"I have rusty blood," says Beth Strommen, the planner and environmental scientist who manages the Baltimore City Office of Sustainability. Strommen has spent much of her life in old industrial cities such as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. She cut her teeth as a planner in the Hackensack Meadowlands of New Jersey, the site of long-running development battles on the outskirts of New York City. Today, the Meadowlands remain a swamp of half-baked development schemes, but they have also seen a remarkable rebirth. The marshes that interlace the area, long a dumping ground for garbage and industrial waste (and, legend goes, organized-crime hits; Jimmy Hoffa is said to rest there), are bouncing back.

Strommen says that when she first arrived in Baltimore in 1991, she looked at the city's grim inventory of industrial brownfields and saw "nothing but opportunity. I saw the hidden gem underneath."

Eighteen years after her arrival, Strommen thinks she has the recipe for such a green revival here—the recently released Sustainability Plan, which, if all goes as anticipated, will be approved by the Planning Commission early this month and sent to the City Council for final adoption as ordinance.  The plan is the product of eight months of work by the twenty-one-member mayor-appointed Commission on Sustainability, Strommen, one other Sustainability Office staffer, and dozens of volunteers. "I've worked on a lot of plans. I think this is the best," Strommen says. "I think we perfected it with this one."

Among the plan's recommendations:

• Clean up city streets, parks, and vacant lots.

• Make all bodies of water clean enough for swimming and fishing by, among other things, reducing impervious surfaces
(read: asphalt and concrete) by 25 percent.

• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent by 2015.

• Eliminate the use of pesticides and other chemicals on city lands.

• Cut energy use by mandating efficiency upgrades to homes at the time of sale.

• Promote urban farming.

• Give buses and trains priority at stoplights.

• Create a team of "youth ambassadors" to spread the word about eco-friendly living.

• Make Baltimore a center for green technology and business.

It's an agenda long on ambition but, at times, short on specifics about how the city can make the leap into the wild green yonder. Still, the very existence of the plan puts Baltimore in the company of larger cities such as Chicago and New York. The planning process helped land Charm City a spot on the 2008 list of the ten most sustainable cities in the United States, compiled by the green website SustainLane. (Baltimore was number ten. Topping the list—no great surprise—were San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon.)

The plan's recommendations were the products, first, of dozens of meetings held in conference rooms, community centers, and church basements last summer. Next, the planners enlisted a team of ambassadors who took the show on the road, soliciting input at meetings of business organizations, community associations, and senior citizens groups. They enlisted young people, who organized an event called Greenscape at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, where kids could learn about sustainability.

"Then we locked ourselves in our offices for two weeks," says Sustainability Coordinator Sarah Zaleski.

The process was not without acrimony. Some who were involved with the process say Strommen and her crew left out some of the bolder proposals in an effort to make the plan more pragmatic. Others wonder whether the economic downturn will render many recommendations impractical, or whether issues such as the recent uptick in violent crime puts eco-friendliness back on the back burner.

Julie Gabrielli, a green-certified architect (and occasional Urbanite contributor) who served on the Built Environment working group, says the Sustainability Commission, headed by Cheryl Casciani of the Baltimore Community Foundation, did "everything right in terms of process. The commission is a bunch of rock stars. It's diverse. There's a lot of brain power and community power." Gabrielli says the final draft is a hybrid of trying to be visionary and trying to be realistic.

Casciani says the commission tried to "be realistic, but with an aggressive tone," and to find those projects that could show results early. "You could do the John Kennedy approach and say, ‘Put a man on the moon,' without any idea how you're going to do that," she says. "We didn't go that route." She says none of the ideas that were floated during the planning process have been lost, but that the commission felt strongly that it needed a "structure that will enable us to make it bigger," not a "laundry list."

And others, such as Morning Sunday Hettleman, an environmental reporter for WEAA 88.9 FM and the president of the Maryland Environmental Justice Coalition, are concerned that the plan is too lofty to speak to most residents' concerns. "It's a wonderful plan, but wrong tools, wrong language," she says. "The plan is designed for people with a college education. The average person [in Baltimore] is dropping out of high school in ninth grade." She estimates it will take a decade or more just to bring city residents up to speed on current environmental thinking. (A good starting place, she says, would be a citywide rat eradication strategy.) Of the people behind the plan, she says, "They're prophets, and they climb out of the wilderness. You need to be sure you get more on the ground."

Still, much can be done without convincing people that they ought to be doing better by the planet, says Morgan Grove, a social ecologist with the Baltimore Ecosystem Study. "Buckminster Fuller famously said, ‘Don't try to change people. Change the environment in which they live,'" he says. "Look at the infrastructural things: zoning, public transportation, roads," he says, and use "selective levers" such as tax breaks and zoning requirements to encourage businesses to be more green.
Grove points to New York City, where, in 2007, Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled an aggressive sustainability strategy called PLANYC. Baltimore's sustainability office sits within the planning department and can offer only recommendations on city projects. But New York actually wrote sustainability into its charter, giving the office a cabinet-level position and control over funding.

To truly succeed, however, any plan as sweeping as Baltimore's needs to capture the imagination of the city, not just a handful of its green-minded true believers.

Such buy-in is not unattainable, says Jennifer Wolch, director of the Center for Sustainable Cities at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Wolch tells the story of the Los Angeles River, which was turned into a concrete-lined ditch in the 1950s. "Twenty years ago, people wanted to pave it, make it a truck lane," she says. "Then activists started talking about it as a river." It took time for the idea to take root, Wolch says, but "it got to be something that is simply accepted." In 2007, the city unveiled a multi-billion-dollar plan to restore the river, replacing old factories and industrial sites along its edges with parks, houses, and office buildings. "It won't be a naturalized river—it can't be with urban development right up to its banks," Wolch says. "But it will be a symbol of eco-restoration."

Wolch calls this the power of the "geographical imagination"—changing people's perception of the place they live, which in turn can lead them to change the place itself.

Could such symbolic transformation happen in Baltimore? Could we tear out the Jones Falls Expressway and restore the river it was named for, or turn Druid Hill Park into an urban farm? Someday, perhaps, but for now, Strommen says she expects more incremental change, the kind that spreads one vacant lot and green-home makeover at a time. "We want to pick short-term projects that have the capacity to multiply," she says. "We're going to hand them off to very capable groups, then go off and plant the next seed."

—Greg Hanscom