“Heading Down the Green Highway”: Terre Jones
By Gideon Banner • Jun 21st, 2008 • Category: Interviews
Interview with Terrence Jones, President and CEO of Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts
05.23.08
Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts is a nonprofit organization founded in 1971 that presents and produces a full-range of performance and education programs in the Greater Washington, D.C. area, as well as nationally and internationally. Wolf Trap is home to three performance venues, the Filene Center and Children’s Theatre-in-the-Woods at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, and The Barns at Wolf Trap. It also programs and operates the Wolf Trap Opera Company, a premier residency training program, as well as arts-in-education programs for people of all ages. The Foundation’s activities are principally operated from the Center for Education at Wolf Trap. Located in Vienna, Virginia, the Center serves as a national arts-in-education resource center for children, parents, educators and performing artists.
Terre Jones, Wolf Trap Foundation President and CEO, has long understood the need to conserve and sustain resources to protect the planet. Several years ago Terre decided that Wolf Trap would go green and committed the organization to becoming carbon-neutral (producing no net greenhouse gases) and zero-waste (creating as little trash as possible, and recycling and composting all forms of trash that cannot be eliminated). At the time, such a commitment was a unique and visionary step forward and Wolf Trap has made profound changes in a very short time span. Moreover, Terre is taking active steps to creating a network of corporations, environmental experts, governmental entities, and performing arts organizations that can facilitate a general movement forward down what he calls the “green highway.
I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak with Terre in late May to find out more about his efforts at Wolf Trap and how they might serve as a model for other performing arts organizations.
Gideon Banner: How long have you been with Wolf Trap?
Terre Jones: This is my 13th summer season. Prior to this, I was running the performing arts program at the University of Illinois, the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at Champaign-Urbana, and had been there for 10 years, and was quite happy there, doing some very innovative things, including commissioning new works. I got called by a search firm out of New York City saying, “The position is open for the CEO and President of Wolf Trap, and would you be interested in visiting with them about it?” And, in fact, it’s one of the few things that would have attracted my attention. A few months later, here I was.
GB: Has it grown quite a bit during your tenure?
TJ: Yes, we’ve had a lot of growth. The largest example of this is reflected in our new national Center for Education, which opened five years ago and is a major addition to what we do. It provides the much-needed space and support for our education programs from early childhood through adult education and college internships. This was possible due to the successful completion of the $21 million Campaign for Wolf Trap to create the Center and an additional endowment to support our artistic and educational initiatives. Programmatically, we’ve grown as well. We remain committed to commissioning new works to expand the American repertoire; I think we’ve now commissioned in excess of 40 new works since I’ve been here, including a new opera, and we’re in the midst of commissioning our second new opera. We also added our signature series, Face of America, the project where we place artists in different National Parks across the country to pay tribute to them, interpreting them through the performing arts with site-specific works with dance, music, and storytelling, and then filming them on location in high-definition. We were pleased to be included as part of the PBS Great Performances: Dance in America series on April 21 when they highlighted all five of the Face of America pieces we created. So, over the last 10 years, we have seen a lot of growth.
GB: Has the partnership with the National Park Service grown over time?
TJ: Very much so; we are pleased to be a part of what many have called a model public/private partnership between the Wolf Trap Foundation and the National Park Service to successfully operate America’s only national park dedicated to the performing arts. We’e in a classification by ourselves within the National Park Service because of that. The relationship has definitely grown and flourished. We began working on Face of America in the late ’90s, on through the current project, which will feature Glacier National Park in 2009. There’s a real sense of appreciation and understanding; it is an active, collaborative partnership. We’re here to help the cause of the national parks, not just put on great performances. In the last two years, with the green initiatives we’ve undertaken, along with our work to become designated as one of the first Climate-Friendly Parks, our relationship has grown even stronger.
GB: I saw on your website that Wolf Trap is putting together a comprehensive report of its environmental footprint. What were some of the more surprising findings of that report?
TJ: I actually received the draft early this week and am still reviewing it. (This is the opening week of the season and a few nights ago, we kicked off our season with one of our primary fundraisers, the Wolf Trap Gala, followed by The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring film in its entirety with a live orchestra for the last two nights ending at midnight, and then A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor.) But I have seen the summaries as we’ve gone along. There have been no huge surprises.
