ecoPRO Certified Sustainable Landscape Professional Program Update

Ray Willard, PLA, EPC

Technical Committee Chair WA State Department of Transportation

ecoPRO in 2022 and Beyond

Hello everyone, I’m Ray Willard a landscape architect for the Washington State Department of Transportation and current chair of the Technical Advisory Committee. I got to start thinking about this program with Gwen Vernon and the team from Cascadia Consulting Group over ten years ago and have had the honor of serving with a group of very dedicated and talented professionals since then to bring the program to where it is today. Our program to certify sustainable landscape design and management is still in the early stages of what we hope will be a decades-long legacy, but it is already serving as an example to the rest of the country. With ecoPRO we are setting the bar on how our industry can provide sustainable solutions for making our buildings and roads more economically viable and at the same time providing climate resilience, environmental mitigation, and enhancing our American culture and society.

This is a very exciting program to be a part of and I am confident we will continue to build in numbers in the years to come. My goal in working with Breanne and the WSNLA is to make ecoPRO the new normal for how we build and maintain our landscape assets in Washington State. Everyone who joins the program will be responsible for spreading this message and it will be easy to do if we stick to the facts and show that we are out to make the world a more affordable and better place – one sustainable site at a time.

Thank you to everyone who has already joined us and if you haven’t yet, please consider this as a piece of your company or organization’s professional development. I would encourage everyone to check out what we have on the ecoPRO website. There you can find additional information and resources for how you or your employees can benefit from this program, and we are always looking for case study examples of how taking a sustainable life-cycle based management approach with landscape architecture saves money and makes people happy. If you would like to contribute to this resource base, please download the form at www.ecoPROcertified.org/Resources.

ecoPRO Industry Leadership

ecoPRO Program Steering Committee

CHAIR: Jennifer Johnson | Thurston County Public Health

Sharalyn Peterson | NW Center for Alternatives to Pesticides

Carrie Foss | WSU Extension - Urban IPM Program

Gwen Vernon | Tilth Alliance

Rob Boyker, EPC | Avid Landscape Management, LLC

ecoPRO Technical Committee

CHAIR: Ray Willard, EPC | WA Dept of Transportation

Barb DeCaro, EPC | Retired, Seattle Parks

Mark Guthrie, EPC | Seattle Public Utilities

Kate Kurtz | Seattle Public Utilities

Lorraine Brooks | Edmonds Community College

Kryssie Maybay, EPC | Kismet Landscape Design

Barrett Tripp, EPC, CPH | Pierce County Parks

Doug Schmitt, EPC

Will Anstey, EPC | Devonshire Landscapes www.BIRINGERNURSERY.com

WA State Nursery & Landscape Association