MONTAGE: The Main Street of America goes Kansas.

"Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything." ~Charles Kuralt

The federal government might have decommissioned U.S. Route 66 twenty-five years ago, but you don’t have to be middle-aged to recognize the name, or even to appreciate it. In fact, the Mother Road seems to have only lodged itself more securely into the American consciousness with each passing year; I’d venture to guess that even most teenagers are at least familiar with its existence. Aside from the roadside businesses and concomitant folk architecture that this celebrated route spawned, it also helped to elicit a hit song by Bobby Troup, a successful TV series, a gas station chain (Phillips 66), heritage associations in each of the route’s eight states, and numerous books and museums. Disney’s hit movie Cars originally was going to be named after the iconic road. This original paved link between Chicago to Los Angeles/Santa Monica boasts contests to win tour packages in the UK, while the blogosphere is filled with chronicles from people of many nationalities who have taken the legendary road trip. Its mystique stretches across the globe, despite—and then because of—the fact that it is as Americana as Monopoly.

At this point, it’s amazing to think that, despite the tsunami of cultural references we confront each year, much of the built environment that this asphalt artery helped to sustain is decaying. And the decay began long before the official decommissioning; if anything, the slam of the hammer against the coffin’s nail only galvanized interest in saving what still survived. The historic neon-accented motels routinely fall into American and international preservationists’ most endangered historic places. They’ve lost their reason for being since so much of the classic two-lane highway has been upgraded into four-lane, limited access interstate, thereby choking the original businesses from the vast majority of transcontinental travelers. Its extreme popularity led to its upgrade to a limited access interstate under Eisenhower’s Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, but this upgrade resulted in the near demise of the stop-and-go roadside culture. Last year, President Obama signed the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Reauthorization Act, extending a National Park Service program the essentially recognizes the upkeep of Route 66 is less a transportation or public works route and more a multi-state historic preservation ambition.

How well is it working? Federal aid is no doubt most visible through the improved/restored signage, with the emblematic logo resting on a backdrop of brown, which is usually the color for historic and cultural sites.

Alas, I have not traveled the entire trajectory of the Mother Road, but I can at least boast that I’ve been through more or less the entirety of Route 66’s path through Kansas: all 12 miles of it. Among the eight states, Kansas claims the smallest portion of the route by a long shot: all of the others get at least 100 miles, and New Mexico boasts nearly 500 miles. However, the entirety of Kansas’ portion remains a two-lane highway, passing exclusively through Cherokee County (the southeastern-most county in the state) and through only two real communities: Galena and Baxter Springs. The map below outlines in purple the path of Route 66 through Kansas, providing a brief link between the historically much longer portions in Missouri and Oklahoma.


Galena is an aggressively depopulating old mining town, with very little remaining of what was probably once an extensive main street. It may earn a blog post of its own. Riverton is an unincorporated community so small I failed to notice anything significant about it during the twenty seconds it took to pass through it. (Apparently the Eisler Brothers Country Store in Riverton is a Mother Road institution.) Far more prominent is the most southerly town in Kansas on the route, Baxter Springs, just a mile or so away from the Oklahoma Border.


The town’s main street is hardly flourishing, but it is alive enough to suggest that the community is trying—and virtually every establishment has some reference to Route 66. The photo series that follows only includes what is contained in the green rectangle on the map below:


Baxter Springs’ downtown is a mere three blocks. But the iconography of Route 66 is everywhere. I would expand upon this montage with a more detailed analysis, but many others before me have done a far better job. Among them is Arthur Krim’s Route 66: Iconography of the American Highway (2006, Center for American Places). My copy of this book is stored far away from my access right now; hopefully someday I’ll recover it and use it to enhance the analytical component of this blog post. In the meantime, I present Military Avenue, the main street of Baxter Springs, laden with references to the Main Street of America.


