My Genesis of Career Values

I seeds for my career in destination marketing were planted during the first 33 months of the 1970s, while working my way through BYU in a windowless below-ground level nook of the administration building, situated next door to the dispatchers for campus police.

Universities are microcosms of communities, and I’ll explain later how this was also when the seeds were planted for me about the importance of community appearance including a passion for trees.

Back then we were a staff of two, then three, and later four or five of us who handled campus tours, administered the president’s box during football games and actively marketed the campus across the nation as a site for camps, workshops, summer youth conferences and events which included assisting their production.

My job title was conference coordinator.  The Office of Tours and Conferences back then fell under the director of University Relations, a division that fell under University Communications which had been headed until the year prior by the late Dr. Stephen R. Covey, then only 36 years old.

I quickly earned a supervisory role, and following a detour for law school, this experience would anchor what would become a 40-year career as a community-destination marketing executive for communities in Washington, Alaska and North Carolina.

The general idea of the then-Office of Tours and Conferences was to fuel demand for campus food services, housing and campus facilities to sustain year round employment and to engage professors and grad students during what were at the time very low volume summer school sessions.

Apparently the ground-work paid off because as I graduated it was spun off and today there is an entire three story visitor center (a tower of which is shown in this blog) located at the main campus entrance devoted to tours, public affairs, alumni affairs, guest relations, reunions, community relations and even a speakers bureau etc.

Up the hill north and east of Lavell Edwards Stadium is now a dedicated conference center where staff still in continuing education now coordinate and produce workshops, camps, special events and professional and association meetings.

It is a long ways from that basement hovel, but the most remarkable physical transformation since I graduated is the presence now of incredible landscaping and towering trees, part of a makeover that was initiated just as I left.

One of my last classes at BYU was a field botany class during the early summer session focused on trees.  BYU has always been a top undergraduate research university so my professor for the class taught us much more about the value of trees than just how to identify various species.

While I was growing up, BYU had undergone a tremendous building boom that had expanded the number of buildings from 6 to nearly 300 on a relatively flat plateau in the shadows of Y Mountain, a peak in the the Wasatch Range of the central Rocky Mountains.

The campus was manicured and grassed but found lacking at the time in overall landscaping, especially trees. This was not lost on two other people as I graduated in August of 1972 including Roy Peterman, a classmate, and fellow-Idaho native Jack Wheatley and his wife Mary Lois who as I graduated were just dropping off their eldest son for his first semester.

Peterman and I graduated from the same department, he in psychology and me in history but we each found our 40-year careers while working for the university part-time.  He worked in grounds keeping becoming director in 1978, I found my calling in community-destination marketing.  Both involve fostering and preserving sense of place including scenic character.

The Wheatley’s are more contemporary with our respective parents.  Jack was born in Pocatello, at the opposite end of the fault line of my youth.  He and his late wife built a business in Palo Alto, California in residential and then commercial real estate including construction of buildings on the campus of Stanford University there.

Neither had ties to BYU.  He graduated from West Point and she from arch-rival University of Utah.  But by the time they dropped their eldest son off to attend BYU, they had shaped a deep appreciation not just for buildings but the extraordinary value landscaping brings not only to both the built and natural environment but to human inspiration.

Wheatley’s are the name sakes for an incredible Institution housed in the same building as the visitors center at BYU.  In part, The Wheatley Institution’s purpose is to foster the teaching of ethical business behavior in universities.

They have also single-handedly donated thousands and thousands of trees to populate the 560+-acre BYU campus along with overall landscaping inspiration and design for waterways, walkways, outdoor art and natural areas that foster learning and creativity.

As a result, even though hundreds of additional buildings have been erected there since I graduated, the BYU campus has since become a spectacular example of the powerful force of biophilia on our lives.

The term was coined a decade after Jack and Mary Lois began to transform BYU’s campus with trees, art and gardens.  Biophia is now the well-proven concept that scenic preservation “optimizes productivity, healing time, learning functions and community cohesion” (Go Cougars!) as well as economic development.

Jack Wheately’s understanding of the importance of natural and scenic aesthetics is unique among engineers, builders and real estate developers.  He served during the Korean War with the US Army Corp of Engineers before achieving extraordinary financial success in commercial office building and leasing including R & D facilities in Silicon Valley.

Much of this occurred in the ten years before he turned his attention to scenic preservation on BYU’s campus in the early 1970s.

Maybe in part it was the influence of his wife, an art major.  Maybe it came from studying the evolution of the beautiful Stanford campus, or maybe it was from meeting the needs of tech entrepreneurs who seem sensitive to the tie between creativity, innovation and natural environment.

Regardless, if we could only clone Jack and infuse all commercial developers with his humility, understanding and commitment to biophilia, maybe community’s would no longer need to seek establish minimum requirements in order to protect their sense of place and environments.

