A System's Approach to Sustainable Development

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Check out "Practice of Sustainable Community Development" a new book published by R. Warren Flint of Five E's Unlimited

 

 


 

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New Book on Sustainable Community Development

The Practice of Sustainable Community Development: A Participatory Framework for Change is a book published in November 2012 by Springer Publishing (New York) that details a systemic approach to sustainable community development (SDC), encouraging full participatory involvement and promoting confidence for all peoples. The book’s author, Dr. R. Warren Flint, is a sustainability specialist with more than 15 years’ experience in working with communities toward achieving sustainability. After fully engaging in the meaning of sustainability, the reader of this book – the student, the practitioner, and the community leader – is presented with experiences of people, relationship building, group dynamics, and community improvement methods that a practitioner of SCD would experience. The book discusses, analyzes, and encourages alternative actions at the community level to promote wide-spread change, while fostering local choices that lead to more self-sufficiency and to the buffering of communities from the impacts of business as usual.

The reader is taken step-by-step through a community development procedure, that includes processes of community assessment, visioning, setting of goals and objectives, and defining strategic actions that can be pursued to achieve the measured outcome of sustainability. Through application of the tools and strategies discussed, community members are putting aside day-to-day concerns in recognition of the bigger picture that nature and people are inescapably under the influence of one another through connecting relationships. The brilliance of the sustainability movement is its demand for seeing things as interconnected and interdependent – its ability to provide a bridge between disciplines and interests, between the pieces of the whole and the whole itself.

This book’s purpose is to discuss the difficulties and opportunities of getting societies to engage with issues from an environment fraught with unforeseen events and unexpected outcomes, where the science is pretty good but the social response, from politics to economics, is focused elsewhere. The book emphasizes that if we can begin to judge proposed actions and policies for their economic value as well as for their ecological and evolutionary affects, we will be following a model of sustainability by associating different human values with the multiple dynamics of natural systems. More information about Practice of Sustainable Community Development can be found at Springer Publishing or by contacting Dr. Flint at rwflint@eeeee.net.


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Last Update: 1/1/15
Web Author: Dr. R. Warren Flint