These banners appear systematically at almost every one of the streetlights of “vintage” design along the primary commercial section of Military Avenue in Baxter Springs. In hindsight, I wish I had taken more care to capture everything about these streetlights in one snapshot, but I didn’t. At any rate, even the street signs have the vintage Route 66 logo—an unsurprising but winsome touch.


All and all, the streetscape is spartan but clearly not neglected. Here’s the east side of the street:



And the west side:

The Historic District in its entirety isn’t terribly active, but it is generally intact, and although many of the buildings are shuttered or vacant, most appear fundamentally maintained.


Café on the Route has smartly tied its name to the heritage corridor upon which it rests, regardless of whether or not it’s a true Route 66 institution. I’m impelled to believe it is not: most of the genuine surviving establishments make no reference to the road in their names, because they pre-date the point when the road became a cultural artifact. This Café’s self-awareness suggests that its owners located here to capitalize on the legacy, and who can blame them? The building itself appears diligently preserved and includes an attractive mural.



To the left of the mural is a placard, indicating that building is within the purview of the Hampton Inn Save-a-Landmark program, an outreach preservation campaign involving considerable time and money, and the first example of a major hotel chain (Hilton) earning recognition for its preservation efforts. Apparently the Café on the Route’s building predates the Mother Road by over fifty years and was originally a bank robbed by Jesse James in 1876.


On the other side of Military Avenue stands the structure in the photo above, which according to this site on Kansas’ Historic Route 66, housed a true highway institution, Murphey’s Restaurant, until recently. The vinyl cladding and vintage sign, visible on the website, have clearly since been removed. It appears to me that the edifice is undergoing a renovation, having received what appear to be brand-new windows—a big no-no among preservationists if not conscientiously implemented, but a positive for Baxter Springs if it augurs a real reinvestment in the building. Traces of the old Route 66 logo still linger.


Apparently local artists have attempted to enliven some of the other vacant storefronts with references to the route in the windows:

Antique stores and flea markets, which appear to be the dominant uses along Baxter Springs’ main street, are replete with decal logos in the windows, or other Route-related bric-a-brac.


This may be the Café on the Route’s biggest competition:


This old Philips 66 no doubt stopped providing an oil change and tire rotation decades ago.

But the building is in excellent shape, and today it hosts a visitors’ center, which, judging from the sign, is less about Baxter Springs and more about the Route—a wise decision.

The lackadaisically run auto shop across the street from the center still took care to reference the Route.


But most remarkable in all of Baxter Springs is an apparently recent incarnation on the east side of Military Avenue: a soda fountain.

According to a local, the Route 66 Soda Fountain was funded through the Abernathy Charitable Trust and a children’s foundation. The Bill Abernathy Memorial Lifetime Learning Center operates solely as a 501(c)(3) organization, providing entertainment and activities to keep Baxter Springs’ youth out of trouble, as well as GED programs and adult education classes. Each vintage booth has outlets for laptops, and the place features high-speed wireless Internet. And it does serve ice cream, though I could not determine for certain if the building ever serves non-local visitors. It was not scheduled to open until later that evening, but peering in the glass, I witnessed what appeared to be an impeccable duplication of the soda fountains from days passed:


The highway continues southward from the historic district, along what is now labeled Alternate U.S. Highway 69, passing through what constitutes the modern-day commercial hub of Baxter Springs: Pizza Hut, KFC, O’Reilly Auto Parts, McDonald’s, and, a bit further down the road, a strip mall with a Dollar General and Wal-Mart.

I’m sanguine about the future of Baxter Springs. The commercial building stock is excellent and in good repair. The town’s boosters clearly know what its strongest asset is, and they have done their utmost to highlight it to passers-by. And most motorists passing through the town will be traveling along Alternate U.S. Highway 69—the historic Route 66—for utilitarian or recreational purposes. The utilitarian travelers are most likely on their way to something else, or perhaps they work in Baxter Springs. The recreational drivers are the key, and for nearly all of them, the route itself is the primary attraction, because it serves as a conduit to any sundry eye-catching curiosities along the curbs.

