well a long time ago
and are ready to be resuscitated. You know, a lot of towns are now starting to
experiment with things called repair fairs where they bring, you know, skill tradesmen and
tradespeople into a central location and you bring yourself down and have it repaired instead
of throwing it out, you know, to keep it out of the landfill. Again, nothing new about repair
or repairing things rather than throwing them out. In fact, I’ve always gotten a kick out of the
fact that a lot of what is called sustainability now is what used to be called being cheap or
being a cheap state, you know, saving that ball of string or whatever or saving all of your
hangers instead of throwing them out. That, you know, sustainability used to be called being a
cheap state. But, you know, that means a lot to me because my grandfather started out in this
country over a hundred years ago, going around the countryside near where he lived in Lado, Ohio
and picking up scrap metal and taking it to foundries. You know, we call that recycling now,
the 2020 census described his profession as junk peddler. So it used to be junk peddling now
it’s recycling. It’s been around for a long, long time. No doubt it reminds me of my grandparents
as well and it turns out when I was a relatively young man, I was getting into sustainability,
permaculture, etc., and not to throw any of them under the bus, but my parents and aunts and
uncles generation at the time didn’t really quite get where I was coming from. But when I was talking
with my grandpa who grew up in the depression and was actually a prisoner of war during World War
II in Germany, Nazi Germany, he got it immediately. He said, you’re absolutely right and he said
something else that has stuck with me all these years, he said, the way our society has gone now
is so far off track and off course. And he knew, I was in his garden talking with him at the time,
he knew things like the relocalization of food production and so forth was essential to the
resilience and sustainability of our neighborhoods, our communities, our families. And so yeah,
I really resonate with the way you’re framing this in terms of returning back to
things that were common practice, not too terribly long ago, really, in the ski no-shakes.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we call local food today used to be called food.
I mean, it was almost all local or nearby and so forth. There’s nothing new about it.
What’s new is the way the food system evolved into this thing where food travels hundreds
or thousands of miles to get to us. That’s new. Local food is more traditional, it’s going back to our
roots. Indeed, yeah, and I’d love pointing out as well that what we now call organic food,
we used to call food, right? Like up until about 100 years ago, all food for thousands and
thousands of years was organic by definition. And when I started working in what we now call
sustainability when I was in college on the staff of a congressman from Montana, and he got me
into this, he asked me to work on what was then called alternative energy, solar energy. Wind
hadn’t really come along yet, but solar energy, geothermal energy, it was just coming into its own,
and my goal, my hope, as I’m hearing the end of my career, is that we can apply the term alternative
energy to gasoline, coal, oil, you know, those types of energy. Our view is alternative energy,
and what we now call renewable energy is the basic or default system of energy to shut off,
you know, how far things have come over the period of my career.
I love it. Yeah, the term anomalous is coming to mind for me.
Yeah, right. Can you remind me just, I want to get it down in my notes here. What
percentage of our food were we growing in our gardens during World War II?
It was not all food, it was produce, and it was about 40% at maxed up, or called victory gardens
in the world wars, and it reached about 40%. The distinction between food and produce is
important too, because large segments of the food system really cannot be produced in cities.
You know, you can’t produce grain in large quantities in cities, and you really can’t produce
meat in large quantities in cities. You can do a little bit with, you know, some forms of
aquaculture and things like that, but really the whole food system requires a region not a city,
but the produce, that part of, you know, the food chain of the food system, that can be done
very locally, and that’s where the big comeback is happening right now.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely wonderful, and I love to circle back on the food piece with you,
because as you know, it’s very near and dear to my heart, but let me first ask you, so now you’re
finished with your role at the city and county of Denver as Chief Sustainability Officer,
and you have more recently launched your company, Western Urban Sustainability Advisors.
Can you tell us a bit about what you’re doing and whom you’re serving through the new company?
I wanted to take the lessons that I learned as Denver’s Chief Sustainability Officer for seven
years and apply them to other local governments in Colorado and elsewhere, and so I offer my
services to communities that are creating sustainability plans, updating sustainability plans,
creating climate action plans, creating individual programs, you know, within those plans.
I typically work in partnerships with other organizations simply because, you know, when you
first become a consultant and you look at requests for proposals from various entities, they always say,
well, give us a list of three other projects that you’ve done that are like this one.
And coming out of government, I wasn’t any, I was not working in the private sector.
