hello my name's lorraine cook i'm with a local organization called southern oregon patch mom alliance and you hear a little bit more about that at the end of the program but what we do is offer educational and inspirational programs here in the valley and one of our programs is called draw down which has to do with how do we make use of very practical solutions to deal with climate change tonight so happy to be talking to our guest paul sheldon who has been working on a very innovative program clean green dream making use  of sure my father was a sociologist and so i've always had an interest in the relationship between prisons and people not in prison but in two thousand and nine hor sure in colorado so issued a dare to me he said that you're working on creating green jobs through wal mart that's great you think wal mart might be the answer i don't but he said i'll tell you a group of people that are never going to get green jobs and that people who've been in prison or in jail and he said if you really believe in green jobs and you think they're the answer you'll make green job training available to people in prisons and i took that on as a dare and  that's what i've been doing last ten years is working on creating jobs and job training and orientation towards what are green practices what's a green economy so that a type of incarceration can be an opportunity to learn a more sustainable way of life well you know a friend of mine heard your presentation recently and she was so intrigued by it and so excited by it i really am looking forward to hearing what you have to say so all right i had to tell you about it so we're going to talk about what i call the clean green dream the greening of america's prisons and this really started out with a referral to the american correctional association the american correctional association has many different facets but one of the primary things they do is a credit prisons and jails to receive public funds and to be certified by the american correctional association as well run prisons and so people invited me to write charter for a committee for the american correctional association to evaluate the cost effectiveness and the feasibility of implementing green practices in prisons and it started out with this question what is green what is it environmental ism is it energy is it water is it recycling is it gardens what were all these different things that we call green practices and and so that's what we're going to be talking about on this and what i'd like to do is share some examples of green prisons and i'd like to begin by talking about my older sister hunter love and and if we could display the st slide here  this is a picture of hunter love and working from her favorite office she's calculating carbon offsets and if you can come back to me also copy of hunter's new book a finer future which is really ok i read that book and so they ordered this today well i'm glad you did it's a wonderful read it's one of the best documented books i've ever seen there are eighty five pages of footnotes well book and she really looks at every facet of what does it take to get from where we are today to a sustainable way of life planet wide and and so hunter has really been my inspiration over the years and hundreds says the science of climate change is uncertain now seriously the science doesn't really matter let's assume the climate skeptics are right it's all a hoax as i said don't go to the casino on those odds but if all you care about is maximizing  compliance or maximizing your budget or increasing your profits you pretty much do exactly the same thing that you would do if you're scared to death about climate and this is my buddy idea who is the jailer kochi oklahoma and i'm old enough to remember that folks in most kochi oklahoma don't take their trips on l s d and they don't do a lot of other things but in most kochi oklahoma father in law who was on a fixed income began using those curiously q light bulbs that are supposed to save energy and sure enough he saved fifty dollars a month on his energy bill and he was on a fixed income and so she said well gee if you can do that maybe we can do that at the jail and so she started putting in those curly q light bulbs at the jail and then she got to learning more and more about green practices so that inspired me that if they can do it in musk ok oklahoma perhaps they can do it nationwide and so i wrote this standard for the american correctional association which thanks to some very visionary former presidents of the american correctional association was adopted within a year and we invited prisons and jails to look at the ability to demonstrate within an audit cycle because the american correctional association audits prisons ok and they come in and they they check whether our facility has demonstrated that we're appropriated feasible they've implemented strategies that promote recycling energy and water conservation pollution reduction utilization of renewable energy alternatives and we gave them some comments about it you know we really wanted it to be an strong and growing contingent of women in leadership in corrections in america but a lot of these people said well i don't really care about all that stuff i just want to say money yeah that's fine or i want to increase security or i want my prison to be safe i want the public to be safe and it turns out that all of these things are safe and they increase safety they save money and they increase the security in the institution we'll talk about that as we go along so with the a c a standard we gave them guidance that implementing these practices includes recycling and that would be recycling of paper and metal and plastic products also energy conservation building insulation heating and ventilation temperature controls vehicle  efficiency lot of different aspects pollution reduction utilization of renewable energy features and once that that standard for the auditor's was adopted the leadership at the american correctional association said also is going pretty well we're saving a lot of money we want a policy that's