Perhaps Route 66 will experience, or is currently experiencing, a renaissance all its own. Maybe the Disney movie stimulated interest among a new generation. Maybe federal preservation grants are helping, but something tells me they are less than critical—they certainly aren’t mandating tour buses filled with Norwegians to pass through towns like Baxter Springs. This town in the corner of Kansas will find its modern reason for being by connecting with its past, which is as clichéd an ambition as there ever was. But while Baxter Springs’ history may be unremarkable or simply uninteresting on its own, the prominence of the Mother Road in American/global mythology gives it a competitive edge over another Kansas town twenty miles away. Baxter Springs is a stop on the quintessential road trip.

REWIND: From Silos to Steeples, Painting the Town Green.

Several months ago, I featured two examples of integrating sustainability and conservation into the built environment through civic participation in a blog post. The Greensburg, KS example that I featured has been relatively high profile. By most measurements, it remains the most ecologically friendly small town in America: since recovering from a catastrophic tornado, it has decided to rebuild using green building principles, and by this point it should have the highest concentration of LEED Platinum buildings of any municipality in the world. The other example in my blog article, First Mennonite Church on the north side of Indianapolis, hardly involves such grandiose gestures as Platinum Certification and is not widely known beyond the surrounding neighborhood, but the church’s efforts demonstrate a stewardship that is also financially savvy. Unfortunately, the timing I chose for my article was the dead of winter and much of which I hoped to feature on the grounds of the church was buried in snow. I recently returned to the site, which benefitted from July verdure and better demonstrates the points I was trying to make. Thus, I feature the article again, with minimal textual changes but a new series of photographs. Comments as always are appreciated.

In less than a decade, the color-adjective in this blog entry’s title has infiltrated common parlance so effectively that practically anyone who regularly tunes in to a national media source is well aware of the word’s ascension to a widespread lifestyle choice. Long the dominion of ideologically driven crusaders who often saw ecological insensitivity as a direct consequence of the moral laxity embedded in free market forces—a negative externality writ large—“going green” has become almost ubiquitous, because its strongest advocates have to an extent dexterously tiptoed around overt partisanship. Green might still be political, but it’s not just referring to a Party aligned with skeptics of capitalism that consistently captures less than three percent of the vote. It isn’t just for the tree-huggers. Though some will undoubtedly disagree with me, I believe the green movement has been tamed—perhaps even domesticated—by shifting its aims to attract the milquetoast moderates. Most reformist campaigns suffer some dilution in order to reach the mainstream, often sacrificing their most ardent supporters in the process. This is often the price that such a movement must pay in order for its ambitions to permeate society enough to effect measurable change. Whether its previous guises were too radical, too Rousseauan, or too removed from a supportive financial base, environmentalism shows increasing evidence of ecumenicalism that broadens its impact as it loses the bite of moral imperative.

Have I unfairly conflated the contemporary green revolution with other, more articulated, more potent ecological initiatives? Probably. But the non-discriminating public at large typically ingests transformative intellectual endeavors through broad gestures, and since I am trying to examine this phenomenon at an extreme macro level, it is only reasonable that I make similarly facile associations to support my examples. With those glittering generalities said, I will introduce one of the best case studies that suggested to me that the current green movement has staying power. The town of Greensburg, Kansas suffered a catastrophic tornado (measuring 5 on the Enhanced Fujita scale) on May 4, 2007. The photos below, taken by Kevin Snyder, demonstrate exactly what it looked like from a worm’s-eye-view just days after the storm.

