UNSEEN GREEN

Remember Cool Hand Luke? Lucas Jackson (Paul Newman) liked to do things his own way and wound up in a hellish Southern prison camp on the wrong side of a sadistic warden (Strother Martin) who sarcastically told him, ?What we have here is a failure to communicate.? In an odd way, that famous line predicted the strange irony of a movie full of foresight about the Green Revolution. That’s right . . . think about it.

Woven tightly into that old story about breaking out of a prison camp long ago are all sorts of symbols of the modern environmental movement we consider meaningful today:

– The chain gang being forced to walk and manually clear weeds off dusty roads symbolizes a day when no exhausts or fumes are emitted by lawnmowers or other outdoor machinery, when there is no use of dangerous pesticides or poisons, and when people habitually workout to stay physically fit (except the George Kennedys among us).

– The luscious blond lathering up her car as the inmates watch, plus the group shower scene of the prisoners, equals the need for water conservation, the efficient use of our natural resources.

– Luke being forced to dig a hole and refill it over and over until he collapses speaks to the waste of natural resources in one sense, the replenishing and renewal of those same resources in another, the size of the carbon footprint in still another.

– The warden’s ?failure to communicate? explains why the Green Revolution ironically appears to be the most popular mass movement of radical change to never sweep the world.

That irony is real: our televisions, radios and computers all broadcast a planet rapidly ?going green,? but take a drive through your community and count the number of solar panels or wind turbines actually being used.

Where is the disconnect?

Why aren’t solar panels being architecturally planned into every large building with a southerly exposure? Why isn?t solar hot water designed into every hotel, hospital, health clinic and health club, or engineered into the HVAC for heating commercial buildings? Why isn’t solar hot air used in the façade and elevations to heat commercial buildings? Why do cities plan and lay out their zoning and development plans without considering solar exposure?

Cool Hand Luke has the answer: renewable energy has failed to communicate on several levels.

Richard Carter of Green Energy Café.com is even more specific, declaring that the biggest communication problem with the Green Revolution is Green Education. ?When it comes to being able to design, certify, and produce a solar or wind system on a commercial scale, to be integrated into the functions of our architecture and civil engineering, for all practical purposes we don?t have any degree programs delivering the needed curriculum to our architects, mechanical and electrical engineers, civil engineers, or city planners,? he says.

?Green technology isn?t new, but our need for alternative and renewable energies has now evolved and risen in importance to where we can?t avoid or neglect developing curricula any longer,” adds Carter. “We have to develop those courses, accredit them and get them on line, and we need to do it yesterday.?

How do we do this? “In short, we must look for those with experience and put them to work along with existing academics,? he responds. ?We have a pool of installers, a few of which can be considered the ‘Old-Pros’ of the emerging Green industry. They have the hands-on experience, but most times without any formal engineering education. However, when it comes to the challenges we should be taking on by now, no one knows whether their experience will scale into the architectural and mechanical and electrical engineering necessary.

“What they know has worked great for residential and smaller commercial projects in solar and wind,? Carter continues. ?It can be expanded and extrapolated with the help of professional engineers and architects. We also have few licensed engineers and architects who actually have any solar experience. You can see where joining these pools of information and knowledge just don?t quite come together to reach the point of ignition. To move forward and meet the new, larger challenges of commercial property energy applications, we need education bi-directionally, to and from each occupational specialty.?

Green Education is a very big, very complex curriculum, something new that must be designed and created by getting all of the participating minds to come together and be flexible enough to learn complimentary knowledge from one another. This involves the academics, the current industry professionals and those preparing to enter these new technologies now and tomorrow.

“We cannot leave this educational challenge to our current system of adjunct instructors and professors, a practice that many academic institutions adopted over the last decade to save costs,? warns Carter. “Adjuncts, though knowledgeable, can only speak to their own limited experience. They may be very knowledgeable in site assessment, or solar installation, or even solar thermal system design, but if they don?t have the broader overview of the industry and where it is going, as well as the broader curriculum needed, the academic effort is doomed to fail miserably.”

Without that, Carter predicts that any new system will fail to meet the needs of employers, fail to meet the industry standards, and most importantly, fail the students overall in their effort to competitively meet the requirements of the employment marketplace.

What a great opportunity to use the education funding in the stimulus package to bring all of this together and make it happen!

Universities, technical and community colleges, grad schools, trade schools, and union training centers all have an active part to play in this new technology challenge. Each of these addresses specific needs and skills that are necessary in the emerging Green industry.

Frankly, these institutions need to demonstrate their commitment to the furtherance of Green technologies anyway. Their appropriate departments should have solar and/or wind systems, or even biomass or hydro or geothermal systems designed and installed. All of this must become part of the Green curricula and serve as another classroom ? whether inside or outdoors.

Let?s be perfectly clear. Green Education is an enormous challenge, but targeting the education stimulus in this area will go a long way into making it the Curriculum of Tomorrow. Without it, what we may have here is just another failure to communicate.