Water shortages, sewage leaks, chemical spills, development in environmentally sensitive areas, fires, pollutants in our waterways. We hear and read about these things almost every day in Southwest Florida.

But, really, aren’t these concerns primarily of government, regulatory agencies, and the so-called environmentalists? They might affect eco-tourism and development, but do they have any real bearing on the average businessperson?

Absolutely, say regional planners, regulators, educators, and corporate leaders.

It’s difficult to think of a business that is not somehow affected by the “green industry,” the environment and its management, says Wayne Daltry, director of the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council.

“With our area economy, the industry is as pervasive, just about, as the energy industry. Without energy, we don’t have a society. Well, without the environmental focus we don’t have all that much of an economy.”

Getting a handle on the “industry” is a little difficult. To those in the landscaping, tree-trimming, and lawn-maintenance businesses, theirs is the “green industry.” To others, its focus is environmental regulation — those governed by regulations and those employed as a result of regulations. Still others think more in terms of “green business,” improving efficiency and cost-effectiveness, even broadening a customer base and avoiding major capital expenditures, through management techniques that also benefit the environment.

Some produce environmental management products and services — from consulting, to fuel-cell development, to hazardous waste. Others are affected by environmental management practices, businesses, and industries as diverse as farming, auto shops, septic companies, hospitals, restaurants, and property development companies.

Environmental management “is so inseparable from our economy, it’s like trying to get to age 70 without going through ages 30 to 50,” Daltry says. “It’s intertwined.”

Keeping a Clean Nest

“Our economy is basically tied to people,” Daltry says, “and our population growth here isn’t because we’ve been birthing a lot of babies.” The population is growing because people keep coming for a better quality of life and that quality of life exists primarily because of Southwest Florida’s environment — warm winters, sunshine, water, clean air.

“When you get right down to it, what is the thing that generates the economy of Florida? It’s our environment,” says Rick Cantrell, director of district management for the South Florida Department of Environmental Protection. “Whether it’s the sun, the beach, the clean water, the fishing — it all goes back to ‘What do we sell in Florida?’ We sell the environment. And if we don’t take care of our environment, it’s going to have a direct negative impact on the whole state.”

Tourism, of course, is one component. Visitors are drawn by the areas natural resources. “We were using our area environment to sustain the economy,” Daltry points out, and the same elements that draw tourists also draw new residents. Historically, many of those have been retirees; now the “information age” also plays a role in the area’s population growth. Technology is releasing people from the traditional workplace and allowing them to set up their desks where they like. And growing numbers of people like Southwest Florida.

“North Dakota worries about out-migration; we don’t have that problem unless we soil our nest,” Daltry says, like Dade County did. “They soiled their nest so they started to lose population and stabilize, until they became the gateway of the Caribbean and new waves of immigration came from the south,” he adds.

“You have to watch,” he warns. “Take a look at year 2000 statistics on what’s happening to central cities and central metropolitan areas. They start having flight if you don’t manage your community’s assets. If we don’t do that here, we can become one of those places, too.”

So far, Southwest Florida has not gone the way of Dade County, but it hasn’t stayed green without a few fights. And it’s in the ring for a few more.

In the ‘70s, the battles to protect the community’s assets focused on the shoreline. As a result, the majority of Lee and Collier counties’ shorelines are in preserves, Daltry says. “In the latter part of the ‘80s, we started to realize that the piney flat — which we had thought would always be there because, hell, there was so much of it — had been over-drained,” he continues. “Now we’re starting to realize, ‘Oh my god, we need to do some more inland preserves there, too.’ Those are air sheds for cooling, air sheds for air quality, that’s headwater protection for water volumes and quality.”

Although a fire regime is normal for this environment, the fires we’ve been seeing in recent years — which take a toll on air quality — are not normal. “The water tables have become lowered to such an extent, there are no natural firebreaks — the firebreaks that were the swamps, the sloughs, the wetlands,” Daltry explains, as well as the vegetation so firmly rooted in the high water table that it could withstand normal fires. “Of course, if you burn off the vegetation,” he continues, “you have a desert. Deserts are made up of sand, which is what we have. You look around the world at our latitude, it’s commonly desert, so it’s been our vegetation that’s helped keep this part of the area attractive.

