State's environmental leaders gather to help move state toward sustainable future

Janel Shoun | 

Almost 200 people from throughout the state registered to attend the Summit for a Sustainable Tennessee, a conference held by the Tennessee Environmental Council and the Tennessee Conservation Voters on the Lipscomb campus this weekend.

State environmental officials, a state senator, Nashville’s mayor, Sierra Club officers and Lipscomb own President L. Randolph Lowry spoke to the environmentalists over the course of three days.

“Our generation has been a generation of great talkers. But this gathering is more than a ‘conference,’ it is a working meeting,” said Paul Sloan, Deputy Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, at a welcoming lunch on Friday.

Nashville Mayor Karl Dean welcomed the environmental movers and shakers.
“I hope that 12 months from now when we have something concrete on the ground, we can look back and say it started here at Lipscomb,” he urged the crowd.

The attendees not only heard from high-level state officials, but attended a slate of workshops to discuss quality growth, sustainable design and development, healthy communities, natural infrastructure and sustainable energy.

The summit is one of the first events Lipscomb’s Institute for Sustainable Practice has been involved in since its creation this summer. Institute executive director G. Dodd Galbreath spoke to those assembled on Friday.

Sloan praised Lipscomb for the strides it has taken over the past year, especially the creation of the Institute, which will offer the state’s first bachelor’s major and first master’s concentration in sustainability beginning in 2008, will host or coordinate five local and statewide conferences in the coming year, and will coordinate the first statewide conference on sustainability in business and Nashville's first comprehensive “green” products and services trade show, both in April 2008.

“In the South, we have an opportunity for a new day,” Galbreath told the crowd on Friday, after outlining various corporate and public sustainable projects now in use, such as green roofs, porous sidewalks and streets and native landscaping.

“This job is easier than we think it is,” he said, quoting a minister friend of his. “Every tree is meant to bear fruit with seed.” Likewise, every seed planted in the heart of one person can grow into a tree of passion for environmental conservation, he said. The conference was a showcase for various “green” office products – such a three-ring binders, name-tag sleeves, pencils and pens – and locally grown organic food, from farmers in Nashville, Columbia, College Grove, Ridgetop, Waynesboro and Portland.