What’s Carroll County’s Shade of Green?

Written By Patricia Rouzer

How green is our county? Let’s just say we would not overwhelm Al Gore with the intensity of our communal hue.

Although there are some positive signs, our commitment to shrinking our collective carbon footprint seems uneven at best. Evidence of county residents’ efforts to become green is at once simple, complex and mostly anecdotal.

Cruise a county neighborhood on trash day. See the plethora of glass, plastic and paper-filed recycle bins awaiting collection. Strike a blow to save the shrinking polar ice caps.

Stand beside a major county thoroughfare upon a weekday morn; inhale the pungent fumes. Growing legions of gasoline gulping SUVs, pickup trucks and soccer-mom minivans, most conveying only their drivers, march relentlessly if not rapidly, toward worksheets in Baltimore, Annapolis, Washington and beyond. Feel those polar puppies melt.

As the 20th century sage and wetlands dweller Kermit The Frog once crooned, “It isn’t easy being green.” Apparently the amphibian knows whereof he sings.

Definitions of what it means to be “green” are, like the lush green fields of Carroll county, broad and deep. There are green things individuals can do, ways industries can be green and government initiatives that can make our world greener.

And although Carroll countians, as a group, do not appear aggressively to demand environmental responsibility in every aspect of their lives, there are some few small signs that green, while clearly not this season’s must-have environmental shade for everyone, may become trendier in the future.

On a government level, the county commissioners created an Environmental Advisory Council to address environmental concerns in the county. The county commissioner appointed a board of seven people, including a college administrator and an engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to address environmental issues. Although the council has no power to legislate or mandate, it has become a catalyst for addressing broad environmental issues and recommends policy to the commissioners.

James E. Slater, Carroll County environmental compliance officer, said Carroll is possibly the only Maryland county with such an environmental board.

“A big part of the Council’s job is to create a sense of openness so that people can express their concerns about environmental issues in the county,” Slater said.

He added that the board was instrumental in bringing community members together with representatives of Lehigh Portland Cement Company of Union Bridge to address air quality issues and has also worked with community representatives concerned about ground water quality.

“The council opened up a forum so that area fuel dealers, the Maryland Department of the Environment and the Health Department could come together to resolve problems with MBTE [a volatile, flammable, colorless liquid used to oxygenate gasoline and boost octane that is highly soluble in water] leaching into the ground water,” he said.

The council meets regularly, their meetings are open to the public and they set aside time in each meeting to listen to public concerns about environmental matters.

Slater also noted that the commissioners are investigating ways to deal with the county’s solid waste as the population grows, landfills fill to capacity and suitable landfill sites become increasingly hard to find; another potentially green governmental initiative.

But solving problems, while important, is not the same as preventing them. And it would seem that in Carroll county, the proactive approach is at best a mixed bag.

One environmental bright spot is the planned opening next fall in Eldersburg of the first “certified green” shopping center in the Mid-Atlantic States. Black Oaks Associates, an Owings Mills-based private developer, which broke ground in mid-September, for Main Street Eldersburg, a 90,000 square foot, $20 million “lifestyle” center composed of three separate buildings on a 12.5 acre plot on Route 32 north of its intersection with Route 26.

The center will include:
¥ Passive solar “daylighting” through use of carefully positioned glass panels to admit ambient light.
¥ An advanced heating, ventilating and air conditioning package expected to reduce energy costs by 30 percent a year.
¥ A cistern water system to capture and reuse rainwater from the project’s roof, combined with use of drought-resistant native plants in the center’s landscaping, will reduce annual water usage by 30 percent.
¥ White pavers to reflect light and reduce the heat island effect.

In addition, 10 percent of all materials planned for use in constructing Main Street Eldersburg will include recycled components, 75 percent of construction wastes will be recycled and 50 percent of building materials will be locally manufactured, thereby reducing the amount of energy used to transport them to the site.

Janet Harvey, vice president of marketing for Black Oak Associates, explained that the center’s green certification comes from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that has developed rigorous criteria for certifying green construction and has a complex instruction and testing program that allows builders, architects and others directly involved in the building trades to become green-certified.

By employing a variety of resource-saving mechanisms, Main Street Eldersburg earned the council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) designation, one that is becoming an accepted standard internationally.

Harvey said the company has seen a rise in interest in pursuing green construction over the past several years.

“We, as a company, have made a decision to endeavor to build green on every project. We’ve been interested in this green stuff for quite a while,” said Harvey. “When we first started going to the USGBC annual conference on green building several years ago there really weren’t many people there. Over the last few years there have been thousands.”

Harvey said that from what she has learned about environmentally friendly construction, many developed Western countries are far ahead of the United States in building green.

