Local Foods, Local Businesses, Local Climate Solutions

At November’s monthly meetup, we tackled a big, daunting, but important bucket: sustainable economic development. What does that even mean? Good question. That’s where our conversation started!

Katie Deuel, Executive Director of Home ReSource, joined us to help facilitate the discussion. She and the HR team have done a lot of work around this topic over the years, and consider it part of their organizational mission to spur opportunities for sustainable business growth across the broader Missoula community. Katie asked us to consider what a sustainable economy would look like in Missoula. Ideas that people shared included:

• Uses renewable electricity
• Prioritizes achieving zero waste
• Promotes local food and local self-reliance
• Resilient!
• Involves a circular economy where resources would not be extracted, used and then disposed of, but instead recovered, reused and recycled for other purposes
• Natural resource use and carbon footprint is decoupled from economic growth; in other words, as our community grows in number and wealth, we maintain or even reduce our individual and collective carbon footprint/consumption/resource use. ​​

The Clark Fork Market

All of these ideas and more mentioned were great to consider, and we had a lot of new faces at the meeting to help spur some brainstorming. But jeez: with such big visions for a more economically sustainable Missoula, where do you even begin?

The short answer: we don’t know!  But we do know that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. When it comes to climate change and the economy, there are lots of great resources nationally and in other communities that Missoula can draw on, in addition to the wisdom of our homegrown sustainable entities and enterprises.

Over the course of our conversation, three main sustainable economic development pathways seemed to emerge:

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Programs and policies that recognize and incentivize existing local businesses and buildings to become more sustainable

• Several great minds from the now-dormant Sustainable Business Council (SBC) joined our discussion and explained what the SBC had been all about. In addition to providing support and sustainability resources to its members, the SBC also educated Missoula businesses and consumers about the value of local purchasing. One of SBC’s most successful programs was its Buy Local Campaign during which the organization asked community members to pledge to make 10 percent of their food purchases from local sources.
• We also heard from folks connected with BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. BALLE provides resources and support to communities developing their local economies in healthy, sustainable, and equitable ways. Dawn McGee, a BALLE board member, talked about how much of BALLE’s framework could be implemented in Missoula, again discussing the success of the organization’s local food and businesses campaigns.
• While it would be awesome if the SBC is revived, in the meantime, one idea is to develop another local sustainable/climate-friendly “seal of approval” and/or certification process for local businesses and organizations. Climate Smart Missoula might serve as the home for this effort, but other entities could bring their expertise to help develop guidelines or certify member groups. Might we use the framework of “0-50-100” as a guide? (Zero Waste, 50% sustainable travel trips, and 100% clean energy.) Businesses that sought a 0-50-100 seal of approval could commit to taking certain steps under those three sustainability areas. Tell us what you think about this idea - funding, as usual, would be a challenge, but we do think this could be a really powerful tool to reduce our community’s carbon footprint.

Solar panels atop the Front St. Parking Garage!

Strategies and policies to attract sustainable/climate-friendly businesses and industries to locate in Missoula
This is an interesting approach, another one that has tons of potential for Missoula. How might we attract businesses or industries that are compatible with our community’s short- and long-term climate and energy goals (and on the flipside, disincentivize those that are not, such as energy-intensive industries like cryptocurrency mining). The time seems ripe for more of an intentional conversation among “economic development” professionals and organizations - like Missoula Economic Partnership, Missoula Downtown Association, Destination Missoula and more - to think about how Missoula can become known for building the green, climate-friendly economy of the 21st century.

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Policies and approaches to ensuring that expansion of our community’s physical infrastructure (e.g. residential and commercial buildings and services) happens sustainably

• This pathway is obviously related closely to smart growth. (That’s the nature of our buckets, and of climate change in general - issues intersect in such interesting ways!) The recently adopted long-range Our Missoula Growth Plan does emphasize the importance of sustainability, but it’s not always clear what that looks like in practice.
• Some communities have implemented Stretch Building Codes, ordinances that reward developers for exceeding the baseline building codes in terms of energy efficiency and green building. Several groups here have considered and even advocated for stretch codes, but they have yet to come into fruition - this could be a great option, especially since over half our community’s carbon footprint comes from residential and commercial building energy use!
• The Missoula Redevelopment Agency may also offer incentives for sustainability when it comes to redevelopment of properties - we’d love to know more about their current policies and ways to boost climate-friendly development. In any case, revitalizing and increasing density in our urban core is certainly an important strategy for sustainable local growth.

​There are a lot more folks that we would like to have join this conversation going forward!

We unfortunately didn’t have time to draw up an entire plan. But we did discuss what has already been done and the clear need for a way to connect the sustainability efforts that are already happening in our community. A big bucket like sustainable economic development requires cooperation and partnerships between all facets of our community--including businesses both local and non-local, nonprofits, municipal agencies, and our creative community members. As we more forward with discussions about our city’s growth, it’s important to keep in mind something we all share: we all love Missoula, and we all want it to grow in a sustainable, forward-thinking way!

And on that note, come celebrate these developing partnerships and love for community with us at our Year 3 Celebration on December 6th. Details HERE. We hope to see you there!

-Abby & Anna