On Wednesday, I mentioned my appearance on energyNOW!, during which I talked about links between extreme weather events and climate change, this year's intense tornado outbreaks, and what lessons tornado-ravaged towns could learn from Greensburg, Kansas.
My biggest regret in the interview was not spending enough time talking about what Greensburg actually did. Because it's really an incredible story, and possibly an instructive one.
In case you haven't heard the story, back in 2007, Greensburg was leveled by a massive mile-and-a-half-wide EF5 tornado. The devastation was so severe that residents of Greensburg, home of the world's largest hand-dug well and the Kansas Meteorite Museum, thought that the town may have been dealt a death blow.
But instead of folding, some saw a fresh start. In the flattened buildings and smashed infrastructure, some saw a blank canvas, or the opportunity to create a better, more prosperous and, yes, greener town.
A handful of local visionaries believed that the only way to resurrect the town -- and to make it thrive -- would be to rebuild green. Three years later, energyNOW! reporter Lee Patrick Sullivan visited the city, and found it to be thriving as a "living laboratory of green living."
As I mentioned in my interview, I'm not so certain that Greensburg's success is easily replicable. I don't know that bigger cities like Joplin, Missouri or Tuscaloosa, Alabama can look to tiny Greensburg (which had a population of around 1,500 when the tornado struck) as a model for their rebuilding plans. For Greensburg, their "green recovery" efforts were also a new, novel idea at the time. A pretty unique story that, when combined with the town's fortunate name, the media couldn't get enough of. Dozens, if not hundreds, of articles, blog posts, and network news reports (there was even a two-season reality show for the Discovery Channel), helped reel in a bounty of charitable donations, from cash to wind turbines to solar panels to geothermal heat pumps.
The city smartly played up this "greening Greenburg" rebuilding process to the media, and there's no doubt it help the city bounce back faster than it would have otherwise. I'm not so sure that the second time a tornado-ravaged (or flood-soaked, or Hurricane-swept) city or town decides to "rebuild green" that it'll be such a big story, nor that it would find such generous donors. That said, I'd love to see what a green recovery would look like without the donations. We're often told that green investments pay for themselves in just a few short years. Greensburg's is an uplifting story, and their revitalization carries some lessons. But if an even bigger city like Joplin committed to rebuilding in the greenest way possible, using the most innovative and ambitious sustainable building and planning practices -- and did so without as much fanfare -- that would prove to be a real and valuable model for cities and towns all across the country.
