Resources For Sustainable Local Communities -- Part Three

In continuing this series of articles, we are giving greater attention to print resources on this topic along with a continuation of our descriptions of relevant Internet web sites. The total length of the three books which are reviewed in this article is slightly over two hundred pages. Each of these books will pay readers rich dividends and require a minimum of reading time and space on your book shelf.

I suggest that unless your are already very familiar with the community sustainability work in the U. S. that you read either Krizek & Power's or Lachman's book both of which focus on this topic. The former book provides more depth and details and the latter provides more easily assimilated generalizations. Both are appropriate to readers seeking general information and knowledge of sustainability work going on in local communities in the U.S. Additionally each book has some distinctive information not duplicated in the other one: Krizek & Power describe planners' roles and the potential of professionally led planning in relation to community sustainability and Lachman relates local sustainability work to pollution prevention activities. Both books provide ample examples and reflect careful and thoughtful research and writing on the part of their authors.

The book edited by Jillian Conrad, is different in topic and presentation than the two previously described books. Conrad's book focuses on thinking and work being done in relation to the Global Eco-Village Network and is a proceeding of a week long conference covering 46 different sessions and consists of many short 1-3 page chapters, each covering a single session.

Three web sites are reviewed in this article. The first one, "Sustainable Seattle," provides regularly updated information on this community's sustainability work which is among the best known such work in the U.S. The second one, "Sustainable Communities Network," reports brief case studies on many community sustainability projects and in addition provides in depth resources on most topics being pursued in these projects. The third one, "Redefining Progress," provides much needed information on indicators being used to measure progress in sustainable community projects as well as other community based projects focusing on quality of life, health, and performance evaluation.

Linking Sustainable Community Activities to Pollution Prevention: A Sourcebook, by Beth E. Lachman. Santa Monica, CA: Critical Technologies Institute, RAND, 1997. (cost $15.00)

Lachman's report of her research on community sustainability initiatives is a short, succinct synthesis of this emerging field of community reform which is accompanied by well chosen examples and documentation of relevant resources for this topic. Her research was stimulated by encountering the topic of "sustainable communities" through her involvement in the development of the National Environmental Technology Strategy and the conferences of the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable. Thus, her perspective is that of an outsider learning about community sustainability for the purposes of communicating these learnings to people focused on pollution prevention and environmental technology as well as other audiences needing a short and well documented review of the sustainability projects which are emerging in hundreds of communities in the U.S.

The book begins with a two page summary and a helpful table of acronyms which are followed by fifty-eight pages which are organized into seven chapters and concludes with a well organized, twelve page annotated bibliography. Chapters 2 and 3 describe the aggregate of community sustainability projects by means of identifying the commonalities within diverse definitions, principles, and operational processes being used in different localities. For example, Lachman concludes, "...a sustainable community effort consists of a long-term integrated and systems approach to developing and achieving a healthy community by addressing economic, environmental and social issues. Fostering a strong sense of community is also an important part of such efforts" (p. 8). Later she identifies and describes common procedures which communities often go through as they develop their sustainable community projects. These are creating and maintaining: an ongoing governance structure for the effort; a community vision; specific goals, objectives and indicators of progress; guiding principles; and designing, selecting, implementing and evaluating multiple new activities and changes in existing activities which move the community in the direction of being more sustainable. She provides a particularly valuable discussion of how and why different communities organize their sustainability efforts differently. In Chapter 4, she focuses on the governmental and non-governmental resources which communities are using to become more sustainable. In Chapter 5, she describes four sustainable community projects: Northampton County, Virginia, "…often cited as a model of small town and rural sustainable development;" Seattle Washington, "…one of the first U.S. cities to explicitly incorporate sustainability concepts as an organizing principle for community planning and development;" EcoVillage at Ithaca, New York, "…where members are trying to develop a new community from the ground up;" and Presidio National Park, "…a former Army base in the heart of San Francisco…a unique national park…trying to become a center for sustainability" (pp. 35,37, 40 & 41). In the final two chapters, Lachman describes the many positive potentials and specific recommendations for creating working relationships between pollution prevention efforts and initiatives to achieve sustainable local communities.

A Planners Guide to Sustainable Development, by Kevin J. Krizek and Joe Power. Chicago, IL: American Planning Association, Planning Advisory Service, Report No. 467, December 1996. (cost $32.00)

While only 66 pages (8 1/2 by 11), this book is chocked full of well researched, useful information along with loads of specific examples. It is written for professional planners but is very understandable and interesting to anyone wanting to learn about the origins and development of community sustainability projects, how planners and their work are potentially an integral part of sustainability activities, and detailed and comparative information about how different communities have developed and implemented their efforts to become more sustainable. Both authors are planners who are experienced in working with sustainability projects. The book itself is part of a well known and highly regarded series of reports produced by the Planning Department of the American Planning Association.

