Patricia Chase of International Sustainable Solutions sent out an e-mail recently regarding the death of Svend

Svend Auken

Auken, the Danish gentleman who helped turn Denmark into the energy efficient country it is today. He passed away in August. When Auken was last in town in June of 2008, I had the honor of personally interviewing him after his talk at city hall. My story, available here,  focuses on how Auken said green was a very tangible and possible thing as long as government set rules and got involved. He suggested rules regulating energy use per square foot of a building. I also blogged about our discussion here.

An event will celebrate his life Nov. 6 at 5:30 p.m. It will be held at the Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle.

Here’s what Chase wrote in the e-mail:

“I was sadly aware the last time I had the pleasure of enjoying Svend Auken’s company, that it might be the last. In spite of weekly blood transfusions, radiation, slurred speech (terrible for someone who loved to talk as much as he did), Svend insisted I come over to sit on his veranda with him, drink his favorite Barolo, and talk about everything from how grateful he was to have reconnected with the Pacific Northwest to the perilous situation with Israel and Gaza. Fully aware that all treatments had failed to halt his prostate cancer, Svend was still as optimistic and full of life as ever. He was excited about his recent speech to Congress about Denmark’s energy independence, and believed that his party, the Social Democrats, were poised to regain government. In spite of his condition, he was actively campaigning for people in his party, and was looking forward to upcoming travels. Svend was grateful that he had been able to reconnect with the Pacific Northwest in the past few years. As a student for one year at WSU, in the heady era of the Kennedy administration, Svend took his first steps in his political career as a campus organizer for civil rights in America. The people of the Pacific Northwest were very important to him, and every time he visited, he gave us 250%.”

I’ll leave you with what he said the last time he was here in Seattle: “If we want to change, we can change. We have the instruments and if we can’t do it, who can do it.”

For anyone who looks to Denmark as a beacon of shining light in green and efficient design, tomorrow is there an event for you!

The University of Washington is hosting a free talk on sustainable design in the Pacific Northwest and in Denmark. Speakers are Louise Grassov of Gehl Architects in Copenhagen, Jim Huffman of Busby Perkings + Will, and Roger Geller of the city of Portland’s Office of Transportation. Peter Steinbrueck of Urban Strategies will moderate. The talk is called “Urban Design for Walkable, Bikable Cities.”

This lecture series, called Global Green, is presented by the Green Futures Research and Design Lab. I’ve been to two of them so far and I highly recommend them. For more information, visit http://greenfutures.washington.edu/events.php.

This week, I (and a packed crowd at Seattle City Hall) heard Svend Auken, Denmark’s former minister for energy and the environment, speak about everything from energy to economics to the U.S.’s responsibility in a climate-conscious world (sign a post Kyoto agreement, lead the way).

Then, I sat down with him in a one-on-one interview to focus his attention a little bit more on buildings. What should we do, I asked? How should the construction industry attack the problem of a changing world?

His answer?  Government.

Government, he said, needs to make very, very strict rules and make it clear to people what they want out of a building. A good way to encourage that, he said, is by requiring an energy goal per square foot of a building rather than a whole-building goal. Once the goal is set, the industry will follow.

Of course government in Denmark is managed differently than government in Seattle and Washington. On multiple occasions, for example, Diane Sugimura, DPD’s director, has expressed exasperation at creating a balance between energy codes and letting untested technologies be used.  As a city government, she’s said, you don’t want to just start using something that might be more efficient but hasn’t been adequately tested. In Denmark, you can be fairly creative as long as you achieve the end energy goal.

But Auken said government has to be very strong on this. Yes, people will moan for a while, he said, but in the end it will make them more creative and will be more profitable (especially in an age of rising oil costs where energy bills are sure to “skyrocket”).

“Once you let architects think in terms of energy efficiency, they get more creative,” he said. “Architects love to do low energy, it’s so much more fun.”

How about it architects? Are energy efficient buildings (like London’s BedZED project above) more fun or a pain in the bum?

For more on Denmark, read my post from last week (click tag ‘Scandinavia’ below). For more on Auken’s talk, what Denmark did and how we could do it, check out my story here.

Face it: everyone who’s anyone in green design says the U.S. is way behind Europe. And one of the areas outpacing us further and further… is Scandinavia. 

Scandinavia’s sustainable strengths are no new feat in Seattle. Local group International Sustainable Solutions has been taking local building and city professionals there for years on a whirlwind eco-tourist trip. It is just about getting ready to kick of a Portland version of the trip,  more here.

Scandinavian speakers have also graced the Seattle scene every couple of months to teach us what we don’t know. One of them, Svend Auken, is going to be in Seattle again on Monday from noon to 1 p.m. He will be speaking at Seattle City Hall in the Bertha Landes room.

Scandinavia also reared its green head when I attended a forum at the UW a couple of weeks ago. At that forum, Jayson Antonoff of Seattle’s green building team (formerly with ISUSTAIN) spoke about how Scandinavia has focused on energy efficiency by looking at different energy producers, varying it’s idea of energy, and requiring buildings to meet an energy requirement per square foot.

For more on that story, and to learn what other sustainability leaders in the Pacific Northwest think about green solutions, check out the story in the DJC here. (more…)