Charting a sustainable, green future

Charting a sustainable, green future

Marco Kusumawijaya, Contributor, Bellagio, Italy, marcokw@centrin.net.id

Bellagio, two hours drive up the hill from Milan, Italy, is a
perfect place to do green mapping. But the 22 green mapmakers
from 14 countries -- six of them from developing countries,
including this writer from Indonesia, were not there to do
exactly that.

Instead, they were there staying at the Rockefeller
Foundation's 50-acre hilly estate by the highland lake, from Dec.
2 to Dec. 6, to chart ways to move the world toward sustainable
living with an ancient tool: map-making.

Green map-making is a process that involves ordinary people
charting the interconnections between nature, culture and society
in a built environment. They do this by spotting places of
environmental and cultural significance and marking them using
125 award-winning universal icons developed by Green Map System.

In the process of producing the 119 green maps published so
far, some local icons have also been invented by, or adapted to,
different places. The latest map, which coincidentally is
Jakarta's second green map, for example, has local icons for
"traditional/ethnic food outlets" and "water-level watch places",
as well as a "bike repair shop" icon adopted from Kyoto's bicycle
green map. The map also enjoyed the privilege of being launched
during that first global meeting of green mapmakers. Former
minister of settlement and regional development Erna Witoelar was
among the first prelaunch buyers of the 119th map.

The founder of the green map movement, Wendy Brawer, said she
was moved to turn "green" when an orangutan in Yogyakarta's zoo
tossed her a stone in 1989. She said she suddenly felt her life
had a mission, and decided to focus on ecological activities from
that point. Her lifestyle changed. She now rides her bicycle
everywhere in New York and piles her garbage only in a composting
unit in a community garden in her neighborhood.

Despite the inspiration it provided, Yogyakarta had its own
green map published only in July 2002. The map charted the unique
places in Jero Beteng, the walled surroundings of the Yogyakarta
Sultan's Palace.

The green mapmakers who gathered in Bellagio are self-driven
and autonomous people who became amateur cartographers because
they believe that global-scale problems should not overwhelm our
ability to respond and take actions locally. Their backgrounds
and actual professions are diverse: philosophy, architecture,
community workers, product designers, agriculture, tourism
marketing, urban planning, eco-design. It seems that, trying to
be optimists, all of us somehow have to turn into activists.

It took 13 years from Yogyakarta to Bellagio, but green maps
have been used by people around the world to guide them to better
quality of lives, sustainable futures and cities and towns. The
maps guide citizens to outlets for responsible social action,
help them live more culturally rich, ecologically literate lives,
giving them stronger connections to diverse communities
worldwide.

In Kyoto, hotels expressed a willingness to be part of a
bicycle rental system in order to get onto the bicycle map. In
Toronto, a green map has proven to be a big success with tourists
looking for something besides conventional destinations. In
Tamagawa, 500,000 green maps were distributed as centerfolds for
a lifestyle magazine. Jakarta's first green map was actually the
first to be published as the centerfold of a magazine, in this
case AIKON.

But how do we assess the impact of these maps? That was among
the questions discussed during this first global get-together.
Also discussed was how to work together as a group of several
hundreds green mapmakers around the world to better impact the
planet through sustainable living. Ambitious tasks to be
accomplished in the years to come include a first Global Green
Atlas, a revamped green map icon system and an impact assessment
system.

Those tasks justify the green mapmakers being the privileged
guests of the Rockefeller Foundation's Study and Conference
Center in Bellagio. Their names were recorded along with the
names of distinguished scholars such as Peter L. Berger and
Samuel Huntington, who were both the center's guests in 1999

There could not be a better place than Bellagio to host the
"green people", as a member of the board of trustees called them.
Bellagio is in a way a typical Italian village: expansive lake,
mountains of rocks with snow on the higher peaks, villas with
bright-colored stucco and plenty of evergreen plants.

And the Rockefeller Foundation estate is a star in the area. A
narrow gate surprisingly opens on a narrow village street, which
is completely lined by buildings, leading us to a hilly
promontory protruding into the elongated lake. The 50 acres of
green space are only sparsely dotted with eight main buildings,
connected by winding roads and steep traversing paths. Some
buildings date back to the 17th century. The remains of a church
built in 1080 have become part of the main Villa Serbelloni. The
whole property was donated to the foundation by Ella Walker,
heiress to Hiram Walker, the famous whiskymaker. She bought it in
1928 and lived there for the rest of her life, dying in a room
that is now the library.

The Romans were already firmly established in the area by the
first century A.D, with their villas dotting the edges of the
lake. Pliny the Younger wrote about his own two villas in
Bellagio: "One is set high on a cliff -- and overlooks the lake,
supported by rock, as if by the stilt-like shoes of the actors in
tragedy, I call it Tragedia. It enjoys a broad view of the lake,
the ridge on which it stands divides in two -- from its spacious
terrace, the descent to the lake is gentle."