We made an overt decision only to measure our environmental footprint within the boundaries of the Foundation and the Park. Obviously, going beyond that involves measuring the audience travel to and from Wolf Trap, and we don’t have a lot of control over that. However, we are also doing things about transportation to and from the park: we’re hoping to increase light rail public transit service on the Metro by running our shuttle bus service in order to reduce the audience travel footprint. And on June 16, we will launch a new tool as part of our designation as a Climate Friendly Park, by which our visitors can log on [at http://www.doyourpartparks.org/wotr] and make a commitment – even a small one – to reducing their footprint even further in their own daily lives. The commitment I made when I vowed to take Wolf Trap carbon neutral in my speech at the National Press Club in March 2007 was to do that with the things over which I and the National Parks had control; and beyond that we would try to develop a broader understanding of the problem industry-wide. And that’s what we’re doing this summer by holding the first National Arts and Environment Summit that we’ll be hosting on July 14.
In some ways, our footprint was not as onerous as I thought it might be, which was good to know. We all talk about these things, and think, “We must be horrible. How will we ever turn that around?” So to have actual measurements is very useful. We worked with Booz Allen Hamilton on that, with the Climate Friendly Parks Program, with the National Park Service and the EPA and ICF International. We measured our trash output, along with how much we’re recycling. The bottom line is that we’re not as bad as I thought we might be, but that’s not to say we don’t have a long way to go to make ourselves carbon neutral. It’s still challenging, but it appears doable by knowing the actual facts.
GB: Are you considering carbon offsets as an option? [Note to readers: if you’re not familiar with carbon offsets, a somewhat complicated tool used to mitigate the impact of an individual or organization’s environmental footprint, a brief explanation can be found at http://www.NativeEnergy.com.]
TJ: We do use carbon offsets now. My point on that is – and I know there’s disagreement and controversy over offsets, and we obviously try to research and carefully look at what we invest in when we buy offsets – but offsets are not the ultimate answer. You’ve got to recycle, reuse, and reduce. That “reduce” is very important. It is very important, even if you have the money, not to say, “Well here’s the money, and now we’re carbon-neutral.” In the meantime, as we move toward maximizing reduction of our footprint, I believe we need to take advantage of methods by which we can accelerate the development of alternative energy. One of those ways is through offsets, if they’re done properly. For example, we offset all of our staff’s travel via air travel with wind energy offsets. Most of our vehicles now are hybrids provided by General Motors, but we still offset the difference. And we have a few limo-type cars for artists that we offset as well. That’s where we’re using our offsets right now. We are also offering our patrons an opportunity to offset their travel to the Park by selling offset stickers that make a contribution to Native Energy through Reverb.
We’re not offsetting our energy utility and lighting usage; we’re simply trying to reduce what we’re already using. We’ve been pretty effective so far. In 2007, on just the Foundation side, we saved 11,700 kWh in electric usage based on our 2006 usage. This is equivalent to a carbon reduction of 154,035 lbs., or 77 tons. This savings is equivalent to planting 104,478 trees, or not driving 133,642 miles … and we’re saving money!
GB: Wow. Within the first year.
TJ: The big-picture advantage of that is that we’re helping to save the Earth. But on a more immediate turn, if you’re answering to a board of directors or shareholders – in our case, a board of directors – that’s pretty compelling evidence that not only is it good for people and good for the Earth, it’s good for the budget. Now we’ve reinvested those savings. We didn’t come away with that much net gain financially from the reductions, so what we did was to reinvest it: we now have recycled paper in our standard letterhead stationary and our brochures. Those things still cost more, but the cost is coming down, the price points are coming down.
We’ve also reinvested in new technology: upgraded stage lights, high efficiency sound equipment. So we took the savings from our energy reductions – which happened as a result of putting in CFLs, reducing building temperature in the winter so that it’s a little cooler, and raising it in the summer so that it’s a little warmer. We’ve reinvested those savings in the things that cost a little more: green cleaning and concession products, that sort of thing.
GB: Have you seen some benefits that are less tangible than just cost savings, such as greater audience response, or more invigoration of your board of directors?