The Threat of Non-Natives To Sense of Place

My three-tenths of an acre lot, where two forested ridges intersect just south of downtown Durham, North Carolina, is three-quarters natural area, accented by the little more than ten percent that is covered by four strips and two patches of lawn.

This tiny area is protected by more than a hundred trees including an over-story of equal parts towering hardwoods and pines and just more than ten under-story trees including two just-planted Dogwoods.

All of the leaves have dropped now except for several stubborn Red Oaks, but several times a day during his nature breaks, Mugsy, my English bulldog and I find ourselves staring up in awe.

Except for three Crepe Myrtles down along the city right-of-way of my street, all but one of the trees are native.  However, the natural area under the trees is also covered by a hundred shrubs of different varieties, all but three evergreen and also including a handful of non-native species.

I’ve only recently been introduced to the differences between native and non-native species and have come to understand why the latter are especially important while reading the informative 2007 book by Dr. Doug Tallamy entitled Bringing Nature Home which has now been updated and expanded.

Tallamy is currently chair of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the 269-year-old University of Delaware.  At his personal website, the professor makes it easy to identify the plants that are native to various regions of the US such as ones found for North Carolina, where I live, when you click on that area of the map shown.

He also lists as resources the native plant websites specific to each state, such as the one for where I live and a series of academic studies on the subject.

When I read Maggie Koerth-Baker’s Eureka column in the New York Times a few days ago entitled Bloom Town, I was reminded of the science Dr. Tallamy cites about the importance of biodiversity such as that found in my yard, most of it naturally derived.

MKB is also the science editor at Boing Boing, a magazine turned group blog.  She notes [paragraphing inserted for ease of online reading] that:

“Over the course of the last century, we’ve developed those preferences and started applying them to a wide variety of natural landscapes, shifting all places — whether desert, forest or prairie — closer to the norm.

Since the 1950s, for example, Phoenix has been remade into a much wetter place that more closely resembles the pond-dotted ecosystem of the Northeast. Sharon Hall, an associate professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, said, ‘The Phoenix metro area contains on the order of 1,000 lakes today, when previously there were none.’

Meanwhile, naturally moist Minneapolis is becoming drier as developers fill in wetlands.”

One take-away is that our settlements are not just being homogenized architecturally and culturally but also naturally.  Devoid of place-based assets, far too many locales are losing their distinctiveness and unique sense of place, making them less interesting as places to visit, work or live.

My former colleagues in community-destination marketing should seek to understand the importance of native vs. non-native species and be just as concerned about the 80% that remains natural, on average, as they are the 20% that is impervious.

In addition to educating governing boards, they would be well-advised to make sure those who steward their cities, counties and states are equally aware.

The Biophilic Convergence of Art, Nature, Science & Place

Even in the remote Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho where I was born and spent my early years there was no shortage of national heroes as I entered grade school in 1954, but none was more famous than scientific researcher Dr. Jonas Salk who had produced a vaccine against polio two years earlier that was being tested nation-wide that year with the inoculation of school children.

He was right up there with war hero and President Dwight D. Eisenhower and sports heroes of mine at the time including some who were from or playing in Idaho such as Elgin Baylor, Jerry Kramer, R.C. Owens, Harmon Killebrew and Vernon Law.

Salk, who would never win the Nobel Prize and was rejected by the National Academy of Sciences, would rival in fame two of my other national heroes at the time, Mickey Mantle and Jackie Robinson as well as two then-college heroes Johnny Unitas and Jim Brown, and a couple of high school basketball stand-outs you may have heard of, Jerry West and Oscar Robinson, all destined to be legends.

Polio had ravaged the nation during the first half of the 1900s, even afflicting a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1921.  But it wasn’t until 1938, six years after FDR was first elected President of the United States, that research into a cure and prevention began in earnest, just as Salk was entering medical school at New York University which didn’t have the quotas common at the time for students of Jewish origin.

In the months before I was born, Jonas Salk, a descendent of Russian-Jewish ancestors and with whom I would share the middle name “Edward,” was just settling into basement quarters at the University of Pittsburgh where he had been promised a research lab of his own to work on a cure for polio.

Sometime after I was born and four years before polio would strike 58,000 people in a single season, more than any other communicable disease, in an effort to clear his mind and escape that cramped, basement space, Salk sought respite in the Italian village of Assisi.

There dominating the landscape stood the 13th-century Franciscan monastery, named in that place of his birth and burial for  Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone, Saint Francis of Assisi.

Salk credits the rooms, spaces and views at Assisi with providing the inspiration and fresh ideas he would use to pioneer the first vaccine for polio.

I don’t know if Dr. Robert Lefkowitz, the new Nobel laureate in the sciences who does his research at Duke University in my adopted home of Durham NC is as inspired by art as much as he is by sports, but Salk certainly wasn’t unusual in his interest in the arts such as architecture.