So I typically partner with other companies I’m on a team. I do have one project I’m working on
right now, which is just me, it’s helping the big strike community up in Montana, implement the
climate action program that they put together earlier this year, earlier in 2023. But for the most part,
you know, it’s doing what I did as Chief Sustainability Officer in terms of planning,
programming and things like that, but without all the bureaucracy of, you know, being an officer
in the city government, I leave that to the to the client now.
So interesting, you know, we recently had on Nathan Stuck on a podcast episode who has a company
called Profitable Purpose Consulting and he’s helping a whole number of companies and organizations
out there get be certified and or prepare for the pathway to becoming be certified. And I’m curious,
just sort of thinking about possible connections here. How might you and your offerings, you know,
differ from and or complement, you know, something like what Nathan and his team are offering,
particularly I’m thinking here for the private sector because we had mentioned you’re working both
with municipal scale governmental entities as well as the private sectors, that correct?
I do a little bit of work with the private sector, not too much. Generally, if someone in the private
sector has a product or service that really strikes me as something with tremendous potential
and they want to make a link to local governments, they either want to sell it to a local government
or they really need local governments to make some changes in their laws to open the door for what
it is they’re doing with their product or service, then I will help a private business. But I’m not
doing general business consulting, you know, someone who’s helping companies become be corporations
which does tie into record sustainability, that’s entirely in the private sector. Their clients are
all going to be private sector companies. There is no, you know, be company or be corporation
rating for local governments. It’s entirely private sector. But the issues we’re working on are
probably very similar. You know, I’m helping the local government pursue sustainability issues,
they’re helping private companies do the same thing. Yeah, in your bio, we mentioned that Denver
became the fifth city certified under the U.S. Green Building Council’s lead, platinum level
certification. I’m assuming just because of what I know about the U.S. Green Building Council,
that pertain primarily to the buildings, the built environment and related infrastructure.
Is that true A and B? Are there other certifications for cities and municipalities that speak to
other dimensions of the sustainability fabric? Well, lead for cities and communities
actually grew out of the buildings program of the U.S. Green Building Council. But it evolved
from a recognition that there was more to sustainability than just buildings. So what a city does
in regulating its buildings, in its own buildings and regulating private buildings is part of what
goes into our certification as a lead city. But there’s a lot of other things that go into it too.
You know, you look at the city’s solid waste systems and what the city is doing with energy
and water and what it’s doing with land use and mobility and so forth and so on. And like with
the buildings part of lead, the city basically says this is what we’re doing and they get points
for doing certain things or achieving certain things or hitting certain benchmarks. And then you
add those points up and you see what level of certification that they’re going to get. So yes,
it is buildings, but really it also goes well beyond buildings. And it’s also the two part program
lead for cities is a certification of local government like a city or a county. But there’s also
lead for communities, which are big kind of like cities. But they’re more than just a building.
They could be more like a campus, but they’re not a local government. You know, Rockefeller Center
in New York, which is a combination of buildings that’s a lead for communities certified
area. Airports can be certified as lead for communities communities. So really, you’re looking
to bridge the US Green Building Council’s program from the individual buildings up to much larger
units. But they do play with each other in the sense that it’s probably easier to develop a
lead green building if your city is lead certified because one of the things that your city is done
to get that certification is to really open up the door and make it easier for individual
developers to develop green buildings, green neighborhoods and so forth. There are other
green systems, somewhat similar. You know, there’s the global compact of mayors, which has certain
requirements of mayors relating to climate. There are standards for healthy buildings. There’s
the well-building standard. There are other systems out there. I like USGBC. I like lead because it’s
been around for so long. It has such a strong brand. It’s very rigorous and therefore very
trustworthy. Yeah, it really, it really seems to have become the gold or platinum stand.
And I’m curious, do you have a sense for how many cities around the United States, you know,
large major cities, medium-sized cities, and or internationally have already attained some level
of lead certification? In terms of cities and cities can include counties, we’re probably
somewhere between somewhere around 100, maybe worldwide, you know, not a lot. Although many of
those that have it, I think it are larger cities like Denver, you know, Denver is gotten there,
Washington, DC, Phoenix, places like that, Arlington, Virginia. Communities smaller number,
most of the communities are overseas. There’s a program is particularly strong in East Asia and
South Asia, and it’s gaining strength in the Gulf States, you know, the Persian Gulf. Again,
they’re not a lot right now, but like any other program, you know, you wanted to grow or you
wanted to expand, and you want to see exponential growth. So it, both of those programs have grown
every single year since they started, and we’re getting to larger and larger numbers. So hopefully
we’ll see more and more cities, counties, and so forth getting that certification.
