Brian Yeoman: compassionate futurist
by Vicki Wolf

Brian Yeoman creates situations to help people see environmentally and socially responsible possibilities within themselves and their organizations. “The big principles are simple like: Treat all living things with respect and dignity; recognize that sharing is not a weakness; and light belongs to people, all of the people,” Yeoman says.

Yeoman’s career path has evolved from an administrator who made decisions and large purchases, unaware of environmental consequences, to a futurist who makes sustainability a priority.

He is a senior research scientist at the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) and director of Education and Development for the National Association of Educational Procurement (NAEP). With HARC, Yeoman facilitates a High Performance Building Team and is principle investigator on several projects ranging from residential construction waste management to campus-wide planning.

For 27 years Yeoman worked for The University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHSC). As the associate vice president of Facilities Planning and Campus Development, he was involved in facilities management, procurement and management systems where he implemented campus wide sustainable development strategies and projects.

Yeoman became aware of his own responsibility for protecting the environment and people while responsible for procurement – buying things, lots of things – for UTHSC. He says much of his personal and professional life had been dedicated to materialism. “I knew better,” Yeoman says, recalling the past. “I grew up in the Black Hills, and my grandmother was probably one of the original environmentalists.”

His epiphany came while vacationing in a beautiful alpine area of British Columbia. He was contemplating a large carpeting purchase he had made and how much carpet and padding would be thrown away to make way for the new carpet. When he returned to the health science center after his vacation, Yeoman was curious enough to ask engineers to figure out the volume. “I thought it might fill half of the Rice football field and stadium,” Yeoman says. “It turned out to be a virtual mountain, 3,800 feet high and five miles in diameter.”

Yeoman says this information plunged him into self-examination and he had to find out where all that carpet was thrown away. “I went to Sheldon Dump in Houston. It’s in an African American community and is large enough to be seen from space,” Yeoman says, “a 125 foot mountain of trash in these African Americans’ backyard.” He stood there and watched bulldozers pile up box springs, TV sets and other stuff. “It put me into very intense guilt and reflection asking, ‘What are we doing?’”

With a new consciousness about human impact on the environment, in 1993, Yeoman and his family – including two daughters, ages 2 and 8 – started taking small steps toward sustainability. “We lived in a community that didn’t have curbside recycling, so we created our own and recycled in the garage.” Yeoman says when they collected enough they would take their discarded items to a recycling center and sell them. The money earned from recycling was used for vacations.

They also stopped fertilizing the lawn. “The kids really got the fact that fertilizing and pesticides made no sense,” Yeoman says. They planted only native plants and avoided the mold and other problems their neighbors had with imported plants. Yeoman says they also stopped using pesticides inside the home, relying only on bait to control insects. “We were encouraged to become more responsible with food and food waste. We kept things cleaner and started to compost,” he recalls. “The girls could see that waste was equal to food for the soil.”

Yeoman realized that in his work he could help UT Health Science Center become a model for sustainability in business. He began altering the operations of the center to reduce environmental consequences and the size the ecological footprint such a large system was making.

“We had successful recycling programs for all the easy stuff and for much of the hard stuff like construction demolition materials,” Yeoman says. “We were laying down more than 6,000 gallons of persistent organic chemicals a year. When we moved to integrated pest management, we reduced that to 15 gallons!”

The UT Health Science Center also abandoned use of bagged vacuum cleaners. Caterers were asked to use china and silver instead of Styrofoam and to buy local, organically grown food. They retrofitted more than 25,000 lighting fixtures with fluorescent lamps and ballasts.

Yeoman says some people at UT Health Science Center thought he was crazy. “They though I’d lost it,” he recalls. “They called me a rock sucking tree hugger. They saw this as radical environmentalism.” Fortunately, he worked with John Porretto, then executive vice president of Administration, who supported the changes, which resulted in $24 million in savings over six years for the center. (link for Building a Better World 2005: What We Can Do Today)

Yeoman describes himself as a futurist, an active member of the world future society. “Futurists have a propensity for flexibility. They look for multiple scenarios as possible resolutions to issues.” His philosophy involves option creation – the intersection between character, competence, experience and the ability to be creative. “In that process, you find out a lot about yourself, he says. “You also find out about systems and their consequences.”

“What makes that all pretty cool is that until you begin the process, you may believe there are no other options,” Yeoman continues. Options don’t have to involve compromise, according to Yeoman. Often there are multiple win-win solutions. “That’s where you get synergy,” he says. “If the other side feels valued, they make contributions that can lead to other potential solutions or scenarios.”

Yeoman was instrumental in the development of The School of Nursing and Student Community Center, home of The University of Texas School of Nursing at Houston, recently selected by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Committee on the Environment (COTE), for the “Top 10 Green Projects Award” for 2006.

Yeoman, with HARC colleague and friend Rives Taylor, also received the 2005 President’s Synergy Award from the Citizens Environmental Coalition for their work on behalf of the public and green buildings.

He says the longer he works on behalf of green building, the more amazed he is at how many solutions there are to dilemmas. Yeoman says working on the School of Nursing project brought together strengths and weaknesses of all involved. “Sometimes it seemed chaotic and we received some bad press,” Yeoman says. “It was a galvanizing opportunity to ask ‘are the principles right.’” The value of not trying to force the issue resulted in a more integrated team with a great design that has resulted in a building that will serve students and others for 100 years in “a wonderful, nurturing way,” according to Yeoman.

The School of Nursing opened two years ago. It has many green features, including a system to catch and recycle rainwater and runoff from air-conditioning units, and the armature to house photovoltaic cells to generate power.

To facilitate sustainable development across the community, Yeoman teaches the Natural Step, a science-based framework that helps build an ecologically and economically sustainable society by educating, training and inspiring people to conduct their activities in a sustainable way.

When asked about the future sustainability of Houston, Yeoman says it’s the most encouraging time in the more than 30 years he has lived here. “I like to continue to refer to Houston as ‘sin city.’ The direction of travel I see is tremendously positive. The number of green buildings being built is impressive,” he adds. “The mayor has created a website to show the best deal for buying electricity – if you don’t like the number of ozone days in Houston, don’t buy electricity from coal-burning power plants.”

Yeoman says he believes many contributors are making these changes because they want a better future for themselves and their children. Green building knowledge is available. People can take the rail many places instead of driving their cars. There are choices when it comes to energy conservation and clean, green sources are available. Now it’s up to the public to demand it.

Yeoman is single. He has two daughters: Brianne, 22, and Brandy, 20. His hobbies are antique automobiles, hunting and fishing. He was born and raised in the Black Hills of South Dakota where he has a vacation log home he built with his father, mother and brother. Yeoman say, “It is where I will die and provide food for nature.”

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