Meanwhile, this Wikipedia photo provides an elevated view, showing the magnitude of the devastation. Outside of the street grid, anything resembling a town—just about everything protruding from the ground, with the exception of the courthouse and a few commercial structures —was annihilated. Many of the town’s 1,500 residents demonstrated their commitment to the region by immediately filing home insurance claims to begin repairs. However, a number of citizens recognized that the community, mired in a continued population decline, could not retain its young population, and that it should seize upon this disaster as an opportunity for reinvention. With the help of a design firm from Kansas City, Greensburg’s leaders devised a proposal for making the city as environmentally sustainable. The comprehensive plan, detailed through the site of the respective nonprofit Greensburg Green Town, culminated in the council’s resolution to make all new construction certified LEED Platinum, which is the highest standard of environmentally sustainable building technology as measured by the US Green Building Council .

Whether it involves a John Deere factory powered by wind turbines, or a courthouse that harvests and recycles rainwater, the goal that Greensburg’s leadership intends to achieve is to become the nation’s first fully ecologically sustainable town—an ambition that has earned the community attention in a Discovery Channel documentary and countless private and non-profit supporters who may have otherwise overlooked the community’s plight. A conversation with Mayor Bob Dixson revealed to me that while not every Greensburg inhabitant clearly bought on to the idea, a significant number in this conservative agrarian community realized that many green lifestyle choices are in themselves fundamentally conservative: frugality with natural resources; saving to purchase higher quality products that will have a greater longevity; encouraging self-sufficiency by working with materials close at hand. These are practices that the citizens of Greensburg widely embraced long before the storm. And thus Greensburg has prepared itself to re-emerge stronger, more attractive to investors, and greener than it was before.

Clearly the Greensburg story captures one particularly remarkable—and extreme—example of the proliferating visibility of the green movement. And LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) as a standard for judging green buildings is undeniably fashionable at the moment. But it doesn’t take much effort to find humbler examples that suggest that the green movement is to An Inconvenient Truth what Facebook is to MySpace: kindred outlets that have expanded the contingent that supports the original idea. You can guess which one of each pair has proven its resiliency by skirting controversy and divisiveness. The new wave of penury which Americans have confronted in this Great Recession only helps to reinforce the notion that mainstream ecological sensitivity is here for the foreseeable future, in the form of energy and resource conservation.

Of course it behooves the private sector to follow this trend—like most fads, it easily equates to a new source of revenue. For the public sector, it can equal more than simple cost savings: it could translate to a growing voter base. But what about when a non-profit or faith-based institution jumps on board?

The First Mennonite Church on the near-northwest side of Indianapolis has engaged in several initiatives that have dramatically altered the congregation’s stewardship of its large property, as well as its physical appearance. The ten-acre parcel rests in the almost exclusively residential Crooked Creek neighborhood, generally large-lot and suburban in appearance and character, yet conveniently only about four miles from the city’s downtown, as seen in the Google map below:


For decades, the church has endured the cost of maintaining its grounds through five hours a week of mowing labor, only to see the turf grass sit unused the vast majority of the time. In the summer, the lawn routinely floods, no doubt exacerbated by the impervious parking lot and rooflines nearby, as well as the fact that the Miami silt loam likely has hydric soil inclusions—in short, part of it was probably originally a wetland. A few years ago, the congregation at First Mennonite determined that the church’s grounds were offering little community or ecological benefit, while unnecessarily depleting operational funds through so much maintenance. With the help of a grant from the Indianapolis Center for Congregations, FMC teamed with local architecture firm Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf Inc to develop a multi-phase master landscape plan and site design, currently underway. The project began in the spring of 2008, with the planting of a combination of trees and shrubs which will serve as a riparian buffer to protect a bioswale partially underway, leading from an existing detention pond in the front of the property (near Knollton Road to the west) to the larger, planned retention pond for wetland mitigation purposes in the back of the property (to the east).