a value statement that says the american correctional association is behind this notion of environmentally responsible and sustainability oriented practices so we wrote a value statement that specifically says the american correctional association fully supports appropriate short and long term cost effective facilities management strategies that implement these green practices so what we're going to do in the next little while here is we're going to talk about some examples i wrote a checklist which is probably very difficult to view on the screen but it summarizes the standard that we wrote in all the different facets and one page and then back in two thousand and twelve with jean atherton and some other people from the american correctional association i wrote a book for the national it's to the justice called the greening corrections technology guidebook and that was really to help people wrap their arms around what is the sustainability stuff about the same time the national institute of corrections also wrote a book the greening of corrections that focuses largely on buildings and building management job training and how do we take people who are incarcerated give them an opportunity to learn building management and building upgrade skills so that when they get out they can get green jobs and what we decided very early on was that people matter this matter how good the technology is if the people managing it don't know what they're doing it's not going to work and so in ohio a woman from berkeley name implemented a program called roots of success which is offered in prisons throughout ohio now and in several other states they've had more than ten thousand dollars inmates go through the roots of success and it's a job readiness and environmental literacy training program the teachers people while they're incarcerated what is a green economy and what do you need to know to fit into a green economy when you get out to get a green job to get a good job that's a good paying job so this is a friend of mine at the boulder county jail and she's looking down at breakfast in the boulder county jail they take all of the food waste that they generate in the dining hall for the four hundred people who are incarcerated there and they put them in these big vats that commander haas had put out on a cement slab behind the jail and they had big electric arbors that turned the compost inside these bats and then they spread it out on a two acre field outside the jail and they grow all the vegetables that all four hundred people in the jail eat all summer wow for years they entered their vegetables in the county fair but they won so many blue ribbons that the county fair finally asked them to stop entering because they said  so we're going to do now is is just kind of go on a guided tour of green practices and prisons and we're going to cover a number of discussion topics we're going to look at integrating technology and people will talk about lighting h back which is heating ventilation and air conditioning and building maintenance we'll talk about plug in appliances motors pumps and then we'll also talk about materials flow which will probably be after our break we'll see how smoothly this runs and then we'll talk about water and energy and if we have time we'll talk about financing also because that's always a big question how do you pay for all the earth so i just want to clarify the work you began with was with the national commission that was working  federal presence is that it works with all persons the american correctional association is open to membership throughout the world actually there are people coming from all over the world to the semiannual conferences and they set standards for what is a responsible incarceration facility they work with prisons jails juvenile facilities community corrections probation parole it's a really broad based approach to bringing together as many people as they can who are involved in corrections and helping them learn how to do corrections in a way that really works and it's evolving over time that's over one hundred and forty years old and they're paying attention to what works and what doesn't work so today we're going to talk about integrating technology in people we're going to talk about lighting we're going to talk about heating ventilation and air conditioning as i mentioned plug in appliances materials toxics purchasing and  waste is dispose of and whether or not zero waste is possible we'll talk about water and energy and transportation and those are really the major focuses of how we define sustainability and it starts really with people really important that when an institution takes on how do we implement green practices how do we learn what they are those practices come from people and so bringing together as broad based a team of people as possible to share what they know and ask questions together really works and it's important to have people in authority at the top of the hierarchy present at the beginning so that there's a sense of leadership and commitment behind what people are doing so there are a number of examples of what happens when you pull people together that we're going to talk about evergreen corrections in british columbia has a very strong presence of what they call st nations and so in their visiting area they created a garden with spaces  for recreation and a sanctuary garden a labyrinth a space for children to play a spirit grounds that are adjacent to the visitor areas so that when visitors come it's not this stark cement and steel bars but it's evident that the actually people there who are in touch with the world san francisco was inspired by that and they did a garden program at san francisco jail which was a horticulture program that actually taught gardening and i particularly fond of that program because when i st heard about it they had a big banner up on the county jail and it said how do you get a thirty eight year old man to stop beating his wife and then in fine print underneath it it said talk to him when he's fourteen and that spoke to me of a community that really