Yeah, that’s wonderful to hear about. And very interesting to think about the interconnection,
where if a city’s already certified, it makes it easier for a particular building or project or
community to get certified. I love hearing that because it speaks to the the interconnection
of all of these different systems and modalities. Right. Yeah, the important thing is that the lead
certification has to mean something. You know, like you can talk about where we’ve certified,
and if a reaction of everyone is, what does that mean? But I can tell you, when we do
certify when the U.S. Green Building Council does certify cities, they always celebrate.
There’s a hoes of press conference. There’s always a photo with the mayor and city officials
probably holding up that certificate and so forth. So clearly it does mean something. Just like
with buildings, you know, when the buildings program was getting started, and people would earn
that certification for their building, there’d always be a process of that or a media event
or something in the corporate report showing that lead plaque that’s on the building. So
the reason the program succeeds is because the U.S. Green Building Council has made the certification
mean something. And it’s got to keep doing that. But that’s why it’s a rock solid system. That’s
why it’s lasted a long time. You know, the buildings program has been around for over 20 years.
So and it’s funny because when I was with the National Audubon Society, I developed my one and only
lead building. It was a nature education center that we developed in Columbus, Ohio. And it was
lead gold. It was one of the first buildings in Ohio to go after lead. And I remember when I was
learning lead, you know, in order to build this building, my reaction was, oh, this is never going
to last. This is never going to last. This is too, this is too cumbersome. It’s too hard. You know,
and no one’s going to do this. And I learned the hard way to never bet against the U.S. Green
Building Council because the program has been a phenomenal success. And I learned the hard way.
I learned by doing just how rigorous it is. And therefore just how valuable that certification
is when you get it. Yeah, that’s so great to you. Yeah. Back when I was in graduate school, I
mentioned to you prior to our recording here that I was working for a Green Buildings material
company. My friend David Adams and founded and continues to run. And we would get all of these
wonderful publications from the U.S. Green Building Council on all manner of built environment
systems and structures and design strategies. And yeah, it’s amazing to step back and consider
for just a moment how much incredibly good impact that one organization has had all around
the world just in the last couple of decades. Yeah, and that’s due to a very dedicated staff
that, again, is very rigorous in what they do. If you’ve ever, for example, been a speaker at
a U.S. Green Building Council conference, you have no idea the hoops you have to jump through,
just to be approved to speak and then have your presentation approved. I’ve never seen it anywhere
else, but that’s why their conferences are such high quality because they put the effort in
up front to make sure that everything is done to my standard. Yeah, so wonderful to hear. Well,
I have to ask because I’m curious, you mentioned airports and back in the day are recycling and
food distribution companies had business at Denver International Airport, one of the largest
busiest in the country and even worldwide. And a really notable and somewhat storied airport,
including with like conspiracy theories and all kinds of strange, mysterious lore surrounding it.
I’m curious in your role as CSO for Denver, did you have a lot to do with the airport and was
there a lot going on there in terms of sustainability efforts? I did have a lot to do with the airport
because in Denver, unlike many other cities, the airport, Denver International Airport is actually
a city department. It’s actually a department of Denver government, so it’s controlled by the city
and county of Denver and therefore it was subject to the work I was pursuing as the chief sustainability
offer. And I have to say, Denver International Airport has a very impressive track record in the
area of sustainability. I cannot take personal credit for a lot of it. You know, I worked with them,
but they have done some remarkable things out there. Just as an example, something that happens
behind the scenes, people don’t even know about. You know in the winter, when you fly out of an
airport like Denver, you have to have the plane diced with this chemical. So what happens to that
chemical, you know, when they when they when they sprayed over the plane? When many airports,
it’s it’s just sent into the sewer system or like LaGuardia, they used to and maybe they still do,
they they would just plow it into the long miles out. Denver actually collects it and has a recycling
plant on the site of Denver International Airport. You’ll never see this as a passenger, but I got
a back stage door. They actually have a recycling plant right at the airport to recycle that stuff,
so it doesn’t get into the environment. And that’s pretty remarkable. They also have a really
remarkable food recovery or waste food recovery program where they started out and they put a big
freezer in the airport. And they asked all of their vendors, you know, if you have left over food,
not, you know, waste, not scraps from the diner’s table, but food that you bought meant for whatever
reason you can’t use it. Could you give it to us, hold distributed to hunger shelters? That program
is so successful that they had to expand that refrigerator by a factor of five, you know, to take
in all of the waste food that was being offered by the vendors. And so that’s really a remarkable
thing that they’re doing. I’ve seen machines they have for recycling, florescent bulbs. They have
a way of recycling all the plastic packaging and wrapping that comes off of freight.
