Communities & Sustainability

Sustainable development in communities is not about walking a tight rope, seeking some mythical balance between economics and environment. This leads to habitats half protected, economies weakened, and personal principles bargained away. The primary barriers to communities achieving sustainability include:

• economic deprivation;
• concentration of money and an imbalance of power (in a few hands);
• an economy driven by profits at any cost; by greed; by consumption;
• communities competing with one another for jobs;
• different languages with no translation and inaccurate perceptions of others;
• lack of accountability in government, in corporations, and in individual behavior;
• placing blame "out there" rather than accepting responsibility;
• barriers between work, home, play -- physical separation, sprawl and isolation;
• imbalance of power;
• lack of trust in "the other;" and
• conflicting goals, strategies, and analyses.

Communities must search for ways to create co action and assume co-responsibility, while doing no harm to the life giving environmental elements that sustain the future of people. Economic activity can promote a healthy environment and healthy ecosystems can enrich their inhabitants. But how can a region achieve community synergy, simultaneously responding to economic pressures while also protecting the environment? An unsustainable community tries to govern nature. A sustainable community emulates nature. A sustainable community is defined not by legal boundaries but in patterns of relationship, connection to place, and amount of citizen involvement. A sustainable community is conscious of its obligations to future generations and develops leadership that can deal with change. In a sustainable community the imperatives of collective well-being transcend the narrow economic interests of individuals and effective processes exist for finding common ground. A sustainable community is one that transmits shared values and honors them in good faith.

Sustainability requires communities to pursue an evolving and ever changing program of activities, including a continuous process of evaluating current and emerging trends, an ongoing means of encouraging citizen participation and negotiating conflicts, and an updating of plans. These activities should be oriented toward searching for ways to continuously move communities in the direction of becoming more sustainable.

The process of developing community sustainability will expose citizens to the effects of their actions on others and on their local environment, while motivating and mobilizing them to pursue a responsible and shared vision for a collective future. Some of the key indicators of a sustainable community include:

• ideas of sufficiency and sharing as core values;
• communities with strong leadership;
• solutions to economic problems should also improve or enhance the environment;
• linking or connecting economic, environmental, and health concerns;
• having the political will for change;
• acknowledgement that human health is integrally linked to environmental health;
• ability to seek common ground solutions;
• show of a spirit of cooperation and patterns of relationships;
• communities that emulate nature;
• inclusiveness (true collaboration) and taking responsibility;
• cooperative efforts toward economic security;
• value of future generations;
• communities wanting to revisit "traditional values";
• framework of cooperation not competition; and
• commitment to comprehensive planning and regionalism.