If you do a couple of Google searches (Eco-Town and Greensburg) you’ll find the small American Heartland town of Greensburg, Kansas is getting a whole lot of attention, and hopefully a lot of help in their effort to rebuild their community after a Tornado devastated their town this past May, destroying almost 80 percent of the community’s infrastructure, both public and private.
My own involvements with the community began some weeks ago when a close friend of mine Bill Thomas of Green Home Solutions rang me up in the middle of the night and said, “I had a dream, and you and I are going to go spend a week in Kansas helping the people of Greensburg rebuild their town.” First thought was obviously, “Why Greensburg?” Any town or city devastated by a natural disaster deserves all the help we can give them, but too often there just does not seem to be enough help to go around, with the best known example being New Orleans, and specifically the Ninth Ward, so why Greensburg?
Greensburg has a vision, a dream and if that dream can be realized, they can serve as a model of what a Green Community can be. Early after the disaster as the town and its people surveyed the damage of their battered community and idea was born into being…lets not only rebuild our community, but re-build Green, construct as many of our structures, including government buildings as LEED Certified eco-friendly structures. That dream, that model of rebuilding the town is capturing a lot of attention.
Discovery is about to launch an All Green cable channel, and one program scheduled to be aired is Eco-Town hosted by Leonardo DiCaprio who has long fostered a dream of providing a town with a complete green makeover. Having seen the destruction done to Greensburg, hearing about their dream to be America’s greenest city, he pitched the idea for his show to Discovery who embraced the idea with open arms. Thirteen episodes of Eco-Town are now being filmed/produced journaling the efforts of Greensburg to rebuild themselves into America’s greenest Community.
Mother Earth News (Ogden Publishing) has stepped up and offered to build one of the first LEED Certified home models for Greentown (a non-profit formed in Greensburg after the disaster) which will act as the organization’s office space and green library.
A small group of us here on the east coast have recently formed a new organization aimed at helping Greensburg, and other communities recovering from natural disasters to not only recover, but to re-build using green building materials, to rebuild a more eco-friendly sustainable community. Green Helping Hands is small, just in the formation stages, yet the people we have reached out to so far have been receptive, are eager to step in and help Greensburg in their efforts to rebuild their community into America’s greenest city.
The town and Greentown want to build an eco village with six green homes cited in the village, another six built at other locations throughout the town, thus creating a real life model of sustainable green living that others can visit and study, which in turn will create eco-tourism for this small rural community. We’ve proposed to Greentown having a competition wherein the best architectures in the world could compete to have their plan chosen for these green home builds. The idea has been well received, and we will see where it goes.
Green Helping Hands is also hoping book publishers and distributors will step forward by donating books on anything green from gardening to green construction to act as the foundation of Greentown’s new Eco-Library.
Greensburg has presented America with a wonderful opportunity. If everyone pitches in, if everyone steps forward and makes a small contribution of their time, effort or money, we can not only rebuild a small town in the Heartland of America, but we can re-build it as the Greenest city in America, a model that other communities can study and immolate moving forward. Take some time to Google Greensburg and Eco-Town, visit our web site (still under construction) and then get involved. America has always been the land of dreams and opportunity, and in helping Greensburg, you can play and important part in making those dreams and opportunities come true for one small town that was devastated by a natural disaster.
If you do a couple of Google searches (Eco-Town and Greensburg) you’ll find the small American Heartland town of Greensburg, Kansas is getting a whole lot of attention, and hopefully a lot of help in their effort to rebuild their community after a Tornado devastated their town this past May, destroying almost 80 percent of the community’s infrastructure, both public and private.
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