Press Room

Boulder Magazine Fall 2003

By Wendy Underhill

It's a small world, after all.   At least it will be from September 29 to October 4 when a global village will come to Boulder.   That's when Sustainable Resources: A Forum for Solutions to World Poverty, the first conference on sustainable development, takes over the University of Colorado's fieldhouse.

              Who cares about sustainable development?   A number of organizations all over the world devote themselves to improving the lives of people who have little money or technology.

On group, Potters for Peace, teaches people in Nicaragua to make water filters from sawdust and local clays.   Since water-borne illnesses are among the leading killers of children, these filters are lifesavers.    Paolo Lugari, a group of visionaries and engineers in Colombia who set out 35 years ago to create a productive rainforest on previously barren land.   Now they've got 247 species growing, including trees producing commercial resin, and they're bottling and selling water in containers that are designed to be educational Lego-like toys when they're emptied.

Another organization, Solar Cookers International of Sacramento, Calif., teaches people how to make stoves with everyday items like glass and cardboard boxes. The direct rays of the sun are the fuel, not trees from the world's dwindling forests.   And Grupo Fenix of Belize teaches people to cut and re-solder cast-off photovoltaic cells from the first world. In areas where electricity isn't available, these inexpensive renewed cells allow people to light their homes for the first time—without using any nonrenewable resources.  

              But it's not just development people who might care about this conference. It's anybody who's concerned about the survival of the world in this era of terrorism. In fact, terrorism is one of the main stories behind the conference. Steve Troy sold his successful mail order business, Jade Mountain, on Sept. 10, 2001.   He planned to sit back, relax, and perhaps get into selling science fiction books.   He woke up the next day to the horror of the World Trade Center attacks, and knew that retirement would have to wait.

              Troy says his first thought was, “if we don't do anything about the roots of terrorism, in ten

              So he created a new endeavor, Sustainable Village, which uses a business model to raise money to support non-profits.   Through Sustainable Village, Tory hopes to inject a bit of business thinking into development work.   All too often a $20,000 water system, say, gets built, and then it's abandoned for want of a 50-cent part.   If the development of the project included a small element of “microenterprise,”—i.e., someone with a stake in stocking those parts and doing upkeep—the system might continue.

              In building the Sustainable Village, Troy was in contact with lots of grassroots development agencies from the tiniest local groups to the largest international agencies. “I was really surprised by how little communication there was between naturally cooperative groups,” he says. And so the idea of a conference to bring these people together was born. With lots of assistance from Engineers Without Borders-U.S.A. in Louisville, approximately 250 agencies, volunteers, donors, educators, and interested individuals from 40 countries will come together to learn from one another. Troy figures that nonprofit agencies and workers are so busy doing their own thing in their own chosen corner of the world, that they haven't had a chance to see who else is doing.   Maybe, through the conference, they will see that they don't all have to do it all.

              Troy's goal, in short, is to foster cooperation–and he's already seeing it happen just through the planning process: “Even just getting Naropa and C.U. to cooperate,” he says, “has been a very visible part of the process.” Developing the conference has been a low-budget operation, based on “the Robinhood approach,” Troy says.   “We're charging those who can afford it and using the proceeds for those who can't,” so that people from developing countries can participate as well.

              Although the conference has a strong emphasis on engineering (as in water filtration, transportation, agriculture, and energy), it will also help people think about culturally appropriate solution to poverty. “If you just have an engineering approach,” Troy says, “you come in, see a problem, fix it and leave. But if it doesn't connect to the people, it doesn't work.” He cited an example of wells built in Tibet that the local people didn't use; they continued to drink water from surface sources, even road puddles. So solutions “need to make sense culturally as well as technically,” Troy says.   All told, there will be 150 or more talks and workshops to look at all kinds of solutions.

              Despite its focus on world poverty, the conference should be fun.   It is, after all, an as an exposition of the best ideas in the field.