“Green industry. You’ve heard it before: Everything’s interrelated.”

One of the easiest ways to “soil our nest” would be through rampant, uncontrolled growth.

“In this part of Florida, the biggest challenge anyone has to deal with is growth,” says the state’s Department of Environmental Protection’s Rick Cantrell. “Growth is that two-edged sword. It’s good for the economy, it provides income for many people, but there’s always a downside to it. It requires the public to spend a lot more money on wastewater treatment plants, landfills, and ways of disposing waste.”

Recognizing that there is a breaking point is why there seems to be conflict in the business sector, Daltry says. “Typically, chambers of commerce are used to being pro-growth no matter what. You find in our area where that’s not necessarily the case, because established businesses can be adversely affected by more growth,” he explains.

Perhaps the biggest threats to the environment and the economy it sustains are political pressure and actions without good foresight, whether it be oil exploration or growth management.

“A speedy decision usually turns out to be a wrong one,” Daltry says. “In Southwest Florida, probably being a local elected official is the toughest job there is, because they can’t successfully blame somebody else. And every day, the policies that they implement have to find a balance point between sustaining the community/green industry and a contemporary issue. With the problem at the time, fixing it one way may become the problem of tomorrow.”

The Business of Regulation

State, federal, and local laws and regulations designed to protect the environment have spawned an industry in itself. Agencies ranging from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, to water management districts, to the federal Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and a host of others employ many people and contract with a wide variety of private businesses.

Regulation itself “generates business or results in business being formed to meet those needs,” says Cantrell. “No matter whether it’s a large, residential subdivision being planned and sited, or somebody building a dock behind their home, in most cases, there will be an environment professional, a private enterprise person involved in that.”

The need for people who understand environmental management and regulations spawned a component of the green industry — environmental consulting.

“There is a fairly significant industry that deals with environmental consulting, which really wouldn’t exist without environmental regulation and a concern for the environment that the people of Florida and of the United States have made known to their elected officials,” Cantrell says.

Regulations touch innumerable businesses and industries, though not always directly, and while environmental management protects some businesses, it can make others’ jobs harder.

“For the average business, it’s probably something of a pain — kind of like being stuck in traffic,” Daltry says. “For a few businesses, it’s pretty darned hard and a lot of them fail because they haven’t kept up with it. Others,” he adds, “go to politics in order to prevent from being covered by it.”

For those who gripe, Cantrell has this: “The first thing I tell everybody is that regulation didn’t get there without a cause.” In his 28 years in the business, he says, “there has never been a regulation that I’ve seen promulgated by either the agency or the legislature that did not come out of some abuse taking place by the private sector.”

Businesses should be aware of the regulations that affect them, he points out. “If you’re in an industry, you should try to keep abreast. Laws are not passed in secret.” Still, the department’s primary focus is to help businesses comply. “Enforcement is necessary at times, but the goal is not to do enforcement. It’s sort of like medicine — the goal is to prevent people from getting sick to start with,” he says. “The agency’s goal is to keep the environment clean. Every chance we get to make the regulations more user-friendly, ... we’re going to do it.”

But having someone on your side to help understand the regulations isn’t a bad idea. “We have very good environmental professionals in the area who will represent their clients well,” Cantrell says. “The agency’s not infallible, we do make mistakes. Having a professional represent you may point out some things that we might miss.”

“Our green industry, then, is more than ecotourism, more than environmental consultants. Most engineering firms have a firm environmentalist, like most law firms involved with land use issues have the firm planner. You’re finding a sprinkling of disciplines interrelated to each other as part of the planning and development cycle,” Daltry says.

The Profits of Environmental Protection

While laws and regulations are inherent in the realm of environmental management, they are not solely responsible for the “greening of industry.” A number of industries have discovered the benefits of implementing environmental management practices, says Bill Hammond, a member of the environmental studies faculty at Florida Gulf Coast University, whether through lower costs, higher profits, or potentially stronger positions in the stock market as a “green investment.”

