Greensburg, Kansas: Rebuilding the Future

This is no dis­tant future ideal—it is quite real. In a very inter­est­ing coin­ci­dence the place is named Greensburg, Kansas, and it is now an inter­na­tional show­place for sus­tain­able tech­nolo­gies. Just recently, a jour­nal­ist flew in from Japan to see how she might tell the Greensburg story back home and inspire the rebuild­ing of their earthquake-afflicted areas for a sus­tain­able future.

Tornado Devastation

But Greensburg didn’t start off to be this way. Prior to May 4, 2007, it was a 1.5-square-mile sleepy, tiny town sit­ting in the mid­dle of the Kansas prairie, with a pop­u­la­tion of 1,400 that sur­vived mainly by oil, gas and agri­cul­ture. As with many small rural American towns, Greensburg had seen a steady decline in pop­u­la­tion over the last sev­eral decades and was strug­gling to get by.

At 9:50 p.m. on that fate­ful day, a record EF5* tor­nado touched down. The behe­moth storm was actu­ally wider than the town, with sus­tained winds of over 200 miles per hour.

“It was a 1.7-mile-wide tor­nado, and the town is only 1.5 miles square,” Daniel Wallach, exec­u­tive direc­tor and founder of Greensburg GreenTown, told Organic Connections. “The aver­age tor­nado is 75 yards wide, so it was much more like a land hur­ri­cane than a tor­nado. It started in the begin­ning of town and went all the way through to the end.”

Given a 20-minute warn­ing that likely saved many lives, peo­ple were able to find shel­ter in base­ments and hud­dle down while the storm lit­er­ally shred­ded the build­ings around them. In mere min­utes, Greensburg went from a stand­ing com­mu­nity to com­plete and utter dev­as­ta­tion. Climbing back up out of their base­ments and storm cel­lars, the cit­i­zens of Greensburg were con­fronted with noth­ing but a flat­tened field of twisted debris where once had been their town.

“Over 90 per­cent of the struc­tures were com­pletely demol­ished,” Wallach said. “We lost all util­i­ties, and it was essen­tially bar­ren except for all the debris.”

Wallach him­self was some­what new to the area. In 2003, he and his wife, Catherine Hart, bought a farm 35 miles from Greensburg in an effort to rebuild their lives. “We had burned our­selves out in our last busi­ness ven­ture, which was in Colorado,” Wallach related. “We ended up mov­ing to Kansas, which is a friendly place for folks that fall on finan­cial hard­ship, and started over on ten acres of land in the mid­dle of nowhere. We didn’t know voca­tion­ally what we’d end up doing, but we had begun a nat­ural foods co-op in the area and six fam­i­lies from Greensburg were part of that.”

Following the tor­nado, Daniel and the rest of the res­i­dents reeled in shock. “It was about dig­ging out of the debris and get­ting a sense of where do we go from here,” said Wallach. “It was obvi­ously very trau­matic; eleven peo­ple lost their lives and many more were trau­ma­tized by it.”

Sustainable Inspiration

Managing to look for­ward, Daniel had a flash of inspi­ra­tion about how they might recover from this hor­rid dis­as­ter in a pos­i­tive way.

“Exactly a week after the storm the first town meet­ing was held in a tent,” Wallach recalled. “Amazingly, 500 peo­ple showed up, in a town of 1,400 where none of them could stay in town. It was pretty remark­able to have that kind of show­ing at the first meet­ing. To that meet­ing, we took a con­cept paper on rebuild­ing as a model green com­mu­nity and found, when we arrived, that some­body from the governor’s office was already talk­ing about this, and so was the mayor at the time. It was quite the convergence.”

Wallach was inter­act­ing with a group of peo­ple who were intensely trau­ma­tized, and he knew how dif­fi­cult such an under­tak­ing might be for them. “Losing all your mate­r­ial pos­ses­sions, includ­ing your shel­ter, is very trau­matic,” Wallach said. “You’re deal­ing with a level of stress that most peo­ple aren’t accus­tomed to at all. Emotional upset is a very chal­leng­ing state in which to get things done and in which to adopt new behav­iors and, in some cases, beliefs about sus­tain­abil­ity, for instance. Sustainable build­ing and liv­ing is tough, because what any­body who has been through trauma or deep loss knows is that there’s this almost hom­ing device that moves us in a direc­tion of want­ing to get back a sense of famil­iar­ity and the sta­tus quo. When the dif­fi­culty of just rebuild­ing is met with, in addi­tion, rebuild­ing dif­fer­ently or bet­ter or in new ways, it makes it more challenging.”

But the town rose to the chal­lenge. “In the end, peo­ple in Greensburg loved the idea of mak­ing some­thing out of this mess that would actu­ally have a global impact. At the time it seemed absurd—this tiny town two hours west of Wichita, quite lit­er­ally in the mid­dle of nowhere, all of a sud­den being thrust onto the global stage. Here was an oppor­tu­nity for us to take the lead and give some­thing to the world with this ter­ri­ble dis­as­ter, and an amaz­ing amount of lead­er­ship sur­faced within the com­mu­nity. Together the com­mu­nity worked for a col­lec­tive vision and then went about sep­a­rately doing their pieces, which now end up four years later being this model com­mu­nity with all these ele­ments of what we call a town for the future as opposed to a town of the future.”

