Cinderella story - Chattanooga, Tennessee's sustainable development strategy

National Wildlife, Feb-March, 1996 by Daniel Glick

Once upon a time, Chattanooga was called the dirtiest city in America. Then, not long ago, it discovered the concept of sustainable development. And not only did it clean itself up, but the Tennessee manufacturing center became a model for a growing movement.

By the 1950s, the pollution in Chattanooga matched its gritty industrial image - personified by its famous smoke-belching choo-choo. Its air was so polluted, reported the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), that when women wearing nylon stockings walked outside, their leg-wear was apt to disintegrate. The Tennessee River curled through an industrial no-man's land along the downtown riverfront - and its in-town tributary, Chattanooga Creek, was so polluted from toxic dumping by coke foundries and chemical factories that in 1994 the EPA proposed 2.5 miles of the creek as a Superfund site.

Current mayor Gene Roberts recalls returning to Chattanooga in the mid-60s after spending some time in notoriously smoggy Los Angeles - only to find the air was dirtier in Chattanooga. Finally, Chattanoogans got fed up. "It was so bad that people couldn't stand it anymore," says Karen Hundt, an urban designer who has been involved in the city's turnaround since those dark days in the 1960s when headlights were sometimes required at noon. "It was just gross."

It's not gross anymore. By almost any account, Chattanooga has transformed itself from a choking, polluted city into a vibrant southern metropolis that The Washington Post called in 1993 the "alluring Cinderella of the Tennessee River." But Chattanooga's story is not simply about a successful environmental cleanup. While the city still has plenty of problems (polluted Chattanooga Creek, for example, was designated a priority Superfund site in September), it has also become a stand-out example of how environmental protection and economic development can coexist because of rather than despite each other. Using a range of innovative approaches - from enticing zero-emissions industries to relocate to Chattanooga, to building a freshwater aquarium that became the centerpiece of the city's downtown renewal - the city has become a glowing recommendation for the sustainable-development movement.

Chattanooga is one of 21 case-study communities that have caught the attention of the President's Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD). The council was established in June 1993, with the mandate to "identify and implement policies that will meet the needs of the present without compromising the future." In August, the PCSD praised the "creative work unfolding inside the communities we visited" and promised that its final report would include "practical policy recommendations and concrete measures of progress" to help other communities adopt sustainable-development strategies.

Still, the council has had a hard time agreeing on what "sustainable development" means, much less on how to achieve it. Some conservatives see the concept as a Trojan horse that environmentalists will use to infiltrate big businesses and to slow growth. Some environmentalists, on the other hand, worry that enticements for corporations to act responsibly end up sacrificing conservation principles.

In order to expand the middle ground in this argument, the PCSD shaped its membership from the business, environment, labor, government and civil-rights communities - with participants ranging from Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, to Chevron Corporation Chairman Kenneth Derr, to Executive Director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission Theodore Strong. Their mission: to figure out how small towns and large cities can become greener while at the same time boosting the local economy. But sustainable development, like world peace and homemade ice cream, is easier to imagine than it is to crank out. The main idea is simple enough, says Lynn Greenwalt, National Wildlife Federation vice-president for conservation programs. "Don't eat your seed corn." But when that means altering manufacturing practices at a cost of millions or reducing resource extraction to sustainable levels, change can be difficult to achieve. "Getting from here to there is a tedious, uphill, Sisyphean chore," says Greenwalt, who has also served as principal liaison for the President's Council.

But as the President's Council has found, examples from Chattanooga and other communities around the country are proving that sustainable development can work. In projects ranging from homegrown cranberry preserves made from local produce, to furniture constructed in an inner-city factory from landfill-bound wood palettes, enough endeavors have succeeded to encourage others to follow.

In Chattanooga, civic leaders first mobilized widespread community involvement with town meetings. The intent was to encourage public-private partnerships (which have accounted for $739 million in investments and 1,300 new permanent jobs) and to consider the environmental costs of just about everything. The effort began more than a decade ago with a "Vision 2000" process, which brought together citizens from all walks of civic life to identify the city's many problems. They named 40 goals, ranging from improving the availability of affordable housing to cleaning up the riven Next, they found solutions. To improve the city's infamous poor air quality, for example, Chattanooga researched and developed a cutting-edge, electric-bus publictransportation system.The city is now gradually replacing all its diesel buses with the new, emissions-free models. To encourage the use of public transportation, the city constructed three satellite parking areas on the outskirts of town, and it now uses the parking revenue to finance shuttle buses that riders use for free. These days, the city is selling its homemade buses to other cities around the world. The local economy gets a boost, citizens are discovering public transportation and air quality is vastly improved. Says Molly Harriss Olson, executive director of the PCSD, "There's a small revolution going on out there."