On a more environmentally unfriendly note, one county custom home builder said he has experienced scant demand for green options in new home construction. “Over the last 10 years we have had only one client express an interest in building green,” said Donald Timanus, Project Manager for John W. Pfaff Building, Inc., in New Windsor. When that customer realized what green would mean to his wallet in increased construction costs, he abandoned his greener intentions.

Timanus said that the one area most of the company’s clients are very concerned with is the efficiency of the heating, cooling and hot water systems in their new homes to keep their energy costs down.

“We did have a client a couple of years ago who was interested in a geothermal heating system,” he said, adding that interest also fell by the wayside when the client learned what the system would cost.

In the conflict between greener wallets and a greener environment, it appears the wallets clearly win. At least for now.

Dean Robert Camlin, a Westminster architect, who does both residential and industrial design, echoes Timanus’ observation about clients’ interests in being green, but takes a more optimistic view of the future.

He sees two major roadblocks to greener building: its current economics and lack of education about it. Both, he feels, will be overcome in time.

Camlin said he currently has a green project on the drawing boards, but fears his client may nix it because of the expense.

“As energy costs continue to rise, people may begin to take another look at building green,” he said. “People may only be looking at energy savings based on what the cost is now and not necessarily discovering that a lot of these green items have a short payback period.”

He foresees a day when costs of building green decline as supply and demand and economies of scale kick in, lowering the costs of construction supplies. Design costs for green construction, now higher than those for conventional construction, will also begin to decline as green becomes more standard and architects don’t have to invent techniques for each new project.

One of the major barriers to green building today is tract housing, with its attendant cookie cutter approach to each McMansion, large and small. Tract housing does little to invite conservation or encourage environmentalism, Camlin said.

Massive construction-waste-clogging landfills, stripping away all mature trees on a building lot, and not carefully situating homes to take full advantage of natural solar resources or Mother Earth’s cooling breezes, tract housing is not an environmentalist’s best friend.

What is an aspiring greenie to do? He could, like Tom Shields, a math and science instructor at Carroll Community College, take small green steps to make his world environmentally friendly, while doing a little stealth educating every chance he gets.

Shields and his wife, fittingly named Kathy Green, take an intense and very personal approach to conservation and preservation of the environment. They are simply careful but not fanatics, although Shields suspects that some of their environmentally carefree neighbors may regard them as a little “out there.”

On their nine and a half acres near Winfield, the couple grows most of the vegetables they consume. They use no commercial fertilizer and little chemical insecticide. Everything that has potential to enrich the soil–kitchen waste, last year’s leaves, cardboard boxes–goes into a compost pile to be used to enrich the soil of next year’s garden. Today’s empty cardboard grapefruit juice box is tomorrow’s starter pot for next year garden plants.

You will find no dishwasher or air conditioner here. Dishes are hand-washed, and in the oppressive heat of summer, ceiling fans stir cooling air. In winter the thermostat is set to a zesty 65 as the couple pull on sweaters or another flannel shirt. Almost every electric bulb is energy-stingy fluorescent. They refresh the garden with soapy dishwater and, in times of drought, sparingly using soaker hoses rather than water-wasting sprinklers.

What Shields and Green do is remarkably simple, and even more remarkably, effective. Mostly what it takes is an investment of time and a little thought.

“We don’t leave lights burning when we aren’t in the room,” said Shields. “We don’t stand in the heat with the refrigerator door open.

We try not to buy convenience foods. We grow a lot of what we eat and, happily, we’ve found that fresh food from the garden just tastes better,” he added. The couple also grows a variety of flowers.

Shields and Green are genuinely concerned about the country’s future-a future they see as balanced precariously on contemporary society’s conspicuous consumption. Last year’s “must have” winds up in the county landfill as we drag home this year’s most important, heavily packaged, plastic do-dad.

They have done extensive reading on the environment and are unapologetic about their somewhat pessimistic view of the future. “It is difficult to see how society as we know it can survive if we keep going the way we are going,” Shields said.

Shields moved to the county from a row house in Baltimore; Green from an apartment in Frederick. The moves brought them to a place where they could do more to be self-sustaining and make a modest contribution to protecting the environment.

“You can’t have much of a vegetable garden in the tiny back yard of a row house,” Shields said. “We don’t fertilize the lawn because, quite frankly, we don’t really care about having a Better Homes and Gardens lawn. We try to do the things that our grandparents did. We’re trying to do things in a conservative and intelligent way.”

Shields admits that he sometimes tries to educate friends, neighbors and colleagues about threats to the environment and give them a bit of advice on how they could live a more environmentally friendly lifestyle. Sometimes he is successful, but most often the subject is met with blank stares or blatant disinterest.

“I don’t talk about it if the person expresses no interest, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest about the environment on the part of many people,” Shields said. “They put out their recycling and that is their only contribution to the environment.”

In the opinions of Shields and Green and many scientists, environmentalists and climatologists that is not nearly enough.