PlanGreen Principal, Mary Vogel, has over 20 years experience in bringing sustainability concepts into community planning.

Currently she is active in helping the Congress for New Urbanism to found a regional chapter in the Pacific Northwest. At the national level she's involved in CNU's Light Imprint New Urbanism Initiative and its Transportation Task Force helping to shape a context sensitive manual for transportation engineers in partnership with the Institute for Transportation Engineers.

As a CNU member of the Correspondence Committee for LEED-ND (Neighborhood Development) as well as the Sustainable Urbanism Ratings Group, Mary is helping to define and implement Sustainable Urbanism. By taking an active role in shaping the Sustainable Sites Initiative standards and guidelines into a rating system for sites and a plug-in to LEED she is helping to further define the concept of Sustainable Urbanism.

PlanGreen's recent successes include:

• Helping Clark County, WA to take a comprehensive sustainable development approach in its Hwy 99 Sub-Area Plan
• Helping the City of Portland to shape what it calls "the most advanced green building policy in North America"
• Helping Montgomery County, MD's Council to craft the first code in the nation to combine a "Complete and Green Streets" approach to future roads and major reconstruction
• Helping Washington, DC become the first major city to mandate green building for the private sector
• Developing the high performance infrastructure guidance for the New Urbanist Smart Code
• Helping to design and install a rain garden that drains a US Senate parking lot as well as six other rain gardens throughout the Anacostia Waterfront Inititative area of the District of Columbia.
• Helping to green the Great Streets program for the Nation's Capital as well as the new Comprehensive Plan

Mary also writes for Urban Land magazine, the membership publication of the premier think tank for the real estate industry, the Urban Land Institute. Two of her articles--"Moving Toward High Performance Infrastructure" (Oct 06) and "Greening Downtown Greens" (Jan 06)--aim to reframe the way we approach the landscape/streescape in our cities, bringing in ribbons of nature to augment or replace our aging infrastructure. Another two of her articles (Aug 07 and Oct 07) aim to reframe the way communities redevelop their waterfronts by analyzing what two of the leaders in this field--Toronto, Ontario and Portland, Oregon--are doing to restore the ecological integrity of the water bodies that create their waterfronts as they redevelop them.

Having been active in Native Plant Societies for over 20 years, Mary has an in-depth knowledge of native plants and their habitats. She teams up, when appropriate, with other planning, urban design, green building and ecological restorationist firms and organizations to help communities develop a protective urban ecosystem.