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PrintS.E.E. Expo Gone With the Wind
Plug unexpectedly pulled on popular eco event
Despite the ragged economy (or, in the best cases, because of it), initiatives in green building, green careers and alternative energy have gained steady traction in recent years. A few small steps: The not-so-big-house movement is swelling, many more architects are seeking LEED certification for commercial buildings, and a number of hybrid-fuel buses were recently acquired by the City of Asheville Transportation department, at a cost of $2.1 million, road-testing an eventual mission to replace the whole fleet.
Nevertheless, one of the region's top sustainable-living events, the Southern Energy & Environment Expo, has been unexpectedly canceled by its co-founder, Ned Ryan Doyle, who also announced the closing of the only recently opened Our Southern Community Center in Hendersonville. The goal of the Community Center was to further the aims of the S.E.E. Expo year-round, offering classes and workshops in everything from composting to solar adaptation.
"We built it, but (almost) no one came," Doyle writes in a passage on the Expo's Website. "Business is business and we lost the gamble."
But where the Community Center lasted only a few months, the Expo was poised to celebrate its 10th anniversary with a three-day event Aug. 19-21 at the WNC Agricultural Center; what's more, the event had seen increasing attendance during its decade-long run. In May, Doyle told Carolina Home + Garden that "it has begun to make sense to more and more people to invest in an infrastructure that will eventually support free energy" (that is, solar and wind power).
But even those newly converted to the cause were not enough to sustain the Expo's goals. "Those of us concerned with rational, sustainable solutions are simply outnumbered, for whatever reasons. Holding [another] S.E.E. Expo would be, as the saying goes, today little more than preaching to the same choir, " writes Doyle. "We already know the 'songs of sustainability,' it's the majority we need to reach ... and have not been able to. It's time for some kind of change of approach."
What shape that might take remains to be seen. On the immediately practical front, Doyle notes that all S.E.E. registrations will be refunded.