Those in the building and development industry, in particular, have discovered the benefits of managing the environment. The industry is one of the most heavily regulated “because they touch all aspects of the permitting process,” Daltry says. However, Cantrell points out, “There is a self-motivation that aesthetically pleasing developments with a good, clean environment associated with it retails for more. There’s also a need to meet the state’s water and air quality requirements. Those things are very compatible; industry is discovering that in doing the latter, they’re actually producing the former.”

At the forefront of this trend in Southwest Florida is The Bonita Bay Group, founded by David Shakarian, the same man who founded General Nutrition Centers. “He was in the business of healthy living from a food point of view,” says David Graham, vice president of planning and development for the group, “so when he started this development, he brought that philosophy with him.

Shakarian launched his new community development business around 1982 and the first community was designed around the site’s natural elements and with consideration to environmental principals.

The company quickly discovered how profitable this approach was. “People really appreciated that,” Graham says. “People would pay as much, if not more, to be abutting a preserve as they would to be abutting a golf course. All of a sudden, they learned the lesson that preserving the environment and trying to ‘design with nature’ is actually a profitable way to go. It probably gave them a competitive advantage in the early days and their profits were better because of it.”

It costs more, he says, “but what the company has found is that you make more when you preserve those features.”

Other developers have learned the same lesson and it’s common now for communities to use their natural features as selling points.

Bonita Bay Group, WCI and others have discovered that environmental considerations are so important that they have full-time corporate officers whose sole purpose is to attend to those matters. “They now know that it’s extremely important and now there’s a full-time upper-level management person assigned to that very thing,” Hammond says.

Bonita Bay also retains its own maintenance staff, trained in environmental management practices. The training has been a result of trial and error, however, and Graham is among those who would like to see regulatory agencies offer courses in landscape maintenance, so the work could be contracted out to other companies.

“That’s just the tip of the iceberg that two of the largest developers in Southwest Florida have built internal structures to look at green management and green philosophy mindset for employees internally as well as externally,” Hammond continues. And he doesn’t believe it’s just in response to the regulatory environment. “I don’t see it as regulatory because that’s been around 40 years. I think it’s an internal shift in policy. We’ve seen it coming in the demand in houses. People are demanding more environmentally sound design and products in houses. And I think it’s a wake-up call to those that are building houses that they start looking at not only the house we build, but what kind of company are we?”

Even developers with good environmental management practices, however, face criticism for enhancing sprawl.

“The argument against them has been ‘Well, they’re still moving into our open space.’ Well, that’s regional population growth,” Daltry says. “In our area, what has added edge to the growth debate/dilemma is the commitment of large breadths of our land to subdivisions approved in the ‘50s and ‘60s before the light dawned. Those subdivisions are using up land that could be better developed reducing pressure on remaining open lands. But they’re in development patterns that have become antiquated so it’s easier for new development to go to unaltered lands than it is for them to try to redevelop those platted lands,” Daltry says.

“Growth is what drives our economy in this part of Florida and that growth is here because of the environment,” says Cantrell. “The key is to ... make growth compatible with a clean environment. At some point in time, that is going to have to translate into less of a reliance on developing new property and more of a reliance on redeveloping existing properties.” That, he explains, is “sustainability.”

Turning Concerns into Business Opportunities

Other environmental problems and issues are related not so much to new development as to old, and that is where more challenges and opportunities lie, says Dick Anderson, director of sales and customer service for Mariner Properties’ mitigation bank at Little Pine Island. Anderson also is a founder of the Southwest Florida Council for Environment Education, Inc. “Once the natural systems that are out there in the environment working can be married to economic forces, that’s when we’ll have some real dynamic win-win situations,” says Anderson.

For example, he says, if the water quality in Estero Bay is degraded, then what are the reasons? “Is it because of new growth or older, poorly located and planned facilities? … But we’re not really looking at those because they’re not being permitted now; they already exist. … It’s an opportunity for science, for public agencies, certainly it’s an opportunity for private business,” he says.

