Leading green execs: Dennis WIlde

Perhaps best known as “the green guy” at Gerding Edlen, Portland’s best known sustainable development company, Dennis Wilde has been instrumental in pushing the green building envelope on the West Coast. Although he has been an essential part of some of Gerding Edlen’s most far-reaching green building projects, Wilde eschews any responsibility for the company’s focus on green development. “This has been part of our makeup from the beginning,” he says, explaining that even before Gerding Edlen was a company, Mark Edlen and Bob Gerding joined forces to come up with innovative solutions for the headquarters for Pacific Gas Transmission at River Place in Portland. But Wilde’s charisma and commitment have carried the firm far beyond a few successful green building projects, driving it to the forefront of the West Coast’s green building revolution.  

And, while Wilde is generally seen as more of a visionary than a businessman, he was instrumental in helping to bring sustainable business principles to Gerding Edlen’s own operations. “In 1997 we got exposed to the Natural Step, and that was really a turning point—especially for me,” Wilde says. “All of a sudden I saw how the pieces fit together and how you could really build a business model dedicated to doing the right thing for the planet and its resource capacity; that’s when we really began pursuing this in a more aggressive way.”

When the company acquired the Brewery Blocks in Portland in 1999, it decided to use the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) criteria as a metric for the big-picture lessons of the Natural Step. That redevelopment project unquestionably changed downtown Portland, and it has become a model for sustainable urban redevelopment nationwide. Wilde says the company has been using both the Natural Step and LEED ever since, and the Brewery Blocks are still his favorite project. “We count success at the Brewery Blocks by the number of jaywalkers that cross the streets,” he says. “There are more people walking there than cars, day and night the streetcar is packed, and bike lockers are full.”

Part of Gerding Edlen’s brand is its focus on urban redevelopment. “We want to create great places for people to live, work and play,” Wilde says. “And that is absolutely consistent with the environmental agenda; the greenest building in the world is a failure if it doesn’t work well for the people in it.” While Gerding Edlen has made a name for itself and built a profitable business around its focus on green building, Wilde says part of the company’s success lies in meeting clients where they’re at.

“We’ve had clients who will say things like ‘Look, we’re just a trucking company don’t try to convince us. We’re not about saving the world.’ But when we show them that they could not only save money, but actually make money by being smart about investments in their new building, they opt to do some really innovative things,” Wilde says. “There has been a rapid uptake and acceleration of these ideas and a sudden realization by business people that, if they want to be in the game, they need to take climate change seriously.” That acceleration has sped the growth of Gerding Edlen as well, which now has offices and projects up and down the West Coast. “The pace of change has been almost breathtaking,” Wilde says, “And while you certainly can’t attribute all of that to our environmental agenda, it has become part of who we are, and it’s clearly part of our brand.”

As business has grown, Wilde says the pressure to do more and find solutions more quickly has increased. “I think we’re all more aware of the immediacy of the need for change, and we stay up at night worrying about whether we can change fast enough—or at least I do,” he says.