LOOSE ENDS: Sustainable Princeton is no paper tiger!

Public Workshop on Sustainable Princeton’s draft plan: Wednesday, March 11, 7 p.m., Suzanne Patterson Center, behind Princeton Borough Hall

By Pam Hersh Special Writer
    Even though we live in an electronic communications world of Twitters with tweets, Face-bookers, bloggers, micro-bloggers, and just plain old-fashioned e- mailers (I never thought I would live long enough to say that e-mail was just plain old-fashioned), people are still addicted to paper handouts.
    As Sustainable Princeton kicks into high gear with a public workshop on Wednesday to discuss how Princeton residents can make Princeton a model of sustainability, I already know where I will focus my efforts. I am launching a campaign to snuff out official handouts.
    At a recent joint Borough-Township municipal meeting, the Sustainable Princeton Committee, under the leadership of Princeton Planner Lee Solow and Environmental Commission chair Wendy Kaczerski, reviewed Sustainable Princeton’s draft plan with the elected officials and invited everyone’s participation in the workshop. And Randall Solomon, executive director of the New Jersey Sustainable State Institute, reviewed several initiatives being pursued by other municipalities and institutions in the state. These include clean-fuel vehicles; 100 percent recycled plastic products; wildflowers and/or meadow growth instead of lawns; pesticide- free zones, and bio-diesel fuel, derived from used cooking oil from local restaurants.
    My suggestion, however, to snuff out handouts would save countless numbers of trees and lots of money, and the only cost incurred, perhaps, would be the cost of a few more laptops and projectors. But as much of a no- brainer as this may seem, it may be the most difficult of all the green initiatives to implement. People have a “thing” — albeit an unsustainable thing — for handouts. Handouts may lack sex appeal, but they offer the comfort of a security blanket.
    As far as I can determine, no one ever needs a meeting agenda other than for doodling purposes. My favorite doodle is the pre- 1960s era of penmanship exercise “ovals.” With all the electronic communication, however, legible handwriting has become an anachronism, thus obviating penmanship exercises, as well as the handouts on which to practice penmanship exercises.
    Everything nowadays can be posted, displayed, and stored electronically. And if the equipment fails at a meeting, people could resort to the really old-fashioned blackboard with chalk or marker. I am sure there is some horrible environmental hazard associated with chalk dust or marker fumes, but in small doses, it may be a far better alternative than printed meeting materials.
    In my case, I may have to remember to bring to meetings a few napkins to wipe up the coffee I always spill and use the paper meeting agendas to wipe up the spills.
    During meetings, I take notes on a little pad or on my BlackBerry or laptop. The downside of sitting at a meeting with a BlackBerry or laptop is that it appears as though I am being rude and ignoring the discussion, perhaps Twittering tweets, as one prominent U.S. official was “caught” doing during President Obama’s State of the Union speech.
    Printed agendas, generally only one page, are minor- league environment hazards compared to PowerPoint presentations. People spend hours and hours to perfect a PowerPoint tour-de-force that inevitably inspires the following question from an audience member: “Can I please have a hard copy of your presentation?”
    Before I became a paper- phobe and a convert to the paper-free life, I confess that often I was the first one to raise my hand and ask this annoying question. The thick PowerPoint presentation printout is very comforting in that security-blanket sort of way. But unlike the security blanket of my youth, I always misplace the PowerPoint presentation, often never looked at again once it enters my office black hole of paper I never can part with, but never use.
    The latest trick among institutions going green is to send out the presentations electronically and then announce that the e-mail recipient should print out the dozens of pages of meeting minutes, presentations, reports, agenda, save-the-date calendars, invitations, etc., and bring it to the meeting. All this accomplishes is a transfer-of-tree-killing rights and should not count as a healthy sustainable practice.
    For me, the greatest obstacle to a printed- paper starvation diet is my lack of trust in the equipment — both the computer and the printer. A cold-sweat panic overtakes me when “system failure” blocks access to e- mail and my Word documents. But everyone reassures me that all will be “fine” for Wednesday’s Sustainable Princeton event — that’s at 7 p.m., March 11, in the Suzanne Patterson Center behind Princeton Borough Hall.
    So I will see you all there. I hope everyone gets a chance to go to the Web and read the draft report:
    www.princetontwp.org/ sustainable_princeton_Draft 2.5
    Or you can go to the Web and just print out the report so you can read it at your leisure.
    Oops!
A longtime resident of Princeton, Pam Hersh is vice president for government and community affairs with Princeton HealthCare System. She is a former managing editor of The Princeton Packet