Seattle’s Sustainability Director on Successes, Failures, and Lessons for Other Cities
Former politician turned city official Jessyn Farrell, who still calls herself a “Save the Whales environmentalist,” tackles sustainability from all angles.
Jessyn Farrell is late meeting me at the Seattle Green Festival in early July — not because she’s late entering the conference, but because it seems she can’t walk through a crowd of sustainability and environmental experts without being stopped.
As the director of the Office of Sustainability & Environment for the city of Seattle, Farrell holds a position that, in other cities, might not be particularly high profile. But in the Emerald City, which regularly ranks as one of the most sustainable cities worldwide, it garners its own type of fame. That position — along with Farrell’s tenure on the Washington House of Representatives from 2013 to 2017, her decades of environmental and transit activism in the region, and her two (unsuccessful) runs for mayor — makes her a known figure.
We hadn’t met before, but once we began our interview, we found that our personal and professional experiences overlap in…