Here is the site of the eventual detention pond, currently enveloped on most sides by unmaintained prairie grasses and recently planted indigenous trees:

And another view with the church clearly in the background:

Tracing the perimeter of the property on the west and south sides (along the street) is a path made of crushed gravel:

The photo below provides a clearer example of the elevation change that sustains the bioswale, while also revealing the contrast between the manicured portion of the property with the unmaintained sections:

A soggy winter photo better reveals the obvious trajectory of the bioswale eventually connecting the two ponds:

While it would seem that First Mennonite’s property still includes a vast expanse of mowed turf, these pictures have only shown the front one-third or so of the parcel. The remaining majority (the eastern portion) includes a completely unlandscaped, unmaintained tall-grass prairie. In 2008, the church planted a variety of prairie grasses and wildflowers on the 3 or 4 acres between the retention pond and forested wetland on the east end of the property and the bioswale and detention pond on the west end. Here it is during this past winter:

And in the summer:


The untamed forest at the far eastern edge of the property can be seen in the photo below, first in the winter:
--then in the summer.


Meanwhile, the aerial photo below best illustrates the final stormwater management goal, with two large ponds connected by a bioswale, which carries the overflow through a dry planted ditch. The young trees and shrubs thus provide the riparian buffer.


And the aerial below shows the eventual plan for a complete one-half mile walking trail:


Future landscape design goals include extending the pervious, crushed gravel walking path according to the plans above, adding a shelter house, a memory garden, and community vegetable garden plots. Ideally, the entire site will serve as a demonstration project to encourage other communities to follow this example.

The First Mennonite Church articulated its goals through these improvements: 1) enhance the overall church mission through increased use of the grounds and by encouraging community participation in healthy activities; 2) limit the ecological footprint of the church by improving the natural habitat and reducing on-site consumption of energy; 3) minimizing maintenance by eliminating the need to mow much of the property and reducing likelihood of vandalism or littering by fostering a park-like setting of collective stewardship. Certain elements of these objectives may clash with other faith-based organizations, who find their religious teachings do not harmonize with green politics or the open invitation of the surrounding community to use their property for recreation. However, few churches would object to a new method of saving money.

Whether mowing the lawn regularly or unnecessarily watering the turf in the summertime (which of course necessitates more frequent mowing of the lawn), groundskeeping can prove inordinately expensive for an organization that relies upon donations and offerings to sustain its operations. The First Mennonite Church has embraced the idea that a manicured property is not necessarily more aesthetic, it certainly isn’t as ecologically sensitive, and all too often it costs more. The return on investment for an aggressively maintained lawn is always difficult to assess, but it may equate to whatever recreational opportunities it affords. This Mennonite Church in Indianapolis is gambling on the idea that an unspoiled wetland/forest may offer more to the congregation and neighboring community than mere grassy playing fields. Based on the numerous scattered examples across the country, their gamble may prove right. Going green is hardly a revolution (and how many revolutions have ever successfully met their initial goals?)—it’s the accrual of modest gestures over time that, with patience, offers a true impact. Conservation is the component of the green movement that is the quietest but also the most “sustainable”—another emerging buzzword. But why should it fall purely under the domain of liberal politics when the root of the word is “to conserve”? Like the citizens of Greensburg, the First Mennonite Church of Indianapolis is investing more now with the understanding that it will save money and offer quantifiable benefits in the long-term. It is an initiative that transcends political parties in this time of prolonged economic strain.

From silos to steeples—painting the town green.

In less than a decade, the color/adjective in this blog entry’s title has infiltrated common parlance so effectively that practically anyone who regularly tunes in to a national media source is well aware of the word’s ascension to a widespread lifestyle choice. Long the dominion of ideologically driven crusaders who often saw ecological insensitivity as a direct consequence of the moral laxity embedded in free market forces—a negative externality writ large—“going green” has become almost ubiquitous because its strongest advocates have in large degree dexterously tiptoed around overt partisanship. Green might still be political, but it’s not just referring to a Party aligned with skeptics of capitalism that consistently captures less than three percent of the vote. Though some will undoubtedly disagree with me, I believe the green movement has been tamed—perhaps even domesticated—by shifting its aims to attract the milquetoast moderates. Most reformist campaigns suffer some dilution in order to reach the mainstream, often sacrificing their most ardent supporters in the process. This is often the price that such a movement must pay in order for its ambitions to permeate society enough to effect measurable change. Whether its previous guises were too radical, too Rousseauan, or too removed from a supportive financial base, environmentalism shows increasing evidence of ecumenicalism that broadens its impact as it loses the bite of moral imperative.