Businesses and communities in other areas have tackled those kinds of problems and we should be learning from them, Hammond says. For instance, some California communities require developers not only to install conservation fixtures like low-flow toilets and showers into new housing, they must also pay an impact fee that is earmarked to retrofit older homes in less affluent areas.

That creates its own market for plumbers but, more important, it ideally conserves enough water so that the community or developer won’t have to spend the capital to dig another well.

There are many business opportunities for those who can find creative ways to deal with existing needs, Anderson continues. “Environmental management in our area has to do with growth management. We’ve made mistakes in the past. We get over 50 inches of rainfall a year, yet we have water shortages. We have a lot of moisture available, but we haven’t managed it so well in places for development. Environmental management, to me, translates to growth management and I believe we have more opportunities than problems,” he says.

The opportunities in “green business” reach far beyond growth management.

Hammond isn’t fond of the term and the stereotypical baggage it carries. Most people have little understanding of the concept — which really translates to efficiency. It’s simply a way of finding the “best management practice” to increase profits and reduce costs by reassessing how a business operates, and multinational corporations are among those that have implemented “green” practices to save millions of dollars.

One component includes those businesses and industries that develop products and services to improve efficiency — fuel cells to replace combustible engines in automobiles, building materials designed to cut heating and cooling costs, consulting services to help companies cut costs, while helping the environment.

One of the leaders in that field is Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute. “He’s helped major, Fortune 100 companies figure out how, just by changing lighting fixtures and changing some of the major equipment they buy, they could save a tremendous amount of energy and cut costs substantially.”

For example, Hammond says, the Environmental Defense Fund worked with McDonald’s on green business practices to cut money. “They found things like cutting napkins size — something as small as that — had a tremendous impact,” especially considering the number of napkins used worldwide by McDonald’s customers.

“By tracking how we use products, how we use resources, and looking at how we could be more thoughtful about using them more appropriately, that’s the real savings in the green industry,” he says.

There are numerous examples on a national and international scale, he continues. With the pending “energy crisis,” the American auto manufacturers are sure to follow Toyota and Honda’s examples in producing hybrid cars. Furthermore, he adds, “the projection is that five years from now, the first generation of fuel-cell cars will be out there,” which will be powered not by fossil-fuel-powered combustible engines, but by hydrogen from much more benign sources.

“Green business” opportunities are growing in the home-building sector, as well.

When Hammond built his house four years ago, for example, he used trusses with flying ends “so we could get an extra foot on our overhangs to take the heat load off the walls. We put cupolas up in the attic so we get air circulation up in the attic without having to put a vent ridge in, which is more susceptible to hurricane damage.”

Florida Power & Light “has known it for years. If they can get you to conserve electricity in your house, they’re willing to subsidize you putting new insulation in or more efficient appliances or a more efficient air conditioner,” he says. “They’re doing it because it’s good green business. For every kilowatt hour saved, that’s a capital investment in a plant they don’t have to build.” As with the low-flow fixtures in California, he says, “We can create water resources by saving water resources as fast or faster than drilling wells. The same thing with electricity. For every bit of electricity that I can save, it means there’s a power place I don’t have to build and operate,” Hammond says.

“I think that’s the magic of the green philosophy is that every person can take an action in their personal life and home that can make a difference, because that aggregate is what saves those kilowatt hours or saves those gallons of water. And every time someone individually does that, it collectively means we don’t need as many ASR [aquifer storage and recovery] wells and these big-capital reservoirs and all those things.”

Environmental management practices and philosophies have an impact on industries “across the board,” Hammond says. “I don’t know of an industry that’s not looking at those things.”

And it is bound to continue growing as more businesses recognize the benefits, he says. “You have to help educate people and then it has to be part of the cultural practice. When I do this in my home, my grandkids see it and then they do it. If corporate leaders are doing it and not just talking about it, people become believers in it,” he says. “Most people who aren’t doing these things aren’t because they never thought about it. It’s not that hard to do.”

Jill Tyrer is a freelance writer and editor based in Cape Coral.