The authors' assessment, with which I agree, is that the greatest asset of the concept of "sustain-ability" is: "That it represents a new way of thinking about matters that places equal weight on environmental, economic, and social issues …changing our ways of thinking invariably affects the way we make our decisions and the outcomes of those decisions." (p. 17) Adapting insights developed in Olympia, Washington's sustainability project, the authors identify 6 tenets of sustainable development: "future oriented/long term&emdash;not&emdash;budget/election/short term; bounded by limits&emdash;not&emdash;lacking natural restraints; natural/geographic&emdash;not&emdash;artificial/political; means oriented&emdash;not&emdash;ends oriented; holistic/interconnected&emdash;not&emdash;hierarchical/separated; and participatory&emdash;not&emdash;autocratic." (p.18). They go on in the third chapter to describe and illustrate each of these tenets.

My favorite chapters in this book are Chapter 2, "Sustainability: Concepts and Policy" and Chapter 5, "Communities Making a Difference: Case Studies of Successful Sustainable Development Programs." From the second chapter, readers learn about how new understandings of population growth and steady-state economics have given impetus to ideas which are the bases of action for sustainability. Excellent information is provided about the foundational work which was done by the United Nations' World Commission on Environment and Development reported in Our Common Future (1987), the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil as reported in Agenda 21(1992), and Habitat II Conference, the City Summit held in July 1996 in Istanbul, Turkey. The most relevant document from the latter conference for community sustainability is Statement of U.S. Civility for Habitat II (1996) produced by the U.S. Network for Habitat II and providing a blueprint for moving the U.S. closer to sustainability. Additionally, this chapter provides detailed and interesting descriptions about the Federal government's contributions to community sustainability through the work of the President's Council on Sustainable Development and new and focused programs in the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy. The chapter concludes by describing state-level sustainability programs with particular emphasis on the extensive work being done in the state of Minnesota. I felt hopeful after reading this chapter because just in the past 10 years extensive global and U.S. attention and work has been devoted to sustainability. Furthermore, this work recognizes and supports the importance of local communities focusing on becoming sustainable.

The case studies in Chapter 5 come from geographically diverse cities of different sizes which are pursuing quite different approaches to becoming more sustainable. Seattle, Washington, one of the oldest such projects in the U.S., has pursued a grassroots approach. Santa Monica, California's approach has been a government initiative with its strongest emphasis being on the natural environment. Chattanooga, Tennessee has used a public/private partnership strategy for its extensive action oriented project which has been recognized by the President's Council on Sustainability. In Cambridge, Massachusetts the approach to sustainability has focused on social issues and been led and maintained by a joining of community activism and academic resources. Olympia, Washington and Thurston County in the South Puget Sound Region have used the fact of being a state of Washington 2010 Model City and the citizens' strong environmental values as a foundation for its extensive and ongoing sustainability project. In this chapter there are well written narrative descriptions of sustainability work in each of these cities, and in addition Appendix C contains a comparative analysis of the five cities focused on the processes used in each city.

The book concludes with other valuable appendices which provide contrasting definitions of sustainable development, different criteria being used in selecting and developing indicators of sustainable development and a selected list of associations, non profits, governments and research centers addressing sustainability.

Eco-Villages and Sustainable Communities: Models for 21st Century Living, edited by Jillian Conrad. Findhorn, Scotland: Findhorn Press, 1996. (cost $ 11.95)

This thin, ninety-five page book is the proceedings of the week-long, 1995 conference, by the same name as the book title, which was held in Scotland at the Findhorn Foundation. While over 400 people from 40 countries attended, over 300 people had to be turned away. My copy of this book is from its third printing which is one indicator of its high value. The Global Eco-Village Network which sponsored the conference received much positive feedback from both official delegations and non-governmental organizations at the more recent UN Habitat II conference in Istanbul, Turkey. (J.T. Jackson and H. Jackson, 1997/98)

Most of the pages of brief and informative reports in this book are split between coverage of 23 plenary sessions and reports on the 23 workshops with the remaining 7 pages devoted to resources ranging from contact addresses for eco-villages to annotated lists of suggested readings, web sites, and useful organizations. Readers will find three types of plenary session reports. The first includes the experiences and perspectives of specific eco-villages: Findhorn in Scotland, Crystal Waters in Australia, Lebensgarten Steyerberg in Germany, Auroville in India and The Farm in the U.S.A. The second group of plenary session reports focus on specific eco-village issues, including sustainability, technological foundations, economy, fundamental rationale/mission and collaboration. The third group are reports on more general but still interesting topics ranging from the evolution of human consciousness by Peter Dawkins to globalization, urbanization, and centralization by Helena Norberg Hodge.

