Sustainable Community
Making Better Places to Live
One of the fundamental sustainability underpinnings of a successful and sustainable community involves engagement. Sustainability is a complex subject and the more people, institutions, and interactions that we can encourage and support regarding sustainable thinking, the better off the living earth can be.
There are some basic guidelines. Decisionmaking needs to be transparent, inclusive, and subject to critical analysis. This goes to leadership and education. In most respects, modern life and the world in which we live can be described as a constantly shifting landscape. Combined with the realities of the nature of change in the biological and ecological world, our ability to be flexible in both our planning and our actualization strategies is a bottom line reality.
There are many ways to characterize liveable communities. These include fair access to wealth and power, education, medical treatment, and justice.
Urban Infrastructure
Some strategies to accomplish this include ideas around walkable neighborhoods, urban infrastructure that protects clean water and air, and an investment in strategies that promotes respect of cultures, races, all ages, and gender.
Walkable Neighborhoods-This includes fundamental investments in public transportation, and complete streets -transportation corridors that promote multi-modal transportation including bicycles and pedestrians, and not just cars and trucks. Walkable neighborhoods are designed to include non-auto routes to jobs, shopping, education, and medical care. parks and green spaces are important.
Combined Sewer and Untreated Release-Globally sewer issues remain a disgrace. We a need to change urban and rural sewer strategies. Aging urban sewer systems that use combined sewer overflows and dump billions of gallons of untreated raw sewerage into public waterways are a public health hazard and effect biodiversity, which contributes to climate change. Rural waste strategies, including sprawl, ag waste, and landfills can be addressed in a wide variety of ways including new technologies, and a refocus away from political and economic inspired growth and consumerism that has turned our planet into a vast consumer wasteland with little regards for the consequences to the environment.
Local Economy- Moving away from global economic hegemony that exploits and extracts local wealth and leaves behind a path of economic, cultural, and environmental destruction that doesn't matter to the distant corporate fund holders is one of the most important strategies that we can employ in order to make a more sustainable community. Thinking like a region, or a community, or a neighborhood, in a globalized world is thinking of ways to defend against global economic raiders. Keep the money local.
Link: BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies)
Urban Ecology- All urban areas were once wild places. As the ecology of an urban area has changed, the need for the underpinning ecological services that were once provided by those lost ecosystems has not diminished. The ecology of the planet is balanced by all places. thinking of a community as an ecological system is pretty important. Our trees, green spaces, and the many kinds of animals and plants that do, can, or should exist here need to be encouraged. This includes less attention to monocultural and pesticide infected lawns, and more attention to native plants, roadsides, parks, backyards, roofs, school yards and things like migrating birds and pollinators.
Design- We can and must design our communities to be environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable. Every day we have opportunities to plan, design, and implement design strategies for infrastructure, private and shared spaces, and institutional living and working enviornments ranging from parks and open spaces to schools, campuses, commercial strips, and residential neighborhoods.
Link: -Janine Benyus Ted Talk: 12 sustainable design ideas
- Biomimicry 3.8
Gender and Human Rights
-Throughout the world gender equality remains a basic inequality. The rights of individuals to have equal access and to have equal rights is fundamental. One of the critical ways to help moderate both population issues and to approach industrial agricultural farming economics, which are counterproductive to a sustainable planet, is to provide women, globally, with equal access to appropriate health care and social justice. Without equal rights we have no sustainable planet.
What is the Real Story behind Factory Farming and Population Growth?
There are some basic guidelines. Decisionmaking needs to be transparent, inclusive, and subject to critical analysis. This goes to leadership and education. In most respects, modern life and the world in which we live can be described as a constantly shifting landscape. Combined with the realities of the nature of change in the biological and ecological world, our ability to be flexible in both our planning and our actualization strategies is a bottom line reality.
There are many ways to characterize liveable communities. These include fair access to wealth and power, education, medical treatment, and justice.
Urban Infrastructure
Some strategies to accomplish this include ideas around walkable neighborhoods, urban infrastructure that protects clean water and air, and an investment in strategies that promotes respect of cultures, races, all ages, and gender.
Walkable Neighborhoods-This includes fundamental investments in public transportation, and complete streets -transportation corridors that promote multi-modal transportation including bicycles and pedestrians, and not just cars and trucks. Walkable neighborhoods are designed to include non-auto routes to jobs, shopping, education, and medical care. parks and green spaces are important.
Combined Sewer and Untreated Release-Globally sewer issues remain a disgrace. We a need to change urban and rural sewer strategies. Aging urban sewer systems that use combined sewer overflows and dump billions of gallons of untreated raw sewerage into public waterways are a public health hazard and effect biodiversity, which contributes to climate change. Rural waste strategies, including sprawl, ag waste, and landfills can be addressed in a wide variety of ways including new technologies, and a refocus away from political and economic inspired growth and consumerism that has turned our planet into a vast consumer wasteland with little regards for the consequences to the environment.
Local Economy- Moving away from global economic hegemony that exploits and extracts local wealth and leaves behind a path of economic, cultural, and environmental destruction that doesn't matter to the distant corporate fund holders is one of the most important strategies that we can employ in order to make a more sustainable community. Thinking like a region, or a community, or a neighborhood, in a globalized world is thinking of ways to defend against global economic raiders. Keep the money local.
Link: BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies)
Urban Ecology- All urban areas were once wild places. As the ecology of an urban area has changed, the need for the underpinning ecological services that were once provided by those lost ecosystems has not diminished. The ecology of the planet is balanced by all places. thinking of a community as an ecological system is pretty important. Our trees, green spaces, and the many kinds of animals and plants that do, can, or should exist here need to be encouraged. This includes less attention to monocultural and pesticide infected lawns, and more attention to native plants, roadsides, parks, backyards, roofs, school yards and things like migrating birds and pollinators.
Design- We can and must design our communities to be environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable. Every day we have opportunities to plan, design, and implement design strategies for infrastructure, private and shared spaces, and institutional living and working enviornments ranging from parks and open spaces to schools, campuses, commercial strips, and residential neighborhoods.
Link: -Janine Benyus Ted Talk: 12 sustainable design ideas
- Biomimicry 3.8
Gender and Human Rights
-Throughout the world gender equality remains a basic inequality. The rights of individuals to have equal access and to have equal rights is fundamental. One of the critical ways to help moderate both population issues and to approach industrial agricultural farming economics, which are counterproductive to a sustainable planet, is to provide women, globally, with equal access to appropriate health care and social justice. Without equal rights we have no sustainable planet.
What is the Real Story behind Factory Farming and Population Growth?
The Niagara Region Habitat
Brought to you by The Learning Sustainability Campaign
Special thanks to videographer, editor and music composer James Grimaldi, Jay Burney and voice artists Madelyn Burgess. For information on this video and how your organization can use it contact Jay Burney; email: lscampaign@aol.com