Cleveland, Ohio is the greenest city in America.

Well ok, it could be.

On a short tour of the city this week, I was shown a ‘green-rehabbed’ office building that is being used as a model.

The five-story complex, in the heart of the city, has solar panels and raised bed gardens on the roof. The parking lot is designed with a slope that filters oil and anti-freeze tainted runoff through a green space area, instead of directly into the storm sewers.

The interior was painted with non-toxic, vegetable based paints (leaving only a faint smell of broccoli, I’m told). And the hallways have energy-saving, motion sensor lights that only activate when someone is in the hallway.

And if that isn’t enough, the property is flanked with a “bird friendly” fence, complete with little perches for your discerning white-throated sparrow, or not-so-discerning pigeon (it is Cleveland after all).

Now, let’s say Bill Cherry worked in the green-rehabbed complex. I met Cherry the other day in a Westside suburb of Cleveland.

He told me he sold his car seven years ago, for environmental and health reasons, and bicycles everywhere locally. He averages 12 miles a day, and if he wants to go beyond this radius, say to an Eastside suburb, he takes a public transit “Clean Air” bus with bike racks on the front.

So ideally: you got Bill Cherry on the environmentally friendly bicycle, hopping on an environmentally friendly bus, to go to an environmentally friendly office.

Now let’s multiply that by, oh I don’t know, maybe several million. And presto: Cleveland’s green (or at least not nearly as rust colored). Now I know by using the word ‘presto,’ you might get the impression this is the stuff of fairy tales. But it’s not, or at least it shouldn’t be.

Because the carcinogens the children in Cleveland are breathing from all the car emissions are real. The toxic runoff that’s going into the storm sewers, that’s then going into the Cuyahoga River, that’s then poisoning the Cleveland fish, is real. And bad ozone over Cleveland, from burning fossil fuels, instead of using solar cells and sweaters at the office, is real.

So why couldn’t the green, rehabbed office complex / Bill Cherry on his bike scenario be real, in spades?

Well, it could.

And here’s how.

Clevelander Gary Pritts recently told me that during the 1997 Cleveland Indians entire playoff series – which took them 16 games and all the way to the 7th game of the World Series – generated a tremendous amount of excitement in this city. In fact, Gary, using a pocket calculator and some rough figures, estimated (“This isn’t definitive, or anything,” he smiled.) that some 12,000 “person years” were expended in all the time Clevelanders either watched, or talked about, this one playoff run.

And wouldn’t it be something, Gary continued, if people here got that excited about “going green” in Cleveland.

I thought: ‘Yeah, it would.’

And when you think about it in a common sense way (and are looking little Cleveland children, who will be inheriting this world, square in the eyes), what’s really more important?

A massive, spirited Green Revolution in Cleveland to save the earth for these little children; or a pennant run?

Tragically though, these little children will go on writhing in pain in the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Ward, or they will go on to face a world of environmental devastation – because, characteristic to their lazy, self-centered nature, Clevelanders continued to answer that last question woefully wrong.

Average Joe Schriner writes about common sense from the back roads (and city streets) of America.