understands that incarceration is a long term phenomenon and there are cycles that take place over generations and if we want to break the cycle of incarceration we really need to think about life cycle and job skills and how to be a better person so inspired by the garden program the san francisco county jail cook county in illinois has their garden program and then in chino there was some private funding that paid became available through the strauss foundation and mountain dew reenergize community grant that allowed them to put a garden at the chino institute for women in california new york city at rikers island they have a wonderful program that they call doing time in the garden and there are some horticulturist there that teach people who are incarcerated wreckers island how to get in touch with the land how to get their fingers in the dirt another program that is particularly dear dear to me is the insight garden program in san quentin state prison this is started by bethwaite because who is depicted in this picture and brown and beth was disheartened by the september th attacks in two thousand and one and she needed to restore her faith in humanity and so what she did was she said let's put a garden on the prison yard and that's what she wanted to do it took three years to get permission and they put the st flower garden on saying quote the st garden inside a prison yard and then took them another ten years to get permission to do a vegetable garden wow and there are lots of issues that were involved of course the security people the custody people were concerned that incarcerated folks were going to bury weapons in the garden and it was going to be a dangerous place and yet what they found was that people don't mess up what they've built and so because the incarcerated people involved building the garden and planting the plants they really cared about it and the insight garden program hooked up with a group in oakland called planting justice where i sit on the board and planting justice hires graduates of the inside garden program at san quentin when they're released they pay them seven when they start and they provide health benefits and because they've been through the inside garden program they already know about the importance of what beth calls inner gardening growing a better self at the same time that you're growing vegetables and having something to contribute to the community it's nourishing and valuable in the same way that a community garden provides food people coming out of incarceration are leaders in their community people look to them to find out if they're different then have they learned what if they learn and can they share so the people at planting justice go out into the schools and they have former gang bangers and gang leaders and bank robbers and serious criminals who've done one hundred and two thousand and thirty years in prison and they come back out to teach young people not to do it the way they did it and how to do it better in prisons in ohio and missouri and nevada and in several other states we're developing a program called wisdom of dreaming that based on my book i brought a book two years ago called wisdom of dreaming and it is a guidebook that helps people to go up a more effective dreamlife and through this dream os a free program we call it it's a dream academy inmates are invited to spend the time that they're incarcerated to go inside their own dream life and dream up a worthwhile life and so we do that in several institutions now almost a one thousand people have been through it and where we just went to the north american association of wardens and superintendents and picked up about forty new institutions that are interested in implementing dream academies in their institutions so starting out with the people really matters and getting the people engaged and getting the people right and now once you've done that then what do you do now we've got people who are involved how do we get people engaged in a way that effective the easiest place to start is lighting l e d lighting has come of age it's now cost effective it provides excellent light in fact better light in many instances in a security situation in a dark room and the light will come on faster and penetrate more deeply into the darkness than an incandescent light will on the cost side if we were using incandescent light bulbs to produce light really what incandescent light bulbs do is they produce heat and they happen to produce a little bit of light and so using an incandescent light bulb to heat a two to produce light is like burning money to produce heat it just really doesn't work elegies are much better so many institutions are in substituting l e d s this is a grocery store in longmont colorado that if you look at the ceiling on this photograph looks like they have fluorescent light to put tubes in the ceiling actually those are the light strings and that's very cost effective now in places like  walk in freezer is in coolers and refrigerated components of all kinds putting l e d lights in is very cost effective because they don't heat up the cooled space so there are many examples now of lighting that are happening throughout the corrections community even up on one hundred foot tall pole lights they're getting l e d s that can work much more effectively next section we're in to talk about is heating ventilation and air conditioning in particular with regard to global warming that's a really important aspect because a lot of the fossil fuels that we burn go to heat buildings or to generate electricity to cool buildings and so those buildings that are inefficient once again are burning money and they're burning opportunity there's a court case going through the courts now filed by twenty one dollars youths suing the government for compromising their future by not effectively addressing climate change our children's trust and so that it's very important to look at heating ventilation and air conditioning you can do it the big way like bridgewater massachusetts did which is to look at compact complex wide energy management they