It comes into the airport. So they’re doing an awful lot out there. If you’ve been out there,
you’ve probably seen the solar arrays that you go by when you’re going into the airport. But that’s
really just the tip of the iceberg. So Denverites can be really proud of the airport. It truly is
one of the greenest airports in the world. Well, I got to ask, I can’t help myself. So what
of all these conspiracy theories out there, do you think? Well, for those of your viewers who don’t
know about this, they’ve been conspiracy theories about the airport for a long, long time.
All you have to do is keyword search Denver Airport conspiracy. And you’ll see all the YouTube
videos and so forth. There’s a number of things. There’s, you know, the air, the building was originally
going to have this underground handling system for the luggage that never really got built. But
there’s this big supposedly empty underground area that’s been rumored to, you know, house,
the landing place for the world government. You know, when the apocalypse comes, they’re all going
to go down there. The runways, if you look at them from above, they kind of look a little bit like
a swastika, which was supposed to be, you know, a symbol of something. There’s some artwork in the
airport that supposedly sends these signals. He would search Denver Airport conspiracy. And you’ll
have to see it for yourself. There was one thing, though, I asked the airport director about this.
There was one part that was true. One of the conspiracies is that apparently the British Royal family
threw a bunch of corporations that they created under other names, has bought up a lot of land
near the airport. Now, the conspiracy theorists said that’s because the British Royal family is
also supposed to go there just before the apocalypse happens. They want to have those lines of work.
Well, the airport director at the time said that’s not what they buy, but they do earn a lot of
property under other corporate names near the Denver International Airport. That part of it is true.
Most of it is not true, but it is pretty funny. And I used to tease the airport director about it.
And I told her, you know, when that, when those doors close and the apocalypse was here, I want you
to be sure I’m inside of it with my family. Yeah, that’s so interesting. It reminds me a little bit,
too, of lore around Henry Kissinger and others owning land in southern Colorado, maybe for similar
reasons. And I actually can’t help but mentioning, I play with some of these themes, especially
at the airport in my novel Veridi Toss, when the charge of Brigitte, so if you have to fly into
Colorado and go through the airport, it actually goes by some of the artwork you’re referencing,
some of these paintings with amazing symbolry and so forth. And, you know, of course, with the swastika,
many of us affiliate this with the horrors and atrocities of Nazi Germany, but maybe not as many
of us are aware that this is a sacred symbol to many peoples, the ancient folks in the Himalayas,
the ancient Hindu tradition. And Hobi and other Native American traditions also use this symbol,
although not necessarily oriented the same way that the Nazi Germany, but yeah, it’s kind of fun
to think about these things and laugh a little bit about them. Well, as the airport director
pointed out to me, if you actually look at the runways, it’s backwards from what the actual swastika
is doing. It’s an interesting theory, you know, we got some laughs out of it.
Oh my gosh.
Let me just take a moment and remind our audience that this is the YonEarth community podcast on your host Aaron William Perry and today we’re visiting with Jerry Tiniano, the founder of Western Urban Sustainability Advisors and I want to be sure to mention a few ways you can connect with Jerry and his work on the web you can go to westurb.com we’ll put this in the show notes of course as well on Facebook it’s Jerry Dot Tiniano and it’s Jerome Tiniano on LinkedIn and again we’ll have all these links in the show notes for you and I also want to
take a moment to thank the many partners and sponsors who help make our YonEarth community podcast series possible. This includes Chelsea Green
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Superfoods likewise 50 dollars or 25% off your first order whichever is
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regeneration and sustainability renaissance worldwide one way or another and
for our ambassadors we have a variety of offerings including our special
behind-the-scenes segments that we record with podcast guests which we’ll be
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only express our gratitude for your support but also help you in your personal
well-being and joy and delight practices so many thanks to everybody and Jerry
I just love thinking about the arc of your career and of course we ran into
each other this past April at the Earth X gathering in Dallas around Earth Day
and I got to ask you know how does somebody who starts out in a legal
career right you’re a lawyer end up doing all of this other work how does
something like that unfold over time I actually started before law school as I
mentioned I went to undergraduate school at George Washington University I
wanted to work on Capitol Hill during during law school and during college and I
was able to work for a young freshman from Montana named Maddoz Valka’s and I
didn’t have any agenda I didn’t have any particular issue that I was working
on but he said I want you to work on alternative energy agriculture or
street natural resources things like that you also sent me out to Montana
during my summers to work in his district and I just fell in love with the West
I fell in love with those issues and so I carried it into law school while I was
here I worked for the Sierra Club legal defense fund which is now called
justice and then when I went back home to Cleveland which was where I’m from to
practice law I also continued my involvement with the Sierra Club as a