Studies led by Dr. Robert Root-Bernstein, a physiology researcher at Michigan State University have looked into the role of avocations in the arts behind creative scientific discoveries among Nobel laureates in the sciences as well as members of the Royal Academy and the National Academy of Sciences compared to the general public over the more than a century.

Even back in 1947, as Salk was settling into his less than inspiring basement digs at the University of Pittsburgh, a poll of eminent scientists across the nation confirmed that “80% strongly recommended fine arts training as an essential element of scientific education,” a finding not rigorously tested and validated until Dr. Root-Bernstein’s study.

As blogged from these studies recently in Scientific American, “Nobel laureates in the sciences are seventeen times likelier than the average scientist to be a painter, twelve times as likely to be a poet, and four times as likely to be a musician.”

Neuroscientists, as noted by Emily Badger in her article for the new issue of Pacific Standard, are now looking closely into biophilic design.  When Dr. Salk commissioned Louis Kahn in the early 1960s to design his Salk Institute for Biological Studies along the seaside area of La Jolla area on land granted by the citizens of the City of San Diego, California, he sought inspiration from his time at Assisi by asking for “ample natural light, views of the Pacific Ocean, and a vast central plaza."

By 1984, researchers such as Dr. Roger Ulrich began making startling discoveries that confirmed Salk’s beliefs about Assisi, finding that the view from their window was a significant factor in post-operative recovery and the need for fewer painkillers.

It is no surprise then that ten years ago neuroscientists from Salk’s Institute teamed up with surrounding architects to found the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture.  In her article Badger quotes one of the founders, Dr. Fred Gage as saying in a speech that “changes in environment change the brain, and therefore change our behavior.”

The late Dr. Salk’s institute has trained 2,700 research scientists and, ironically, five have gone on to win Nobel prizes.  But you don’t have to go to La Jolla to see the influence of architecture on creativity.

Riding a national wave of renewed interest in historic downtowns, Durham’s city center’s adaptive reuse of several million square feet of unique 19th-century brick tobacco and textile factories has fueled its growth as a center for start ups and entrepreneurs, while at the same time, enhancing the community’s emergence over the past 20 years as a top-ranked center for the creative class.

Environment, both natural and built, are crucial to inspiration and creativity.

The Economics Of Biophilia

Absurdly, nearly 80 years ago, the outdoor billboard industry argued that nature, including trees, should be sacrificed on its behalf along public roadsides because the billboards served as a much better way for the public to see art than in galleries or museums.

Failing to see the irony, outdoor billboard enthusiasts today argue that the huge, roadside structures are not distracting which to marketers should indicate that they are then worthless or obsolete compared to the other 3.6 million ads we each see per year in America.

Equally ironic, one billboard, as shown in this blog, warns that the distraction of texting while driving kills and then encourages drivers to text for more driving tips. Uhhh!

But the desire by the nearly 8 of 10 North Carolinians, including me, who find outdoor billboards a desecration are concerned not about the billboards per se but about the much more valuable commodities being sacrificed along public roadsides so billboards can try to be distracting.

It isn’t just the fact that roadside vegetation, beyond the safety clear zone of 30 to 40 feet is valuable in sequestering carbon or holding and then slowly releasing storm water or generating oxygen or increasing appeal to visitors and relocating or expanding businesses etc.

Numerous scientific studies are showing that exposure to nature, even if it’s simulated, sharpens attention, improves productivity and satisfaction, increases rates of learning, reduces stress and violence, enhances well-being, increases property values and even accelerates healing.

Those are the same reasons that office buildings, retail outlets, hotels, restaurants, homes and hospitals are using products such as those manufactured in southeast Iowa by Sky Factory to replicate skies and mountain vistas where they are not otherwise available.

The term Biophilia was coined in 1984 by Harvard researcher and sociobiologist Dr. Edward O. Wilson to describe the innate, primal connection we all have with nature.  He argued that humans hold a biological need for connection with nature.

It has been validated by neuroscientists studying the relationship of nature to stimulation of the parts of the brain related to pleasure and positive outlook.  Exposure to nature has even been linked to increased retail sales far greater than any generated by advertising.  Views of trees and landscape have also been linked with a 10% reduction in absenteeism.

Unrelated, I’m sure, to being one of the largest recipients of campaign contributions from the outdoor billboard industry, the current democratic candidate for governor of North Carolina recently wrote that he understood “the value of outdoor advertising to our economy.”

I’m not a lawyer like he or a politician but I do have 40 years of experience in economic development including the study of economic impact and advertising; and with all due respect, there is no credible  evidence or model showing that billboards have any net economic value to the state.

But there is plenty of clear and compelling evidence that nature, including trees and vegetation along roadsides, has a huge economic, social and public health value not only along roadsides but in any way it can be manifest.

An overview of this evidence has just been published in an excellent 43-page white paper, authored by Terrapin Bright Green, development practitioners and thought-leaders in what they term a transformation to a restorative economy.