invested about five million dollars in upgrading and putting in  high tech controls and they're going to save about twenty seven million dollars over the next ten to fifteen years for their investment or you can do little stuff this is a technology that's called air pair in the photograph is of the boulder county jail where you have a room that's twenty or thirty feet high it's two stories or three stories in a day room or a recreation room if you put these little air pairs in the ceiling they're like miniature jet engines and they blow a column of air down which takes the heat from the top of the room down to the bottom and it creates circulation saves about forty percent on heating and camilla and so those little puppies pay for themselves and because we can spend a long time on heating ventilation and air conditioning it's a tremendous opportunity to save money and it's important to bundle back with lighting and other kinds of technologies that save money because a check is expensive to upgrade and so a lot of institutions make the mistake of picking the low hanging fruit taking the easiest savings st and deferring the big expenses will then once they've sucked off those easy savings it's harder to amortize the cost doing a check and building upgrades another example is plug in appliances and motors and pumps we're not going to spend a lot of time on that because it's been at the ground it's been fairly well covered and so i'm just going to say a magic phrase energy star the energy star appliances that have the energy star rating from the department of energy and the environmental protection agency are in the top twenty percent set of efficiency two thousand and twenty five percent depending on what the appliance is and just investing in energy star is going to save a lot of money and make much more efficient use another area that we're not going to spend a lot of time talking about in this hour just because of time is motors and pumps which are usually old and inefficient they have square corners in the pipes and they have they don't have variable speed in the pumps in the motors and so just  upgrading motors in pubs and circulation here's a quick example in a correctional facility if an engineering company comes in they can find dozens and dozens of opportunities to save money on engineering and air conditioning in those kinds of technologies i want to just introduce the topic of materials flow before we break and that is everything that flows through an institution in the form of materials kit can be paper it can be food it can be water anything that flows through an institution can be done more efficiently and what we find when we look at efficiency is that usually we can improve our fish unsee by anywhere by fifty to ninety percent of the way that we use any kind of anonymously once we've done that when we circle back around in a year or two to look at can we do it more efficiently we can generally improve the efficiency by fifty to ninety percent because technology has improved because funding becomes more available people are looking at life cycles and not just individual purchases so after the break we'll come back and talk more about materials well i'll tell you that sounds great yeah  now the other thing that i want to just share before we go to the break is that the energy efficiency water efficiency engaging people more sustainable living is a contact sport it requires people to get involved and engaged and that's where the parts of mom alliance and drawdown and other organizations like that become so important because they're opportunities for people to party and although many of us think it ain't it awful like what can i do it's a very difficult world these are big problems i don't know what to do if we look around there are opportunities everywhere it's like the flowers growing between the cracks in the sidewalk if we look for the opportunities like the pop up parts of mom and pop of mama alliance if we look for those opportunities we look for those organizations those are opportunities to participate and it really takes everyone participating hunters my older sister is very ready fond of saying there's no silver bullet there's only silver buckshot and we really need to look at how can we do this together and everybody has something to contribute everybody idea i think it's so inspiring that you're giving these examples of what's happened in prisons where the environment is so called very tight and closed not free and look what's happening yes and that's that's an inspiring thing and it's happening everywhere if we look for the opportunities if we look for what people are doing and look for what we can do there's always some little thing just one quick story at pendleton prison in indiana which is not always thought of as a hotbed of liberal environmental thinking one of the correctional officers had seen a program on p b s about recycling and he said gee maybe we can do that at the prison and so he asked to supply officer if they could get three colored trash cans and they said sure and so they put out three colored trash cans in the dorm stuff so the nd year they started bundling and somebody gave a bailer and they started bundling and selling their cardboard and their glass and their aluminum they generated cash flow of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars in new revenue so in two years they had a swing of two hundred and sixty thousand dollars which really got the attention of the warden and of the state wide correctional commissioner in fact the corrections commissioner said gee if we can do it at pendleton maybe i can do it at home and they really goes both ways so i thank you very much for this opportunity to share this information and after the break we'll come back and talk more about materials flow and different things that are happening in different parts of the country with using resources more efficiently  te valley t v yes and the volunteer staff that's putting this show together and give them a big thank you to yes we will do so as we go along here it's a it's a vast subject but we'll do our best to