volunteer so really you know I didn’t set out to be a sustainability guy I just
kind of stumbled into it but profession as we now know it didn’t really exist
back then what I started doing all this stuff as a volunteer worked my way up the
ladder on the volunteer side of this year club as a local group chair in the
state chair in a regional vice president and national vice president and then
I decided I wanted to do at full-time and from when I decided that until when I
got a full-time job was ten years because I then I was living and working in
Columbus I’d been transferred to another office in our welfare and I could just
back then and just weren’t a lot of jobs anywhere other than on the coast so
took me ten years I finally got the job thought upon that took me into the
regional planning commission got the invitation to come to Denver to be the
two sustainability officer and you know I didn’t plan it this way and I’ll tell
you one other thing and if back then when I was working in Capitol Hill and
in college and everything if someone had told me when you come out of law school
you’re gonna have one government job when your life and it’ll be working for a
city I would have told them they were nuts I would have said are you
kidding a city that’s where you know that’s where corruption occurs that’s
where they pick up garbage that’s where they fill panels what can I possibly do
in a city that would be of any importance and yet you know by the time I finally
got that job in 2012 cities were where it was at you know the frozen but the
federal government was frozen up the state government’s not doing too well but
at the city level at the local level that’s where you can really get things done
and anyone who’s watching this and thinking of a career and sustainability take a
look at local government because I think that’s where the most exciting stuff
happens yeah it’s so cool I want it I want to ask especially at your time with
the city what are some of the accomplishments that you’re most proud of and
that you think have had the most perhaps the most impact you know we took
the what was with the mayor mayor handcock referred to as a marketing program
a program called green print which is predecessor had run and we totally
altered its focus the mayor gave me a four-word agenda four words which was
scale and everybody plays so he wanted us to focus on moving big numbers not
little stuff not little you know demonstration projects or whatever and it
was funny because my first day on the job when the staff of the old
office was giving me the tour at the end one of the women on the staff said to me
you know what I hope you could really accomplish while you’re here I hope you
can really get the mayor to stop drinking out of his styrofoam crop and the
mayor told me scale and everybody plays and I didn’t say anything to I but I
said boy do I have a lot more to go here if that’s what they’re thinking
it’s about an individual drinking out of a styrofoam and so and everybody
plays men what I’ve talked about earlier you wanted every agency and city
government to be involved in sustainability and so over a period of seven
years you know I always we had no authority we couldn’t order any
department to do anything we had almost no money we had very little money and we
had to work by persuasion by persuading everyone to to work in this area and I
think we didn’t build it into their culture and then in my final year kind of
all the fruits came about you mentioned being certified for lead and you
mentioned being on the a list of top performing cities worldwide in climate and I
was proud that in 2020 we set a very early 2013 we set a very ambitious
greenhouse gas reduction goal for our community to get our missions down
to where they were in 1980 in total not per capita in total by 2020 and we
actually met that goal two years out of schedule we met that goal in 2018 and
almost no other cities were able to do that and that was not me that was the
product of getting everyone on board focusing on scale getting all the agencies
involved to the point where just after I left you know our city council said we
need to be doing a lot more of this we need a lot more money and a much bigger
staff and so they put an issue on the ballot in 2020 that few which
devorites will will tax on their electricity bills which would fund a new
office called the Office of Climate Action Sustainability and Resilience and
that passed overwhelmingly and we went from my office which was funded at
$400,000 a year and had three people to the current Office of Climate Action
Sustainability and Resilience which has over 40 million dollars a year and a
staff of dozens of people so you know I’m pretty pleased with what I did over
seven years seven years is a long time to stay in in a position in city
government and I’m very very grateful that I was able to have this one
opportunity to work in government and also grateful that I’m able to work with
other cities and local governments around the country now because they’re all
different and I’m someone who tries on difference I’m not the kind of person
who can do the same thing every day I want to do something different every day
and that’s what my current company allows me to do but so impressive congrats
and my gosh from 400,000 to 40 million if I’m getting my math correct this is
two orders of magnitude a hundredfold increase what does that mean and just
thinking about numbers for a quick moment in budgets at a municipal level what
does that mean in terms of you know is this now a hundred times greater cost
center or is that 40 million more like an investment in avoiding a whole
bunch of other costs or potential costs when they structured the ballot
initiative they were very careful to indicate that a lot of that money was
supposed to go out into the community was not supposed to fund firing a lot of
new staff and so it was almost structured at least in part as a sort of a
foundation like a newfound new private foundation and so a lot of what the
