Daughter takes father's mission to another level
Most Columbus drivers headed up Interstate 185 to the intersection with I-85 near LaGrange know something about the efforts that went into protecting the natural beauty along that corridor.
Drivers in other parts of the greater Chattahoochee Valley area might be more familiar with a stretch of I-85 that Columbus drivers don't often travel, the one from LaGrange to the Chattahoochee at West Point. Thanks to the vision of a West Point industrialist who died four years ago, that stretch of highway could also become environmentally significant.
A weekend story from Georgia Public Broadcasting related the legacy of Ray Anderson, founder of the international carpet tile manufacturer Interface. In a 2003 documentary titled "The Corporation," Anderson recalled a pivotal moment in his career: "One day, early in this journey, it dawned on me that the way I've been running Interface is the way of the plunderer. Plundering something that's not mine, something that belongs to every creature on Earth."
The result of that realization was something Anderson called Mission Zero: a pledge to develop a product and a process by 2020 that would leave no environmental footprint.
He died nine years too soon. But his daughter, Harriet Langford, is keeping the project alive, and then some.
GPB reports that Langford, president of the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, has added another project onto her father's original one, something she calls the Mission Zero Corridor. It involves doing for that stretch of I-85 that bears her father's name what he pledged to do for Interface.
"When you've got the greenest industrialist of the century named after a dirty highway," Langford told GPB, "he would say 'Go do something good with it.' "
She has consulted with Georgia Tech, Anderson's alma mater, and the Georgia Conservancy about the viability (and, of course, cost) of such a project. The result so far is more than 100 pages of ideas from present and former Tech students, from lunar-cycle lighting to wildlife bridges to water and land restoration projects along the highway itself. One idea is already a reality -- an electric vehicle charging station at the Georgia Welcome Center funded by the major industry along that highway, Kia Motors.
In many ways both obvious and perhaps not so obvious, this is an even more ambitious environmental undertaking than Anderson's original Mission Zero. It would be a spectacular enough achievement to have zero environmental impact for an industry; it's another challenge altogether to do the same for a public highway and the natural setting through which thousands of fossil-fueled vehicles run every day.
Jeralee Anderson of Greenroads, a Seattle organization that has created an environmental rating index for roadways, told GPB, "It's definitely a substantial effort to retrofit a highway that already exists and put it back into maybe making a lower footprint."
Godspeed to anybody willing to try.
This story was originally published October 26, 2015 at 5:10 PM with the headline "Daughter takes father's mission to another level."