A Blueprint for the Green Amendment in Texas
Less than a mile from where we started Green Gate Farms in East Austin, the groundwork had been lain — literally — for the nation’s green building movement. On the wooded campus of the Center for Maximum Building Potential Systems, a two-story green demonstration building, radical for its time in1992, was showing Austin a more sustainable way of designing and manufacturing our homes and offices.
In addressing the need for more energy efficient, environmentally friendly building practices, our friends and mentors at the CMPBS were reaping the scientific insights and gains of the environmental movement in the 60s and 70s. For the past 50 years they have been applying them, often brilliantly, to what might be thought of as a green blueprint for reducing the carbon footprint of the built environment. Improving energy efficiency, using local materials, cutting product emissions and waste, planting native landscapes — these were the climate-friendly solutions they studied and promoted long before the science of climate change upended our assumptions about what constitutes smart growth. Today, the U.S. Green Building Council has inspired more than 30% of the nation’s office buildings to meet its green building standards.
This Saturday evening, 30 years since the council’s founding, the founder of the green amendment movement, Maya van Rossum, will be our guest speaker as we celebrate the 120th birthday of old Bergstrom farmstead. Recent successes and momentum in her efforts to win constitutional protections for the environment offer inspiration — and hope — at a time when the perils and challenges of the climate crisis feel overwhelming.
Like the founders of CMPBS, van Rossum is riding on the shoulders of earlier visionaries and activists. She has seen more clearly than most how environmental legal challenges in this country increasingly hit the walls of a regulatory framework designed to protect and maintain business as usual. She is shouting to the rooftops what most of only dare to mutter in private: undoing the wrongs of environmental justice and preventing further degradation of earth’s life support system won’t scale up fast enough without protecting our rights to a clean healthy environment at the constitutional level.
During my pre-farming journalism career, I witnessed how outspoken visionaries and the media attention they captured could sway public opinion, change policy, and win lawsuits. This summer we saw this tipping point in action when a dozen youths, protected by Montana’s long-established yet untested green amendment, won their first round in a lawsuit against the state for not protecting them from the damages of climate change.
This win, unfortunately, is an exception to the rule.. It is, indeed, unprecedented. I didn’t appreciate how unfairly the rules are written until coming up against them personally when confronting the explosion of unplanned industrial manufacturing, tunneling, and mining along our river bend in Bastrop County. Our failures have far outnumber our successes in forcing developers to follow the few rules we have or in seeking more public input before such large-scale, disruptive land deals are finalized. What van Rossum concluded from more than three decades as Delaware Riverkeeper was that the deck is so stacked in favor of corporate and special interests that most people choose to sit it out and accept defeat. Those who don’t often assume their states provide protective rights to a healthy environment when, in fact, with the exception of Montana , Pennsylvania, and now New York, they don’t — at least not to the extent we are led to believe.
Green Gate’s good fortune was the founders of CMPBS were looking for organic farmers when we arrived from Atlanta in 2005. The one acre of good ground they offered us to launch our CSA was surrounded by a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang atmosphere of map-cap innovation in appropriate technology, permaculture, and smart growth — new tools and lenses for guiding decision-making. Lunch was served in the Green Demonstration Building, whose stove, frig, and yes, even the kitchen sink, could be rolled out the door to create a makeshift meeting room. Interns in eco-dynamic architecture from around the world spiced our discussions as we feasted on food harvested from our fields and prepared by the resident potter and cook.
It was that initial grounding in what co-founders Pliny Fisk and Gail Vittori often refer to as “serious commotion” that we took with us when Green Gate established its business and mission at the Bergstrom farmstead just up the road. The drafty 1902 farmhouse we would lease for the next 15 years was far from green. The cedar shakes still visible under the tin roof of the big red mule barn were as local as you can get, if only because cedar trees were cleared en masse to make way for cotton, cattle, and corn.
When writing the Bill of Rights, our founding fathers never imagined the scale and speed at which industry, invention, and innovation would literally change the face of the earth. In safeguarding our right to private property that Texans hold most dear, it was inconceivable then that the nation’s vast resources and abundant wildlife would one day be depleted. Even in our short time here, we never foresaw the unmaking of the bucolic landscapes we took for granted.
Those pressures, ironically, are what led us to be more open and creative to change. To push back where we could, adapt where we couldn’t. This was the long yet rewarding path that lead to the making of Village Farm, the first of its kind agrihood, with more than 150 tiny homes surround the farmstead. On another Swedish farm site up the street, Community First has demonstrated how the sweet spot of private and public collaboration can create a model for addressing our continued failings in homelessness. A mile south, in what were the abandoned offices of the old Austin State School Farm Colony, Austin Discovery School is approaching its 20th year offering students a nature-based curriculum where growing food and exploring the nearby river ecology are seen as essential as the three Rs.
These changes to the status quo were not radical, outlandish, anti-growth measures. And neither is the green amendment movement. Like the green building movement, it is a stepping back before we continue moving blindly forward with the same pace and mindset— to reassess our assumptions, address our excesses, seek a more harmonious balance with the rest of nature.
The gate at Green Gate Farm has always been open to new possibilities while honoring our the past. It is this spirit of innovation, adaptation, compromise — and hope — that we celebrate Austin’s rich farming history while we all work toward a more sustainable future.