Wallach con­sid­ers part of the rea­son he and oth­ers were able to sell the idea is that the towns­peo­ple were from rural stock. “People out here are, in some ways, much more con­nected to nature than those in urban areas,” he said. “I’ve always found that to be the case with peo­ple in rural areas—they are just a lit­tle less domes­ti­cated and come from stock that was down­right wild. The folks out here had ances­tors that set­tled and used wind­mills to bring water up out of the ground, built homes with solar ori­en­ta­tion, cap­tured rain­wa­ter in cis­terns, and used home­o­pathic and natur­o­pathic medicine.”

Through this event, Daniel and his wife dis­cov­ered the voca­tion they were seeking—the for­ma­tion of a new non­profit orga­ni­za­tion called Greensburg GreenTown, which became infor­ma­tion cen­tral for the rebuild­ing effort as it related to green and sus­tain­able tech­nolo­gies. It was to this orga­ni­za­tion that busi­nesses and indi­vid­u­als could come and obtain assis­tance and infor­ma­tion on exactly how to go about imple­ment­ing these meth­ods. Greensburg GreenTown also became the face pre­sented to the rest of the world.

Click any image above to see a larger version.

“A lot of it has been about pub­lic rela­tions both in the com­mu­nity and with­out,” Wallach remarked. “We’ve done a tremen­dous amount of media work, all of it being just respon­sive to media. We were, I think, the first to really paint the pic­ture of a liv­ing sci­ence museum and help make that hap­pen. So a lot of what we did was facil­i­tat­ing infor­ma­tion to the peo­ple who needed it.”

Green Greensburg

“We have found that our nature as human beings, like any crea­ture, is to fol­low the path of least resis­tance,” Wallach con­tin­ued. “In get­ting peo­ple to change any kind of behav­ior, your odds increase dra­mat­i­cally the eas­ier you make it for them to do it. We part­nered with the Natural Renewable Energy Lab, which is a Department of Energy pro­gram, and they brought some of the best minds in the busi­ness on green energy, green trans­porta­tion, biofuels—all these top­ics relat­ing to sus­tain­able liv­ing. Now we had the fore­most experts in the world at our dis­posal, and so we helped make that con­nec­tion in the com­mu­nity, talk­ing to peo­ple and say­ing, ‘This is an amaz­ing resource. Don’t waste it.’”

Four years later, evi­dence of the community’s com­mit­ment to sus­tain­abil­ity is every­where you look in Greensburg. Visitors to the town will first see GreenTown’s Silo Eco-Home and Green Visitors Center, which show­cases unique build­ing tech­niques, energy-efficient fea­tures, and green mate­ri­als and products.

As a home show­case, this cen­ter is only the begin­ning. “Most every­thing in Greensburg is tourable,” said Wallach. “The school, all the city build­ings, all the county build­ings, are open to the pub­lic, and things like the street­lights and the wind farm are totally acces­si­ble. But even though some of the green­est homes in the world are in Greensburg, they’re pri­vately owned and occu­pants don’t want peo­ple traips­ing through.

“So we’re build­ing a chain of what we call eco-homes. The first is our Green Visitors Center, and in the last year we’ve had over 5,000 peo­ple come through to see what a state-of-the-art sus­tain­able home looks and feels like. We’re work­ing very hard on build­ing a sec­ond home, a very cool state-of-the-art house that will be afford­able and acces­si­ble and will use 90 per­cent less energy than a con­ven­tion­ally built home. It’s being built out of a wall sys­tem that’s barely been out­side of Europe; the German com­pany that pro­duces these uses 100 per­cent biodegrad­able wood blocks that are kind of like huge Legos.”

When Greensburg decided on their green goal in 2007, they passed a res­o­lu­tion to build to LEED Platinum stan­dards in all new con­struc­tion. LEED is an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, an inter­na­tion­ally rec­og­nized green build­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process devel­oped and super­vised by the U.S. Green Building Council. Beyond the mate­ri­als and meth­ods of build­ing, their stan­dards also encom­pass air qual­ity, facil­i­tat­ing alter­nate trans­porta­tion, water-wise land­scap­ing, the dis­tance mate­ri­als have to travel, and much more. There are four dif­fer­ent lev­els of LEED cer­ti­fi­ca­tion: Certified, Silver, Gold and Platinum. At this point, five of Greensburg’s projects have received LEED Platinum cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, and many more are in the works.

Paying It Forward

It has been a long stretch. But there has also been an incred­i­ble trans­for­ma­tion with a bright future. “It’s been an inter­est­ing thing to watch,” Wallach con­cluded. “A lot of peo­ple are still very tired; a lot of peo­ple worked very hard in bring­ing things back. But there are also a lot of good feel­ings about how this col­lec­tive vision was real­ized, and it’s quite exhil­a­rat­ing to see how the town is pay­ing it for­ward. Representatives of the city of Tuscaloosa came to town to see what Greensburg had done, and I think it’s inspired them to do their own sus­tain­able rebuild­ing. We have a reporter com­ing from Japan soon, from the sec­ond largest news­pa­per there, to tell the story and bring some inspi­ra­tion and ideas back to Japan. Folks from Greensburg went to China after the big earth­quake there. The impact is just enormous.”

*EF5: EF is the Enhanced Fujita Scale, a rat­ing of the strength of tor­na­does in the United States based on the dam­age they cause. EF5 is the high­est rat­ing, indi­cat­ing winds over 200 mph.

For more on the trans­for­ma­tion of Greensburg, Kansas, visit the Greensburg GreenTown web­site at www.greensburggreentown.org.