office does has been to make grants to other entities to do work to do
research to start their own programs to do their own training and so forth but
they also have operational work I mean there’s still you know monitoring
vendors greenhouse gas emissions they have to be updating plans have to come up
with new programs and of course Denver has up two weeks ago when we were
recording this as a new mayor and he’s going to appoint a new head of that
office in fact when I left and they created that office they got rid of the
term chief sustainability officer they called it the executive director of
that office the new mayor is bringing back the term chief sustainability
officer and and that person’s gonna have a lot of money to play with and a lot
of staff to work with I would say it may not be the largest climate and
sustainability fund of any city in the United States because it’s under cities
that are much larger than Denver but I’d be willing to bet on a per capita
per resident basis it’s the best funded climate sustainability program of any
city in the country well yeah it’s really quite interesting in it actually I
would consider it a positive thing to bring back the chief sustainability
officer title to term because one of the the trends and patterns we’re seeing
worldwide is not only among more and more municipal governments but also in
the private sector including with the world’s largest corporations a position
of chief sustainability officer in many of these organizations and institutions
and more and more connectivity it seems among many CSOs out there in order to
you know share information and best practices or equivalent ideas what
I have you and I’m curious and I want to ask a two-part question the first part
is what’s your view on this this global phenomenon and potential for
connectivity and collaboration among CSOs in particular as a certain node
within these organizational ecosystems and secondly tying back to your
earlier comment about your first steps in your professional career what would
you advise to folks these days obviously the world’s a little different who
want to do work in the sustainability regenerative stewardship arenas
regarding any particular courses of study or third-party certifications and
education programs that they might choose to go through experience out to their
resumes etc so it may seem like a bit of a broad question here with these two
parts but in my mind at least it’s got all interconnected let me start the
the second question first about people who are looking to go into this as a
career if you are you’re in luck because sustainability has spread out so far
remember I said earlier I had to wait 10 years to get a job because there were
hardly any that’s not true anymore sustainability is everywhere throughout the
private sector the public sector and so forth and my recommendation which may
make some people unhappy is I don’t actually believe in getting degrees in
sustainability and getting a master’s degree in sustainability or a
certificate in sustainability or anything like that I believe it’s about your
skills it’s about your analytical skills your ability to use statistics your
ability to research new areas and learn new things your ability for example if
you can’t do geographic information system GIS work at least you know how to
talk to someone who can it’s about your skill with computer graphics design
communications things like that mean the substance of sustainability is
relatively easy this those certificates in the degrees as an employer someone
who used to hire in this area never really met much to me you know I want to
know what you can do do you understand science do you understand engineering
and you work with numbers can you work with computer programs can you create
engaging presentations to the public can you win people over those are the
skills that I would look at and there’s so many different professions out there
where you can do that you know some of the people I know who’ve been very
successful in this field have started out in entirely different fields and so
that would that would be my advice don’t look for a degree with that name or a
program of that name focus on whatever skills you can develop and whatever
tangible things you can produce to show other people like this proves that I
know how to do it look at this thing that I produce that’s what you need to be
focusing on I will say I’m not maybe not as fly on this chief sustainability officer
position or title as you are it’s often misused in a lot of places it’s still
mainly a marketing device there’s a lot of green washing still out there a
lot of green washing and there are people are making fun of maybe for the
gym ESG environment social governments which a lot of companies are doing
it’s almost become like a joke now because so much of ESG is just
posturing presenting reports at no one reads or that only a bot somewhere reads
you know the joke I heard recently was that the company and their ESG
support at rigor they said well we really didn’t cut back our pollution but we
are using better pronouns now yeah unfortunately there’s a lot of it and
it’s become very politicized so let’s just say just because you have or hear
that someone has a chief sustainability officer doesn’t mean things are
automatically going to be great you need to dig below the surface and ask some
tough questions to find out what’s really going on yeah I love I love the
relevance and the salience of your insights and feedback here on on both parts of
the question Jerry and it’s all very well taken and I actually on that first
question about career paths and so on I ended up writing something very
similar in my book why on earth actually and so I love hearing that sort of
corroborated or reinforced and what I’m also hearing is we’ve got a lot of
work to do and regardless of our particular position professionally also as
citizens engaged in civic processes and as consumers engaged in market
