BUILDING A COMMUNITY AND SUSTAINABILITY TOGETHER

Richard N. Knowles, Ph.D.

The current way in which most communities try to address and solve their difficult problems is cumbersome and often leads to more frustration and failure. This article illustrates new ways to come together. In both Niagara Falls, NY, and Charleston, WV, new opportunities opened up for the chemical plants and the communities to find and build on the common ground we shared. This resulted in more open interactions where trust was built and better decisions were made for us all.

INTRODUCTION

From public opinion surveys, we know that the chemical industry is viewed with suspicion and dis­trust. Some of this is justified, based on the industry's previous performance, and some of it is not, in view of the significant progress that has been made in reducing emissions and incidents. Often interac­tions between the plants and communities are tense and can be adversarial. In this atmosphere, finding win/win solutions to the issues before us is almost impossible.

We have found, however, that we can begin to build the trust and understanding that is needed to allow the full discussion of the difficult questions. We do this when we go into the community finding bridge builders, then openly and freely sharing information about ourselves and our facili­ties, and what we are doing in them. By really listening to the concerns of the neigh­bors, we discover commonly held ground. As we step into the community and engage in the process of dialogue, doors of oppor­tunity open up.

The economic developer has the opportunity to be the needed bridge builder in this trust-building process. He/she, as the firm itself, has an interest in maintaining the viability of a facility in his/her area. Certainly working to increase the commu­nication and understanding between a lo­cal plant and the people in a community is a positive step towards retaining the local operation. A situation whereby the firm and the community both win is feasible as well as highly desirable.

LOCAL SUSTAINABILITY

DuPont is strengthening the focus on building the relationship with our local plant communities in order to create Sustainability; we sincerely believe our Company and our plants can function over the long run only with the permission of our neighbors. To be viewed as good neigh­bors we must be trusted and seen as re­sponsible citizens. We need to work with our communities so that together we can reach better solutions for us all. We need to fully implement Responsible Care® and the DuPont Safety, Health, and Environ­ment Commitment, sharing our progress with our neighbors.

DuPont's work is aligned with the en­tire membership of the Chemical Manu­facturers Association through the ten Prin­ciples and Six Codes of Management Prac­tices of Responsible Care®. The industry is working hard on improving itself and in being more open. Significant progress has been made in the last eight years.

As Ed Woolard, CEO of DuPont, states,: "Sustainable development has to generated one household, one manufacturing plant, one community at a time." Wendell Berry writes that there are no planetary problems and no planetary solutions — only local problems and local solutions. If we take care of the local problems, many of the big problems will take care of them­selves.

DIALOGUE

Dialogue is a process that enables a diverse group of people to come together in a way that can build trust and meaning, over time. A key component of this is coming with a willingness to be influenced; we do not have to agree, but we really need to listen and try to understand what others are trying to say. It is best to begin this process before issues have reached their boiling points or an incident like a fire occurs.

During the last several years, the Berkana Institute and the MIT Dialogue Project have independently created some principles that help the dialogue process to be successful.

The Berkana Institute

• Speak only for yourself, truthfully.

• Build on what has already been said.

• Seek to expand the inquiry.

The MIT Dialogue Project

• Suspend certainties.

• Listen to your listening.

• Slow down the inquiry.

• Be aware of thought.

• Maintain peripheral attention.

Other principles are:

• Treat everyone as a peer.

• Be open vs attached to a specific out­come.

In the process of dialogue where we are openly sharing information, building our relationships, and finding our common beliefs and values, trust and meaningful-ness emerge. In this climate, we can find the ways to address our issues and prob­lems which lead to better decisions for us all.

Dialogue is not complex. Those at the Berkana Institute do not see it as a set of techniques at all. Rather, it is in our being as we come together. As Margaret Wheatley has said many times at the Berkana Dialogues, "Just do it!"

Some have asked how long it takes for a group to come together. There is no simple answer here. In the Berkana Dia­logues, it often happens after a couple of days of work. However, in the community work, the meetings are not so long, so the coming together requires more elapsed time. Another factor in the community work is that many other things also are happening in the community which can impact the process and can help or upset the process. Because we are working to­gether and trust is building, the process has some robustness, however, it takes con­stant openness and a willingness to stay in it, for trust is very fragile. In one experience, we unintentionally upset the pro­cess; it took several months and some hard work to recover from it.

