Jennifer Allen, Portland State University
Jennifer Allen by Celeste LeCompte - 3.10.08
On the event of our fifth anniversary, Sustainable Industries decided to catch up with 10 subscribers who have been with us from the very first issue and get their perspective on how things have changed since 2002.
A testament to the magazine’s Northwest roots, 9 of the 10 are Portlanders, with a lone Seattle representative in the bunch. Like the rest of our readers, though, the early subscribers profiled in the following pages and online are leaders in a diverse range of industries from green building and law to food processing and investment.
The positive impact of public concerns about climate change, reflections on the growth of greenwashing and a conviction that sustainability will need to tackle social equity issues were common themes among many of the interviews. We hope these interviews provide a moment of reflection on where we’ve been and where we’re headed as part of the green business community.
Read more profiles and join the conversation by clicking here.
In 2002, Jennifer Allen was working at Oregon’s Economic and Community Development Department as their sustainable business liaison, providing outreach on various sustainable business and economic development issues to diverse sectors of the Oregon economy. “I focused a lot on market connections and transformation issues, creating more opportunities, seeding projects.” One such project was a new publication proposed by Brian Back and Nik Blosser, Sustainable Industries Journal Northwest. “The thing that really appealed to me about that was the “no fluff” approach,” Allen recalls. “It was not an advocacy magazine; it was a very serious look at what was working and what wasn’t—an attempt to bring some rigorous thinking to this whole sustainable business stuff.”
Allen, now the associate director of Portland State University’s Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices, sits on the boards of Food Alliance, Shorebank Pacific, Porlan Energy Conservation Inc. and Illahee, and participates in numerous policy and business strategy efforts underway throughout Oregon. Like many other long-time sustainability professionals, she says there’s been a shift in people’s thinking over the last year and a half, in particular. “One factor has been the increased attention to things like climate change, a particular driver like that which has become much more difficult to dismiss and got peoples’ attention. People often see that as the main reason to be having these conversations,” she says.
However, Allen also notes “you can have an extremely inequitable society that could be climate neutral, so if you think sustainability is about the social aspects – equity, access, quality of life – all those other issues related to the social side, Climate change is not synonymous with thinking about sustainability. … There’s a more complex system out there.”
The university plays a crucial role in expanding the impacts of sustainability, Allen says, from training students equipped to think about their work through the lens of sustainability to conducting research on some of the supply chain issues facing fledgling industries such as green building and food service. “How do we get to the volume where we can actually supply the largest levels of demand? It’s no longer just this small-scale market demand. It’s also moving into the larger production modes.”
As for the next five years, Allen says she hopes the conversation becomes more sophisticated with respect to social aspects. “Sustainability is about thinking in a more integrated way, and I hope that we can move toward that more. I’m hoping that the conversation about business opportunity and policy strategies is more sophisticated and includes how you think about social impacts and equity and unintended consequences.”
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