dynamics and purchasing decisions there’s a whole lot we can be doing at
least that’s my view on things and I’m really curious Jerry if if if somebody
could hand you a magic wand and you were able to prescribe for us over the next
three five ten twenty twenty five years the the directionality the trends that
changes that you’d hope to see so that we’re moving rapidly from green
washing to real action and in real fundamental systems change how would you
what would you do with that magic wand how would you do that how would you go
about that well the first thing I would do is use it to put a meaningful price
on carbon so much would flow from putting a meaningful price on carbon and
that’s the one thing we never seem to get around to doing at the national
international level and so forth every program that we work within the
sustainability and climate for the most part would work better if there were a
meaningful price on carbon but or to put it another way to try to do climate
action work without a price on carbon is like going into a battle with one arm
tied behind your back and the other arm in the sling you know I mean give me
that magic wand that is the first thing I would do because it would really
affect everything else it would it would unleash the the private sector to be
innovative and so forth we would actually need a lot less regulation because
for example if we actually had a meaningful price on carbon we might not need to
have federal regulation of fuel efficiency we not may not have to say your
cars have to get this amount of miles per gallon or whatever the market would
do that for us particularly if if we use a revenue neutral carbon fee and
dividend Washington state is experimenting with something like that they now
have a carbon market up there and Rocky Mountain Institute recently did an
analysis of 20 large state climate programs in terms of who was on track and
who wasn’t on track and you know who was the furthest ahead Washington state
and I don’t think that’s I don’t think that’s a coincidence so that’s the one
thing I would do with my magic wand but if I could do one other thing like big
picture I would turn us all into chiefs hates again what I talked about
earlier about I got into this because I’m basically cheap I’m a cheap bastard I
would get in people into saving stuff and saving energy this would be you know
the core culture it would be it would not be people would not be teased for
saving stuff for saving aluminum or whatever they they would be a scene for
that they would be a scene for going with a a lower cost healthier diet those
type of things you know being less focused on accumulating wealth and more
focus on accumulating personal status not even satisfaction I guess personal
development to your full extent so many good things will flow from that so
that’s my second use of the magic wand I absolutely love this and I created a
phrase that I’ve hung near my office for years frugal abundance and yes there’s
this this this great secret that I think more and more people are tuning into
that as we simplify our lives and and shrink our footprints of impacting
consumption by and large we experience higher quality of life and certainly
there’s many many many millions of our brothers and sisters around the world
who don’t have the the basics met and this is a conversation that I think
deserves acknowledging the reality worldwide end right here in our country right
here Colorado right in the city in County of Denver and so for a lot of us
however there’s there’s such an over abundance of material goods financial
wealth and so forth that strangely enough it seems to contribute to a lower
quality of life often when we’re not engaged in this kind of way of of being
frugal which again makes me think of grandparents and I absolutely love your
wisdom there so that’s my magic wand yeah so it’s so great Jerry and I got
to ask a carbon question so you know for 20 25 years we we were looking at
assumed carbon market pricing of around five maybe ten dollars a ton and
low and behold in the last 18 months we’ve seen in the markets worldwide
demand for carbon from big buyers cash buyers pricing 50 a hundred dollars a
ton more than a hundred dollars a ton for high quality carbon coming out of
things like biochar and certain measurable verifiable regenerative agricultural
practices and and and a few technological sources as well though that’s not
really online from what I understand by and large relatives who would it might
be down the road so we’re getting it we’re starting to see a lot of very real
pricing signals just in the last four six quarters it’s it’s real like some of
my friends and colleagues in the finance world are are sort of lit up around
this what what do you think about that well you’re right Washington state and
their most recent auction of carbon allowances the price came out around
fifty dollars per ton and that’s important because if you have to pay fifty
dollars per ton to release or use that carbon maybe you’re gonna figure out a
way to not release it not use it if it goes to a hundred dollars a ton you’re
gonna find it in more ways to do it that’s why keep saying if we could put a
price you know not just in Washington state in certain parts of their
economy but globally worldwide and then let the market respond I think it would
be great it’s but it really does that I mean a smallest unit that can do
carbon pricing is a large state by which I mean physically large like
Washington or Colorado someplace in Delaware Rhode Island probably wouldn’t
work because it’s too easy to just go across the border from you know
Wilmington Delaware to buy something in a place where they don’t have the
price on carbon so it really has to be a big state or region or a nation or
ideally the world I don’t know whether we’re gonna get there in time or not but I
am glad to see that as you’ve noted that we’re moving in that direction and
hopefully and I think really to have it happen at a state or national level it’s
