Photograph by Lisa Hubbard
On one of Mark Fisher’s first days working at the Cincinnati Zoo in 2005, he opened the zoo’s water bill.
“Holy smokes,” Fisher says, recalling the shock 20 years ago. “The thing was $60,000.” His job description hadn’t come with any goals for sustainability, he says, and back then the zoo hadn’t made any measurable efforts to conserve natural resources, but he decided that would be a good place to start.
Fisher first tracked down the zoo’s janitors, plumbers, and any other frontline workers that could speak to the zoo’s water usage for plants, animals, employees, and visitors.
“We started getting their ideas, their input, and began making significant adjustments to our systems,” Fisher says. “Our efforts were never about being the Greenest Zoo in America—and that’s not why we do it today—our whole effort started, and is [still] about, doing things better, being smarter, less wasteful, more efficient, safer, all those things.”
Today, the zoo gets its green title for all sorts of projects: transitioning all its facilities to LED lighting, composting herbivores’ organic waste and food waste, building all new projects to (at minimum) LEED Gold standards, partnering with local farmers and regional food providers, and growing food for the animals.
Photograph courtesy Cincinnati Zoo
“It was about being better with everything we do,” Fisher says. “The way we manage our facilities, the way we manage our trash, the way we treat our neighbors. Whatever it is: How do we do this better?”
Efficiencies created savings, and over the last two decades, Fisher has been able to reduce the zoo’s utility bills from 10 percent of its annual operating budget to just 1 percent, with sustainability projects saving more than $30 million to date. The only reason they’ve been so successful, Fisher says, is because his bosses recognized the importance of reinvesting those savings.
Photograph courtesy Cincinnati Zoo
“To this day, it’s been 20 years of: Save it. Spend it. Save it. Spend it,” Fisher says. “Reinvesting in infrastructure is as important as anything we do, because if we have weak infrastructure, we have a weak organization.”
Savings and early successes gave Fisher and the zoo the credibility to take on bigger, bolder projects through the years, like the zoo’s 1.5 million-gallon rainwater catchment system and its solar arrays, which can produce 4.5 megawatts of power (the equivalent of powering 4,500 residential homes), Fisher says.
He argues the boldest moves, as important as on-site conservation work is, are the efforts to be a good neighbor. In the last few years, the zoo has helped secure and deploy solar panels to social service agencies around Cincinnati including Talbert House, and last year built a one-acre garden for Rockdale Academy, a Cincinnati Public School.
“I just think it’s our duty—taking our talents and our resources outside of our fence to help people,” Fisher says. “It has been the most satisfying part of this journey, and we take it very seriously.”
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