Have I unfairly conflated the contemporary green movement with other ecological initiatives? Probably. But the non-discriminating public at large typically ingests transformative intellectual endeavors through broad gestures, and since I am trying to examine this phenomenon at an extreme macro level, it is only reasonable that I make similarly facile associations to substantiate my examples. With those glittering generalities said, I will introduce one of the best case studies that suggested to me that the current green movement has staying power. The town of Greensburg, Kansas suffered a catastrophic tornado (measuring 5 on the Enhanced Fujita scale) on May 4, 2007. The photos below, taken by Kevin Snyder, demonstrate exactly what it looked like from a worm’s-eye-view just days after the storm.




Meanwhile, this Wikipedia photo provides an elevated view, showing the magnitude of the devastation. Outside of the street grid, anything resembling a town—just about everything protruding from the ground—was annihilated. With the exception of the courthouse and a few commercial structures, every building was damaged beyond repair. Many of the town’s 1,500 residents demonstrated their commitment to the region by immediately filing insurance claims for repairing their homes. However, a number of citizens recognized that the community, mired in a continued population decline, could not retain its young population, and that it should seize upon this disaster as an opportunity for reinvention. With the help of a design firm from Kansas City, Greensburg’s leaders devised a proposal for making the city as environmentally sustainable. The comprehensive plan, detailed through the site of the respective nonprofit Greensburg Green Town, culminated in the council’s resolution to make all new construction certified LEED Platinum, which is the highest standard of environmentally sustainable building technology as measured by the US Green Building Council.

Whether it involves a John Deere factory powered by wind turbines, or a courthouse that harvests and recycles rainwater, the goal that Greensburg’s leadership intends to achieve is to become the nation’s first fully ecologically sustainable town—an ambition that has earned the community attention in a Discovery Channel documentary and countless private and non-profit supporters who may have otherwise overlooked the community’s plight. A conversation with Mayor Bob Dixson revealed to me that while not every Greensburg inhabitant clearly bought on to the idea, a significant number in this conservative agrarian community realized that many green lifestyle choices are in themselves fundamentally conservative: frugality with natural resources; saving to purchase higher quality products that will have a greater longevity; encouraging self-sufficiency by working with materials close at hand. These are practices that the citizens of Greensburg widely embraced long before the storm. And thus Greensburg has prepared itself to re-emerge stronger, more attractive to investors, and greener than it was before.

Clearly the Greensburg story captures one particularly remarkable—and extreme—example of the proliferating visibility of the green movement. And LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) as a standard for judging green buildings is undeniably fashionable at the moment. But it doesn’t take much effort to find humbler examples that suggest that going green is to An Inconvenient Truth what Facebook is to MySpace: kindred outlets that have expanded the clientele in support of the original idea. You can guess which one of each pair has proven its resiliency by skirting controversy. The new wave of penury which Americans have confronted in this Great Recession only helps to reinforce the notion that mainstream ecological sensitivity is here for the foreseeable future.

Of course it behooves the private sector to follow this trend—like most fads, it easily equates to a new source of revenue. For the public sector, it can equal more than simple cost savings: it could translate to a growing voter base. But what about when a non-profit or faith-based institution jumps on board?