gonna have to be paired with relaxation of other regulations let’s get away
from commanding control telling people exactly how to do things let’s put a
price on stuff and see if we can get things cut back that way because people
are very innovative people are entrepreneurial they’re very creative in terms
of solving these problems and once you start to put the price tags on them a
lot of great things can happen yeah absolutely I love that I love that vision and
that recommended approach and this has planted a seed for me Jerry that
perhaps down the road a little ways we could have another podcast session
perhaps with another guest and you talking about the carbon piece in
particular because I think this is such an important topic right now perhaps
we invite somebody in from the the financial sector specifically that could be
a lot of fun but I recognize that we’re getting toward the end of our time
here for the podcast interview and and want to make sure we have some time for
our behind-the-scenes segment for our ambassador network and once again folks
if if you’d like to join our ambassador network and haven’t yet you can just go
to yunters.org and go to the page called become an ambassador and get your
journey started that way and then you’ll have access to our behind-the-scenes
segments as well as a whole bunch hours of footage of different conferences
and symposia and our recorded sessions from our monthly online
regeneration Renaissance Roundtable meetups for Sunday of each month we get
together 11.33 a.m. Colorado time for those and Jerry I’m just so thrilled we
could have this time together and I wanted to ask you one final question from a
certain perspective we could say that the world is really quite far behind where
we could be or or somebody even say where we ought to be relative to so many of
these systemic risks that we’re facing that are impacting the lives of people
around the world now why do you think we’re so far behind and what do you think
we we can do about it I think the problem with climate change is it’s very
complex the chain of things that lead up to it and the chain of things that
lead back to it is very complicated you know by comparison that problem the
hole in the ozone layer remember that yeah that’s gonna be a hole in the
ozone layer so we’ve largely solved that because that was a much less
complex problem and it was also kind of an equal opportunity from everyone was
going to get tried you know it’s not like if you had more money you were going
to be able to avoid it but climate change is very very complicated and there’s
also feeling you know there’s I don’t know the old joke about you know two
guys are out in the woods and a bear starts chasing them running away and the
first guy says gosh I hope we can outrun the bear and the second guy says why
don’t have to outrun the bear I just have to outrun you yeah I think all that
joke has a lawyer joke as a matter of fact well yeah there’s lots of lawyers
jokes but the point is I think there’s a lot of folks out there very powerful
folks who say I don’t think this is going to lead to the extinction of
humanity or whatever it’s going to hurt a lot of people just not me and mine
because I don’t have to outrun the bear I just have to outrun those other
people and I think that’s why it’s such a challenge to deal with and if we’re
going to deal with it I think the key is going to be that for everything we
want to scale people on that needs to happen we need to come up with some
completely independent reason to do it that has nothing to do with climate
change we I and I’ve had these conversations and we need to be able to say I
don’t care whether you believe it or not I don’t care what you think the
climate is all this changing until fortune so on let’s do this because it’s
going to save you money you may not be interested in the climate but you are
interested in money you’re interested in your own lifestyle this is going to
let you live longer this is going to let you be happier this is going to you
know make your neighborhood better whatever I think that’s the key if we’re
going to beat it that’s the way we’re going to be there yeah so brilliant
Jerry and and thank you so much for sharing your time with us and your
wisdom your insights and thanks of course for all of the the work that you’re
doing for our world and before we wrap up the podcast I just I want to be
sure to give you the floor for anything else you’d like to say to our audience
calls to action whatever it might be yeah thank you my friend the the floor is
yours yeah my final message would be to everyone pay attention don’t
automatically accept the conventional wisdom ask questions ask questions of
businesses ask questions of public officials and most important vote because
and I’m a registered in Colorado we’re called unaffiliated I’ve been a
registered independent for 20 years I got the Democratic Party 20 years ago so I
don’t belong to any particular party but I will say the one thing I’m certain of
is in 2024 if the president that we elect as a Republican it’s basically
not came over for climate change this really is the end of the game we’re we’re
not going to be able to have national leadership in the United States with
the Republican president and that makes me sad because earlier in my career I
worked with a lot of Republicans who were very progressive in this area things
have really really changed during my lifetime but now unfortunately that
party is so anti doing anything about climate change so if the United if
they’re in the United States won’t lead and if the United States won’t lead it’s
not going to happen so above all else stay informed and vote next year
words of wisdom thank you Jerry thank you so much for joining us on the show and
sharing your insights with us okay my pleasure looking forward to the off the
record part of the program when we tell all your ambassadors what’s really
going on in the Denver airport the YonEarth community stewardship and
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