TJ: Well, one of the first and, I think, the most gratifying advantages of going green was the involvement of the staff. Right after I announced the initiative – of course, I have a National Advisory Council on the Arts and Environment chaired by Norman Mineta, the former Secretary of Transportation, along with people like Kathy Mattea, Mike Love of the Beach Boys, Adam Gardner of Guster and Reverb, Tom Chapin, and Sissy Spacek. Creating that group gave us a very big “public face.” I came back right after that and said, “I want to create a working task force among the staff, but I want it to be totally voluntary.” We have a staff of 70-some, and nearly half the staff immediately signed up to be actively involved in the green initiative at Wolf Trap. It’s been a real coalescence, they’ve really come together. Once a month, we give an award to a staff member who comes up with the Green Idea of the Month, and we’re going to do a Green Idea of the Year. So we’ve created little competitions with that, and they’ve just come up with some wonderful ways of saving money, and therefore they all feel a part of it. So it’s not just me, the CEO, saying, “Alright, you all are going to be green. Turn your lights off when you leave your office, turn your computer off, do all those things.”
For example, one of them came up with composting. We have a large catering service here, and I wouldn’t have thought to ask them to do that here, because composting is work, but they came up with that. So now we compost all of our compostable materials from our catering service.
Then the board: I was a little reluctant to hear what their response would be. Wolf Trap Foundation has several high-level corporations, some of which would not come to mind immediately as green industries. I did it as an administrative decision, not as a board decision; we made the decision as an operational function. When I informed the board, to my great joy, they were very responsive. All of them – I didn’t get any pushback from anyone on our board. And, in fact, many of them came to me and told me what they were doing, which was helpful, because I hadn’t realized that some of the industries were already implementing sustainable practices in their operations.
Finally, our audience. One of the things I had the team do here was emphasize signage. Anything from the restrooms in the park – we use recycled hand towels, and we’ve put in high-intensity, rapid, electric hand dryers in the newly-redone restrooms. [Life cycle studies have shown electric hand dryers to use less net energy than the equivalent number of paper towels.] We have signs identifying everything we’re doing, and we’re getting really positive feedback from our audiences. I’m pretty visible at the performances, and many people will just come up to me to talk about it; but we also get some feedback via e-mail from the comment section on our website and the responses have been very positive. This summer’s eco-concert with Hootie and the Blowfish, featuring our Green Spot of vendors on July 13, along with the Summit on July 14, and the Do Your Part interactive tool launching on June 16 will each help us to further engage our patrons.
GB: That summit will be attended by an audience?
TJ: Yes, audiences can attend the green concert that kicks off the Summit on July 13 at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts where we are setting up what Reverb calls a “Green Spot” that will begin at 5:00pm three hours before the Hootie and The Blowfish concert. We’re working with the band to make it a sustainable concert, so people will be aware of that. The Green Spot will be a demonstration and resource area, with both national and local organizations and musicians playing nearby – an all-afternoon festival and performance with a green theme. And again, we’re also selling offset stickers to the audience for $3.00 and reinvesting that money in wind energy offsets, which will offset the carbon produced by your trip to the festival. Then the following day on July 14 during the National Summit on the Arts and the Environment, audiences from all over the country can log on live for the webinar beginning at 4:00pm to hear the list of key strategies for what the members of the arts community can do to practice environmental stewardship. We will of course be posting these strategies on our website once released.
GB: I know that this is hard to measure, but by going green and letting your audience know about it, have your ticket sales or attendance increased in any way?
TJ: It’s too early to really measure that. Right now we’re just getting anecdotal feedback that they really like it. At this point we’re the only facility in this area taking major steps toward sustainability. It is beginning to catch on, though, which is what we want, of course.
The outcome of the summer summit, where we’ll have twenty or so top minds from the arts, government, and business, will be a white paper (or electronic paper) that will serve as a guideline for the performing arts industry – either for touring artists, or those like me who are presenting the art. Sort of a beginning guideline on what you can actually do. With that, I think you’ll see more influence. After our session in New York [at a panel on arts and the environment at the 2007 Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference] we had a huge amount of follow-up: I was invited to speak at the National Performing Arts Convention in Denver in June, where we’ll reach presenters, opera managers, theaters, symphonies, dance, and so on. It’s really good news to hear that, in planning that conference, sustainability was included as part of the discussion.
GB: You’re going to be putting on some environmentally-themed performances: can you describe those?