The First Mennonite Church on the near-north side of Indianapolis has engaged in several initiatives that have dramatically altered the congregation’s stewardship of its large property, as well as its physical appearance. The ten-acre parcel rests in the almost exclusively residential Crooked Creek neighborhood, generally suburban in appearance and character, yet conveniently only about four miles from the city’s downtown, as seen in the Google map below:

For decades, the church has endured the cost of maintaining its grounds through five hours a week of mowing labor, only to see the turf grass sit unused the vast majority of the time. In the summer, the lawn routinely floods, no doubt exacerbated by the impervious parking lot and rooflines nearby, as well as the fact that the Miami silt loam likely has hydric soil inclusions—in short, part of it was probably originally a wetland. A few years ago, the congregation at First Mennonite determined that the church’s grounds were offering little community or ecological benefit, while unnecessarily depleting maintenance and operation funds. With the help of a grant from the Indianapolis Center for Congregations, FMC teamed with local architecture firm Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf Inc to develop a multi-phase master landscape plan and site design, currently underway. The project began in the spring of 2008, with the planting of a combination of trees and shrubs which will serve as a riparian buffer to protect a proposed bioswale leading from the existing detention pond in the front of the property (near Knollton Road to the west) to the larger, planned retention pond for wetland mitigation purposes in the back of the property (to the east).

I offer my deepest regrets that I learned about this remarkable church during such inclement weather; most of my photos shroud the impressive work under a thick layer of snow. But you can still make out the young plantings in the photo below:

And the unlandscaped portion to the left of this photo below is the evident retention pond at the front of the property.

Below is the obvious eventual trajectory of the bioswale connecting the two ponds:

Later in 2008, the church planted a variety of prairie grasses and wildflowers on the 3 or 4 acres between the retention pond and forested wetland on the east end of the property and the bioswale and detention pond on the west end.

The untamed forest at the far eastern edge of the property can be seen in the photo below.

I hope to revisit the site in the summer, when the landscaping will be much more plainly visible, and the long-term plan undoubtedly will show further progress.

Meanwhile, the aerial photo below best illustrates the final stormwater management goal, with two large ponds connected by a bioswale, which carries the overflow through a dry planted ditch. The young trees and shrubs thus provide the riparian buffer.

Future landscape design goals include a pervious, crushed gravel walking path (already partially in place in the front of the property), a shelter house, a memory garden, and community vegetable garden plots. Ideally, the entire site will serve as a demonstration project to encourage other communities to follow this example.

The First Mennonite Church articulated its goals through these improvements: 1) enhance the overall church mission through increased use of the grounds and by encouraging community participation in healthy activities; 2) limit the ecological footprint of the church by improving the natural habitat and reducing on-site consumption of energy; 3) minimizing maintenance by eliminating the need to mow much of the property and reducing likelihood of vandalism or littering by fostering a park-like setting of collective stewardship. Certain elements of these objectives may clash with other faith-based organizations, who find their religious teachings do not harmonize with green politics or the open invitation of the surrounding community to use their property for recreation. However, few churches would object to a new method of saving money.

Whether mowing the lawn regularly or unnecessarily watering the turf in the summertime (which of course necessitates more frequent mowing of the lawn), groundskeeping can prove inordinately expensive for an organization that relies upon donations to sustain its operations. The First Mennonite Church has embraced the idea that a manicured property is not necessarily more aesthetic, it certainly isn’t as ecologically sensitive, and all too often it costs more. The return on investment for an aggressively maintained lawn is always difficult to assess but may equate to whatever recreational opportunities it affords. This Mennonite Church in Indianapolis is gambling on the idea that an unspoiled wetland/forest may offer more to the congregation and neighboring community than mere grassy playing fields. Based on the numerous scattered examples across the country, their gamble may prove right. Going green is hardly a revolution (and how many revolutions have ever successfully met their initial goals?)—it’s the accrual of modest gestures over time that, with patience, offers a true impact. Conservation is the component of the green movement that is the quietest but also the most “sustainable” (another emerging buzzword). But why should it fall purely under the domain of liberal politics when the root of the word is “to conserve”? Like the citizens of Greensburg, the First Mennonite Church of Indianapolis is investing more now with the understanding that it will save money and offer quantifiable benefit in the long-term; it is a message that transcends political parties in this time of prolonged economic strain.