Remember the Mindless Ignorance Awards post?
How many times have you noticed a truck or a car belonging to the city or to one of its agencies whether it is: Septa, Philadelphia Gas Works, the Philadelphia Police Department, the Philadelphia Fire Department, the Philadelphia Airports Authority, the Philadelphia Housing Department or the Park and Recreation Department, how many times in the past week did you notice a vehicle from one of those City Agencies idling for more than three minutes??
The reason I can have a field day with my Mindless Ignorance Awards by pointing out such obvious non-sense as hordes of city employees driving city owned vehicles not respecting City and State Anti-idling ordinance is because our City Government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided against making the training its employees to what Global Warming and Sustainability are, a priority.
What has been very clear for me for the past 2 years is that a very very small minority of the 25,000 city employees have any idea of what Global Warming is, of its increasing impact on the planet and of their own role in this global issue .
So I wanted to check, I wanted to hear it spelled out for me and here was the occasion:
On Thursday Oct 4th the City Director of Sustainability – Catherine Gajewski, came to West Mt Airy to talk in front of a Membership meeting of Weaver’s Way Coop.
Typical of Catherine’s style, her presentation was sweat, short and to the point. Catherine focused on the priorities she set for her Department. And in typical fashion, at the end of her 20 minutes presentation Catherine took questions from the audience.
The ability of government officials to take any question from the audience of a public forum – I mean: any question – never stops to amaze me and annoy me at the same time.
After a couple of pointilistic questions I had a chance to check with Catherine what I have been suspecting for a while.
Be as it may, my question to Catherine Gajewski, was simply whether the City had any training program in place for its 25,000 employees to teach them about Climate Change and what each of them can do about it??
Her answer was that no, the City of Philadelphia does not have such training program in place. She went on to specify what are the sort and medium term priorities of the City administration: increase the energy efficiency of the different building used by the city administration, move city procurement toward buying more sustainable materials. Nothing, not a thing, not one action item toward training all or some of the 25,000 city employees to the impact of Global Warming and how their most simple actions can affect this global issue.
I think that the fact that the City government does not consider Training its multitudes of employees to be part of its short or medium term priorities is telling volumes as to the approach of the city government to moving Philadelphia toward becoming the “Greenest City” in the country.
What this is saying is that the Philadelphia City Government took a top down approach to making Philadelphia a more sustainable city.
I am sorry to say that not only I do not believe in top down approaches, I believe that the implicit belief that a few enlightened technocrats can legislate and mandate moving the citizenry of Philadelphia toward more sustainable lifestyle is delusional.
If I were in Catherine’s shoes, I would not change course after one year of work on the Philadelphia Greenworks plan, without any more proofs than what common sense might be telling you. Not a good idea.
My proposal is to wait another year and make an honest mid-course evaluation of where we are then vs. where we want to be.
As long as the city workers are sheltered from the knowledge and understanding of the consequences of 50 years of a mindless ignorant lifestyle this country has enjoyed, the less likely we are to be moving toward a more sustainable Philadelphia.
Worse still, the city is not benefiting from the knowledge, input and suggestions from the people who actually do the work and have potentially the most impact toward making Philadelphia the greenest city.