TJ: The other big move we’re making, which I feel is incredibly relevant, is at our Children’s Theatre-in-the-Woods for 4- or 5-year-olds up to 12-year-olds. We’ve commissioned two or three new works for the summer, all of them environmentally-themed. One of them is a piece by Dinorock, one of our most popular performing arts groups for kids, so it’ll be packed. These shows will play for a week each in the children’s theater. The piece by Dinorock is called “Junkyard Pirates;” it’s about battling the landfill by recycling. If we can reach these children – and I think we can all agree that we can’t just wait for that generation to grow up and take action – but if you begin working with them…. Children have great influence: I’ve got a 9-year old grandson, and if he comes home and tells his mom, “We’re all recycling at school; why aren’t we doing it at home?” Parents who may not be as conscious about it will say, “Oh, yeah, okay.” Out of the mouths of babes, as they say.
We’re very excited about that. But we definitely don’t want to preach from the stage: it’s really about setting an example. Even these children’s productions, which are environmentally-themed, will be fun – you’re going to have a good time, hear good music, and we won’t just be preaching about recycling.
GB: Can you speak about the collaboration between Wolf Trap, Booz Allen Hamilton, and the Park Service? For example, who put together the environmental footprint report?
TJ: Well, they all had a part in developing it. The National Park Service has a sustainability division called Climate Friendly Parks, which works in cooperation with the EPA. Right now there are 40 pilot parks, and Wolf Trap was one of the first to sign on. They hope to expand it across the parks system. In fact, the Secretary of the Interior, who I’ve worked with on some long-term initiatives, has made climate sustainability a big part of the hundred-year anniversary of the park system, which occurs over the next 8 years leading up to 2016. Now, I don’t think that means “carbon neutral”, but certainly making progress toward sustainable practices. Climate Friendly Parks worked with the EPA and ICF International to measure the footprint and to do a waste analysis.
Booz Allen Hamilton is a major international consulting firm, and it has a sustainability division. They worked together with Climate Friendly Parks to help us develop a sustainability plan, which will be posted on the Climate Friendly Parks website. Actually, one of the fun things we’re doing at the summit is that while we’re inviting 20 people, we’re actually hoping they don’t all physically come here: Booz Allen has the technology in their corporate offices to include panelists by video conferencing.
Once I announced that we were going “green” – it was the kind of thing that would be considered either bold or foolish, depending on how well it turns out in the end – I realized that I didn’t really know what that meant. I had no idea what our footprint was, or how hard it was going to be, or how much it would cost; I just knew we had to do it. Once I made the announcement, I knew we needed partners to help us make this happen, and the Vice President at Booz Allen Hamilton happens to be on our Board, and when I told him about it he was very excited and offered to help. We received a wonderful reaction from the Park Service’s Climate Friendly Parks division. And General Motors also lent us their environmental expert from Detroit to come and talk to us about what they were doing.
So what we found was that not only were people open to it, but excited about doing it, because most of them had thought about it or had something started, but this was a way to bring it all together.
GB: Was that the point at which GM suggested implementing flex-fuel vehicles? [Flex-fuel vehicles can use different types of fuel, generally an 85/15 mix of gasoline and ethanol.]
TJ: No, I asked for that. They’ve been our automotive sponsor for at least eight years. I went to GM and told them what we were going to do, and I went with a little trepidation, thinking, “Gee, are they going to be upset?” But I got the same reaction from them; they were incredibly excited, because it gave them an opportunity to showcase what they’re doing, to show that they are making an effort. We’re happy to give them the connection to Wolf Trap’s green initiative, because they are doing some positive things, and the public needs to know about that.
Now we use GM’s two-mode hybrids, which actually employ technology comparable to what one would find in the Toyota Prius, improving the fuel efficiency of our larger vehicles significantly – over 50 percent. We still have a few flex-fuel vehicles, but almost everything is hybrid now. I’m driving a hybrid, and there’s a hybrid Chevy Malibu on display at the entrance to the park. With a few exceptions: we still have to get limo cars for artists; they don’t yet have hybrid versions of those.
There are about a dozen flex-fuel filling stations in the Washington Metro area. The closest one to us is at the Pentagon, so we’ve been going there. I wanted to get out of flex-fuel vehicles and into hybrids as quickly as possible because of the controversy over ethanol. [A large-scale debate is currently raging as to whether ethanol actually produces net environmental benefits, and whether it takes resources away from food production at a time of worldwide food shortages.] But we used flex-fuel the first year because that was all they had available. It’s like offsets: it was better to make an effort to change than to do nothing. But again, GM was anxious to showcase their new hybrid technology.
