11/30/07- As seen in SOlares hill

Belland Rides A New Wave of Green

BY Mark Howell

This wave of green is tossing up the most unexpected of bedfellows. Businessman Chris Belland, a founding partner in Historic Tours of America, has developed an Al Gore-style show-and-tell called “Love Your Island” that he brought to a luncheon this week held by the Ambassadors, a growing group of citizens who qualify by sitting in on city functions

As a member of the mayor’s Green Coalition and cochair of the city’s Clean and Green Committee (“I’m not Al Gore”), Belland is doing for waste and wastefulness what the former Vice President has done for global warming. His presentation, just like Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” on Powerpoint, has been seen in various venues around the place and has already been videoed.

In the big BOQ dining room on the Navy base, Belland introduced us to “an animal committing suicide.” One of Key West’s leading corporate executives, Belland was raised near the Miami River and can recall why Miami got its name from the word for “sweet water.” Not any more — not there or hardly anywhere. “Unclean water,” he said, “now kills more people in the world than anything else.”

It was the beginning of a scary litany, broken only by questions occasionally hurled at the audience by Belland and followed by a bouncing ball if the answer was correct. His numbers were numbing but an interesting lesson in compounding. It takes 12 days to count up to one million and 32 years to count up to one billion. One trillion dollars in dollar bills would stretch all the way to the Sun.

That’s thinking globally. Thinking locally, Belland realized that very morning, he said, that the artichoke hearts in his kitchen were from Peru. Food travels such immense distances these days, not just up and down the Keys (“we bring it down here, we have to haul it out”). It’s a wasteful practice and feeds our appetite for packaging, for more and more plastic.

The throwaway culture that plastic has wrought, explained Belland, began with an excess of oil-based products manufactured during World War II, for which a civilian market had to be found. “I’m not a conspiracy person,” he added. “It’s the profit motive.”

Ever since the nation’s first landfill appeared in California in 1935, there are now 10,000 landfills in the country; the one in New York is the biggest man-made thing in all the land. “Each of us throws away 4-and-a-half pounds of waste a day — multiply that by 300 million people over 365 days and you get half-atrillion pounds a year.”

They don’t like landfills in Toronto, said Belland, so the Canadians ship their trash to the U.S.

It gets worse. There are 50,000 toxic sites in America. Twenty-five million acres of Earth’s natural forest are lost every year. The animal extinction rate is at its highest rate in history. “I could go on and on,” said Belland. “It overwhelms you. You think, Oh my God! Stop!”

But one person changing is a start. Belland himself is changing every day. He takes his own reusable bag to the grocery store to save on paper or plastic. He carries his own cup around with him, not made of plastic, that is the only cup he uses. (From drinking warm liquid out of Styrofoam cups, “There is nobody in this room that does not have petroleum waste product in their body,” he said.)

A photo popped up on the screen of a storm water drain littered with cigarette butts. “These are made of cellulose, which takes 25 years to disappear.” America tosses away 176 million pounds of butts a year. To think locally, our population of about 3,000 smokers is producing 71,000 butts a day, adding up to 8 million pounds of butt a year.

“Why subsidize tobacco?” cried an Ambassador, her hand waving from the audience.

“I don’t know,” said Belland.

He does know that his granddaughters — here he brandished a color portrait of Katie and Olivia — deserve a better world. “We’re running out of time,” he said, “and we’ve got a long, long way to go.” See the wisdom in eliminating waste and wastefulness, he said, and the financial advantages.

“The communal fat man has got to stop ... I beg you to chose not to be overwhelmed.

“Every day from now on, say that you are going to change something you do.”

mhowell@keysnews.com