SOME SUCCESS STORIES

Blueprint for Action
In Niagara Falls in about 1985, the Ecumenical Task Force led by Sister Margeen Hoffmann, set out to bring the Love Canal residents. Times beach resi­dents, regulators and chemical industry people together to discuss some of the serious problems created by Love Canal and Times Beach. This was an attempt to bring a diverse group of people together, who had never been together before, and address ways to avoid getting into prob­lems like this again. Ecumenical Task Force and industry people met and struggled together for about a year to bring a confer­ence to fruition. While we often did not agree, we found much common ground and built the relationships and trust needed to build success. But, just several weeks prior to the conference, we were still so divided on how to conduct the conference that our major process facilitator pulled out. This shocked us into coming together, but left us high and dry in providing the facilitation needed in the conference work­shops. In DuPont, we had just been through several years of developing meeting and process skills, so we offered to the confer­ence planning team our skilled people to facilitate the conference workshops. While there was much hesitancy in the group about whether DuPont would try to take over the conference, enough trust had been built to take the chance.

Several hundred people from across the country gathered in Niagara Falls for the conference. Through meaningful, deep and passionate discussions, many bridges were built. In the conference reflections, it was felt that the DuPont facilitators had con­ducted themselves in a most professional way and had not tried to steer or influence, in any other way, the outcome of the con­ference.

None of this would have happened with­out all the involvement and trust building that had happened over the months of dialogue.

Niachlor Building Permits
In 1984, DuPont began the planning and development work to build a 660-ton/ day chlorine/caustic plant in Niagara Falls. This also required the development of a salt brine mining operation about 50 miles east of Buffalo, N.Y., and the construction of a 60-mile dual 12-inch in diameter pipe­line from the mine to the plant.

Early in the process, we began to have extensive discussions with out neighbors in Niagara as well as in the community where the mine was planned and also along the pipeline route. We shared a lot of information about the scope of activities and the steps we were taking to protect the environment and our communities.

These small meetings led to larger ones where we invited people to come to see and hear about this work. We were open to all questions and tried to answer all of them. This was all done as we were working on the permitting process with the NY De­partment of Environmental Conservation (DEC). They were fully aware of these meetings and participated as observers in many of them. By the time we got to the point in the permitting process where pub­lic input was needed, the NYDEC decided that a public hearing was unnecessary. They said we had already answered all the questions. This saved all of us a number of months and led to a much earlier start-up of the project.

Safety Street - Managing Our Risks Together
One June 3 and 4, 1994, the thirteen chemical plants in the Kanawha Valley around Charleston, WV, shared twenty-nine worst case scenarios with the commu­nity as well as a lot of information on what we were doing to be sure that these did not happen. Under the Clean Air Act, many people handling hazardous materials will be required to do this by March of 1999. However, this work was prompted by a request in January of 1992 by an environ­mental activist on the Local Emergency Planning Committee. After careful study, the plants in the Valley concluded that we should all do this together and that we, needed to have the community as fully involved in the process as possible. A technical committee and a communica­tions committee were set' up with people from the community as their leaders. The plants were deeply involved in the process, but did not control it. Our credibility was so bad, we felt that we had to be as open as possible if we were going to get people to listen and not just try to kick us out of the Valley. We asked people from all over the community to actively participate, so there were environmentalists, regulators, stu­dents, and other people from the general public who got involved.

This process took us two and one-half years of intense and patient dialogue as we developed the ground rules, the basic data on the specific chemicals, the release pro­tocols, dispersion model selection, and the communications process.

We shared information openly and freely, stayed together through thick and thin, and built on our common ground. As the trust was built, the environmentalists began to tell us that, while they really did not want the industry to leave, they felt very strongly that we had to improve our performance. Here was common ground we could build on!

When we finally came to June 3, every­one was ready. We held a meeting in the Charleston Convention Center with about 700 people attending where we explained the background in a series of presenta­tions. After several scenarios were shared in the large meeting, so people could see the methodology, we moved into a large room where all the plants as well as the environmental groups, the hospitals, the ambulance services, and the fire services had booths set up to show people the sce­narios, tell them about the things we were doing to prevent releases, and how the community emergency services are pre­pared to respond. The environmentalists told people about other things they'd like to see. Since everyone was involved, ev­eryone was very supportive of the effort.

On Saturday, June 4, we moved our displays to the Charleston Town Center Mall, the largest shopping center in our community. Each manager and his team was there from 10 A.M. to 9 P.M., talking and sharing with the community. This idea, to go to the Mall, came from several of the women on the committee as well as from some feedback from a community survey. It was not an idea that the plant managers really liked when we first heard it. After talking with our spouses, we began to see the merits of this and agreed to do it.

The entire event was far more success­ful than we had dared to hope. We had listened to the community who told us, "We know you guys can kill us; what we want to know is what you are doing to prevent it." The media coverage was in­tense and balanced. In addition to the local coverage. The New York Times and CNN were there and found a community work­ing hard together to discuss a difficult issue; they saw that the community had come together around this. Trust had gone up in the process.