GB: I know that Wolf Trap is also accessible by Metro because it subsidizes a Shuttle Bus. What percentage of your audience rides the Wolf Trap Shuttle Bus?
TJ: Several thousand patrons per season take the shuttle, but we attract 500,000 people each a summer. We’re in northern Virginia, and we’re not on the Metro line, so yes, we pay to subsidize the shuttle service. Down the road, the plans exist for the Metro to come out this direction and past us to Dulles airport. But now, from the west, it’s not possible to come in via Metro. We are also encouraging patrons to carpool and are now working to eventually provide a shuttle system from the west.
GB: Many of your concession items and food trays are biodegradable or sustainably sourced. Has it been hard to source those?
TJ: No, that was another pleasant surprise and one that made us hit our heads and say, “Gosh, why didn’t we think of this before?’’ But again, that’s part of the advantage of a green initiative: it makes you more aware of what you’re doing, and therefore you pay more attention.
For example, we’ve eliminated all bottled water within the Foundation meetings, so now we put out reusable glasses and pitchers of water. We still have some artists that require the bottles, however. We also switched to using corn starch cups instead of plastic; that was very easy, as were potato starch utensils, biodegradable wraps for sandwiches, biodegradable trays. And of course, overall, we’ve reduced packaging in our concession efforts to make a huge impact. So not only have we reduced the amount of packaging, but now everything we use in that area is biodegradable.
GB: Did you find composting to be similarly easy?
TJ: Yes, that was one of the Green Ideas of the Month; it came from our catering staff. It’s not that it’s that hard, you just have to make an effort to do it, separating certain food items and so on. The reason it happened freely and relatively painlessly was that the staff who worked in that area came up with the idea; they were excited about making that contribution. And we do have the advantage of being in a large park-like setting; we actually have flower gardens on the property that take our compost. So we don’t even have to use transportation to move it elsewhere – we use it here, we compost it here, and then we put it back into the gardens.
GB: You mentioned that you’re using more efficient lighting, which I’ve heard very little about. Have you replaced your whole lighting system with them?
TJ: Actually, at the Filene Center, we replaced all the orchestra shell with higher efficiency ETC Source Four fixtures utilizing HPL lamps. It used to take 138 Par-56 300w instruments to light the shell. We now have 54 Source Fours at 575w. The net savings is 10,350 watts every time we use the shell, and we’ve got more even and more comfortable coverage. We have also gone to energy-saving all-digital sound mixing equipment. We did a similar change at The Barns at Wolf Trap, and realized a 15% energy savings there last season.
All office lights have been switched to CFLs [compact fluorescent bulbs, which use about ¼ of the energy, release much less heat, and last up to 10 times as long as incandescents], and virtually all of our instruments in The Barns have been switched – so we’re saving a lot of money that way. LEDs are supposed to be the future, but they haven’t perfected them yet; they’re still in the R&D stage. But I think they will get there, because it’s a great natural light. We can’t switch out the incandescents in the dressing rooms, because when we have tours like Les Mis or Rent, the performers don’t want fluorescent lamps no matter how much progress they’ve made in making them a better light source. It’s still not the look they want, and they’re trying to replicate the look of incandescent stage lights. As for the new lamps we use in The Barns, if my technical director hadn’t told me of the switch (he made the effort to move in that direction), I’m not sure I could have noticed the difference; it’s just a higher efficiency lamp.
GB: You’re a member of the U.S. Green Building Council; are you working toward LEED accreditation? [LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and is a rating system the USGBC uses for green buildings.]
TJ: We came very close when we built the new Education Center. It’s one of those things that when you factor in the cost of applications for LEED status, you go, “We’ve got to get it open, we can’t spend the extra time and money.” We always promised ourselves that we would go back and do it, and the good news is that Matthew Cooper of PEG Environmental Engineering, a long time individual supporter whose company specializes in sustainable practices, is willing to work with us pro bono, and so I anticipate that by the end of the year we’ll have a LEED Existing Building certification. It’s a little harder for us at the Park, because I don’t have direct control over that. We tried very hard to have our latest project here LEED-certified, but it was a government project, and not something we raised the money for. But they did put in a number of high-efficiency components, just not far enough for the certification. But through contributions that we’re working to raise for the Park, we hope to do some retrofitting for the front of the house and backstage.
Links:
Grist.org’s interview with Wolf Trap’s PR Director, Chris Guerre
The National Parks Service’s Climate Friendly Parks Initiative