Cool vision

Whistler, the luxury ski resort, is an outstanding natural environment. Anxious not to spoil its best asset, it turned to The Natural Step for some fresh thinking on sustainable tourism. Trevor Lawson reports.

“A lot of people raise their eyebrows and ask how we can be sustainable when our economy is based on visitors.” Ken Melamed, the mayor of Whistler in the Canadian Rockies, has put his finger on the dilemma facing the premier ski resort. Its 10,000 residents are outnumbered five to one by tourists who cross continents to get there.

Melamed is not your average mayor. “I moved here 32 years ago, when it was very much a frontier town, to work as a stonemason in the summer and a ski patroller in the winter. But when my wife and I started to think about raising a family, I realised that construction was threatening the future of Whistler.”

Others, too, were recognising that visitors came to Whistler for its beautiful landscape, generating 10% of British Columbia’s tourism income in the process. “They didn’t want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg,” he says.

That’s where Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt came in. An oncologist from Sweden with a particular interest in the environment, he visited Whistler on a ski trip in 2000, and was invited to make a presentation on The Natural Step (TNS), a strategy to unify thinking about environmental, economic and social issues by looking at them from a full systems perspective. “It resonated dramatically in our community,” says Melamed. “We really liked the scientific basis behind it and since adopting it formally in 2002 we’ve been getting more and more comfortable with it.”

A key TNS technique is to look at the future differently, by ‘back-casting’. It’s an approach they’ve used with partners as well known as Ikea and McDonald’s. “It’s the opposite of forecasting,” explains TNS International’s chief exec David Cook. “We coach people to ask themselves what sustainability would look like for their organisation, based on our TNS principles, and to cast back through the steps needed to get there. It might take 30 years to reach that vision, but seeing the obstacles from a position of success can help you overcome them much more creatively.”

With its future in mind, Whistler has created a website packed with information for individuals and organisations on how to be sustainable, from the affordability of living in the town through to the best environmental choice in antifreeze. The community is busy putting together guidelines on green construction, and it’s aiming to make the Whistler Athlete Village a showcase of sustainable design when it co-hosts the 2010 Winter Olympic Games with Vancouver.

Cook’s favourite example of the Natural Step in action in Whistler is how it helped rethink the energy supply issue. Most hotels are heated with propane supplied by Terasen Gas, and when the company planned to extend its propane tank farm, Melamed and his peers raised concerns about the safety and environmental implications. Pressed for an alternative, Terasen’s suggested extending the natural gas pipeline instead, but that would have cost $42 million and tied Whistler into buying the gas for 50 years.

Looking back from the sustainable goals it had set through TNS, Whistler felt the options on the table were not flexible enough. “What if a more sustainable energy solution is developed in that time?” asks Melamed. “We wouldn’t be able to use it.” Terasen went back to the drawing board and came up with a system to deliver energy rather than gas. In the medium term, they’ll provide natural gas through a smaller, cheaper pipeline, allowing more homes and businesses to switch from diesel, so bringing an improvement in air quality. As new technologies are improved and refined (solar power, geothermal etc) the energy supplier will make those available as well. It is a pretty novel approach for an administration to build the opportunity into its arrangements with the provider.

“Economic growth is the toughest question and the reason why society has been so slow in addressing sustainability,” says Melamed. “We have to find a new paradigm for business and growth so that we are moving towards a steady state economy.” How many elected mayors across the world could say this and still hang on to office? But he seems to be taking his people with him. As Cook says, back-casting is helping Whistler find a way through the challenges. “You can’t take today’s problems with you.”

3 May 2007

Trevor Lawson