the Mark Pike

“What happened here?”

The question lingered in the air as our rental car sped along Route 54 in Kansas, somewhere between Wichita and Dodge City. We had no idea exactly where we were, or what had happened until we saw a sign.

GREENSBURG, KS
Rebuilding…
STRONGER, BETTER, GREENER
Home of the “BIG WELL”

That’s when I remembered the Tornado—and everything that came after it.

(Thanks to Chris Cheatham’s consistent coverage of Greensburg on Green Building Law Update)

On May 4, 2007, Greensburg was hit by an EF5 tornado, which destroyed 95% of the city and left the other 5% severely damaged (see e.g., Mike Theiss’ photos, and Jon Person’s photos). Only one building was left standing on Main Street (it’s now an antique store).

But the city decided to rebuild; and, it decided to rebuild “green.” In the words of then-Governor Kathleen Sebelius, “We have an opportunity of having the greenest town in rural America.”

Greensburg had to decide what policies to enact in order to achieve such a green goal. Just 12 weeks after the tornado flattened the town, the City Council presented a thorough long-term plan (.pdf, amazing that they made this so quickly and so well). The Public Square Steering Committee stated it’s vision statement therein:

“Blessed with a unique opportunity to create a strong community devoted to family, fostering businesses, working together for future growth.”

On December 17, 2007, Greensburg made history (.pdf) by being the first place in the country to require all city-owned buildings larger than 4,000 square feet to become certified LEED® Platinum by the U.S. Green Building Council and requiring all city-owned buildings to reduce energy use by 42% over current building requirements.

As a passerby on a road trip, it was inspiring to look out the car windows and see such an incredible story of rebirth in America’s Heartland.

Check out the full photo set from our drive.

In under 24 hours, I recently designed and built a web presence for a symposium on green building law. The entire process was one of the most exciting experiences I have had in law school

As the Technical Editor of William & Mary’s Environmental Law & Policy Review, my main job description is to maintain the journal’s online resources. The journal publishes several volumes a year, and each article’s citations and sources must be checked by our staff and uploaded to a shared server.

Prior to this year, the journal did not have much of a public face on the Internet. We are mentioned on William & Mary’s website, but the administration controls that space. This makes it very difficult to promote our scholarship and comment on how our work is applicable to contemporary environmental policy issues. Without an online publishing interface, we were locked out of the discussion; constantly playing catch-up with an archaic printing press process.

Now, with our newly designed website we were able to host a symposium that instantly put us in the mix. The summaries of the panels we hosted this past weekend have been getting views from all over the globe. Our old journal articles are getting a second-wind. We are influencing the policy discussion.

And, I learned a ton about Web 2.0 during the process. In an effort to give symposium attendees the chance to broadcast their commentary onto the site, we not only had comments enabled, but also embedded a box that featured a stream of live Twitter messages.

I had no idea how powerful Twitter was before the symposium. I’ve long been a fan of Facebook’s status messages and assumed Twitter was just another overlapping service. It’s not. By utilizing a “hashtag”, Twitter users at the symposium could essentially create an impromptu digital huddle and share their reactions with fellow-attendees, as well as folks thousands of miles away. This is something Facebook fails at because of its reliance on the friend-based social network instead of an interest-based network. Eventually, I see the two services merging and Web 2.0’s collective knowledge offerings will be even more powerful. Very exciting.

After an intellectually stimulating weekend, the journal has a permanent online home; and, I madesome new friends in the field of green building law!