In The Zone Spokane Interstate Fair’s New Green Zone Looks Like A Blue-Ribbon Favorite
Like any respectable harvest-time exposition, Spokane’s Interstate Fair has dahlias and draft horses, butter churning and dog obedience, a SPAM recipe contest and Morse Code demonstrations.
If one booth doesn’t pique your interest, the next one probably will. (“Hows abouts a nice sticky elephant ear, honey?”)
But few exhibits offer as broad an appeal as something new this year called The Green Zone.
Whether you live in a house, tend a yard or garden, shop in a grocery story, eat in restaurants, attend school, ride a bus, commute to work, use the library, enjoy the outdoors - whatever you do, The Green Zone has tips for enhancing interaction with your surroundings.
“The idea behind The Green Zone,” explains Ann Bailor of the Spokane Regional Solid Waste System, “is to provide something threedimensional where people can learn little ways - and big ways - they can changes their lives to become less invasive on the Earth.”
Don’t worry, she’s not talking hair shirts and wild hickory nuts. In fact, living less invasively, Green Zone style, usually means living safer, more comfortably and less expensively than we already do.
For instance, The Green Zone’s centerpiece is a house made of polystyrene-and-cement building blocks that are twice as energy-efficient as conventional 2-by-6 wood construction, plus they’re fireproof, quiet, pest-resistant. And 86 percent of the blocks’ content is recycled packing material and shredded fast-food containers.
The model home includes a kitchen (equipped with a recycling center, of course), family room, home office, sun space and “working” greenhouse, all tucked inside the northeast corner of the fairground’s new exhibition hall.
Low-maintenance yard landscape provides food for the home’s hypothetical occupants and habitat for urban wildlife. A mulching lawn mower is refueled with solar energy, and a composting exhibit demonstrates how to reduce yard waste while creating “black gold” for the garden. An enclosed exercise run for pet cats shows one way to curb unnecessary bird losses.
Other Green Zone displays include:
Urban forestry’s role in cleaning city air and reducing summer heat.
The advantages of using energy-efficient and human-powered transportation, and the convenience of telecommuting to work.
Ways of shopping smarter to cut waste and save money.
Environmentally sensitive management of agricultural lands, streams, forests and mountains.
And the adjacent public restrooms teach lessons about low-flush toilets and the advantages of cloth diapers over disposables.
“We’ve been trying to convey all these messages separately for years,” says Green Zone designer Don Stephens. “The fair offered us an irresistible opportunity to pull them all together under one roof.”
Although numerous local businesses contributed materials and labor, nothing is actually for sale in The Green Zone. Instead, a free pamphlet lists all the resources - both public and private - associated with the exhibit.
“Our goal is for people to leave feeling, ‘Gee, I can do that,”’ says Bailor, president of the Green Zone Committee.
In many ways, The Green Zone resembles one of those World’s Fair-type “House of Tomorrow” exhibits, but with one important distinction: all the products and techniques on display here are available today, and probably cost less (in the long run) than their more conventional competition.
Designer Stephens believes Green Zone visitors are better served by less far-out imagery - e.g., a robot butler who vacuums the carpet while proffering a tray of hors d’oeuvres - and more concrete solutions to today’s challenges, such as how to manage rain runoff and avoid having to expand Spokane’s sewage treatment plant.
Each year, The Green Zone will incorporate new products and approaches to reducing waste and improving area residents’ quality of life.
“We’re optimistic realists,” Stephens says. “We recognize we can’t force people to embrace these ideas.
“But if they leave The Green Zone with two or three things they didn’t know were possible, over time they may realize how sensible some of these ideas are.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Drawing
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Fair fare The Spokane Interstate runs today through Sept. 15. Fair hours are 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., with carnival rides running to midnight. Admission is $7, $5 for juniors (12-17) and seniors (65 and older), $3 for children 6-11.