In the reflections of this entire event, the community felt that the plants had done a good job in sharing this difficult material and that the process used to lead up to the event was just as important as the event itself. In fact, it had been responsible for its success.

The Belle Plant Landfill
In January of 1994, the State of West Virginia issued a permit for a plant's new landfill for the non-hazardous sludge from our waste water plant without a public hearing. During the comment-period, after the public notice had been published, no ad verse comments had been received. Prior to all this, plant people worked hard with our neighbors and elected officials to let them know what we were doing, why, and the steps we were taking to be sure to protect the environment. We had several public meetings and a bus tour of the site so people could see for themselves what we were doing. With the trust having been built and nurtured, we had the basis for open discussions about the project and could develop the understanding in the community of why this was important for the competitiveness of the plant.

TEAMWORK

In all these examples, a number of people were involved. In a sense, each plant is a community in itself with the manager as the leader. As the plant and the larger community around it come together, there has to be alignment between what's hap­pening inside the plant and what we are talking about outside the plant. The more plant people who are willing and able to move beyond the fence and talk with the neighbors, the better. Many people work­ing in the plant and their families also are neighbors themselves; what they say about what's happening inside the plant carries great weight with the community. This work in the community needs to be based on a record of continuously improving performance in the plant to reduce injuries, incidents and chronic emissions in order to be real and authentic. It takes all of us working together.

CONCLUSION

These four examples help to show what can happen when we openly share infor­mation, build relationships and help people to see themselves in the picture. The pro­cess of dialogue seems to be the way to open things up and enable us to reach decisions that are good for the plants and the community. As we listened to each other, we all changed and grew. The con­ditions for this self-organization to occur are:

• Information must be openly and freely shared so that everyone is on the same footing in trying to understand the issue. We need to shift our use of information from a tool for power and control to having information be more free-flowing like the air which is available to us all.

• We need to enter into the dialogue as concerned citizens, coming together to address important issues, meeting on a person-to-person basis rather than in our traditional roles. In this way, we will dis­cover each others' beliefs and values, come to understand our intents and develop stron­ger relationships.

• We need to begin to create a picture together where we each can see ourselves in it and answer the questions we each have, namely, what is in this for me, what is in this for us? While it may sound pretty self-centered, if we are connected to larger wholes like our family and community, this can lift us all up.

• We need to also come to the process with the care, concern, courage, and com­mitment to make it work.

SOME QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

As we come together in dialogue, there are some significant questions to consider:

• Who are We? What do we believe to be our community?

• How does disequilibrium occur in our community?

• How do we care for ourselves?

• How do we know who we are?

• How do we do work together?

• How does the community move into action?

• How do we create potential? How is the work sustained?

• How does the community find out what it wants to have happen?

• How do we raise the consciousness of the community on sustainability?

None of us can answer these questions by ourselves. We need the community in the room with us. If we just keep talking to ourselves, we will never change. The pro­cess of dialogue seems to be the way to open things up and enable us to reach decisions that are good for the plants and the community. When we listen to each other, we all change and grow, the commu­nity comes together, and we move towards sustainability.

The economic developer is certainly in a position to help facilitate this process.

Richard N. Knowles, Ph.D.

Dr. Knowles graduated from Oberlin College in 1957 and received a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Rochester in 1961. He then joined DuPont at the Experimental Station where he worked for 12 years in the fields of agricultural chemicals, industrial chemicals, process development, and flame retardants. He received 40 U.S. patents in this work. He then spent 3 years supervising a market development group and since 1976 has been engaged in manufacturing assignments at Repauno, Chambers Works (as­sistant manager), Niagara Falls, NY (plant manager - 1983-1987) and Belle, WV (plant manager - 1987-1995).

Dr. Knowles is active on the Na­tional Institute of Chemical Studies board, the CMA-CAER Task Group and the Berkana Institute. He was a 1992 recipient of the DuPont Agricultural Products Crystal Award for the Championing of Human Potential.  He helped establish the Industrial Liaison Committee in Niagara Falls 2 in March 1985 and the Belle Community Advisory Panel in 1990. He also actively supports the NICS Community Safety Assessment councils which began in 1987. For four years. he was a member of the West Virginia State Emergency Response Commission. In 1991 he helped found the State Chemical Working Group of the West Virginia Environmental Institute.

In January, 1995, Dr. Knowles was appointed community awareness, emergency response and industry outreach director for DuPont.  He is also serving as a loaned executive to the Chemical Manufacturers Association. In both assignments the overall theme is to help build sustainable communities around manufacturing facilities where the chemical industry's plants are viewed as responsible neighbors and welcome neighbors.

His article is based on the presentation he will be making to the 1996 AEDC Annual Conference in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at 302/773-0980 (voice) and 302/774-1361 (fax).