To provide you more of a flavor of the book, I will describe two of my favorite session reports; a report of a session from the second group ("Why Eco-Villages" by Robert Gilman) and one from the third ("From the Global Village to a Globe of Villages" by Helena Norberg Hodge). Gilman, a former NASA astrophysicist and more recently a co-founder of the important In Context Institute and In Context Journal, focused on the question "What time is it?" or in other words, "Where are we in history?" He began by examining the pattern of changes in human population numbers and industrial output per capita to point out the consequent major changes which now are required in technology, consumption and production. In qualitative terms he concludes that this puts us at the point of a major cultural transition from 5,000 years of the age of Empire to an emerging Planetary era calling for very new institutions and myths. A theme of his presentation is the need for balance in making this transition, e.g. we need to give balanced attention to technology, consumption and production changes. For him, eco-villages and neighborhoods as well as sustainable communities are the ideal places to work on and develop the new culture. As he puts it:" We can't birth culture simply within ourselves. We need to be able to do it with others, but we need to be able to do it at a scale that we can understand." (p. 12) The challenges to such villages and communities call for balanced attention to the physical and biological systems(e.g. waste water treatment, food production, etc.); to the built environment (e.g. buildings, roads, etc.) and to the human part (e.g. economy, governance, etc.) This requires balanced attention to our relationships with the natural world, with each other in terms of politics and social issues and with ourselves in terms of health, personal growth and spirituality. Further he states, "There's a balance that needs to happen between group and private; between what needs to happen today and tomorrow, between the hardware aspects (the buildings), and the software side (between the heart, the mind and the will)". (p. 12) Gilman also seeks to answer the question, "What time is it?" in terms of where existing eco-villages are in the s-curve which sociologists have discovered describes the diffusion of innovations. These diverse, and until recently, quite separated social units are now at the stage of experimentation and pilot projects but now beginning to develop support systems and infrastructure. He advocates that these separate experiments get into closer contact and cooperation to speed up the learning process and the process by which eventually this innovation moves into the stage of popularization. He recognizes that with the major challenges and stresses of such social and cultural innovation it is critically important to celebrate accomplishments and to experience, individually and collectively satisfaction and joy grounded in living meaningfully which must include time for play along with the hard work now occurring in these villages, neighborhoods and communities.

Helena Norberg-Hodge in her plenary session communicates an analysis which comes from over 20 years working in the so-called "underdeveloped world" with the Ladakhi people on alternatives to conventional development grounded in the prevailing patterns of modernization and Westernization. Her analysis focuses on ever increasing urbanization and the growing power of multinational corporations supported by mass media. She describes the accompanying exploitation of the natural environment along with the spread of a human monoculture of consumerism based on created needs and accompanying feelings of inadequacy which leads her to describe and advocate for decentralized small communities. As she puts it, "Precisely because there are so many people, a globalised economic model which can only feed, house and clothe a small minority has to be abandoned." (p. 31) From her experience and values, physical sustainability becomes more viable in such smaller and decentralized social units. Also, she experiences them as providing for human development and fulfillment which comes from direct participation in the processes necessary to sustainably meet the basic needs of one's own life and that of one's family members and neighbors. She says, "It is becoming essential to support knowledge systems and economic models that are based on an intimate understanding of diverse regions and their unique climates, soils and resources. It is becoming essential to support the eco-village movement." (p. 31)

The reports of the workshops held in this path-breaking conference include a wide range of topics from strawbale construction to communication and conflict resolution. One that I found most thought provoking was on the topic of "interest and inflation free money," by Declan and Margrit Kennedy. (pp. 81-83)

Before spending time with this book I thought I would be frustrated by the short length of the reports on each plenary and workshop session. Quite to the contrary, I enjoyed gaining so much from so few pages. Thanks go to editor Jillian Conrad and her writers. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I have. If you want to access Internet based web sites associated with eco-villages here are two good ones with which to begin: http.//www.gaia.org (for the global network) and http://ena.gaia.org/index.html (for the network of the Americas).Jackson, J.T. and Hildur Jackson, "The Global Eco-Village Strategy," Earth Ethics, vol. 9, nos. 1 & 2, Fall/Winter 1997-98, pp. 15,16 & 35.

Sustainable Seattle
(http://www.scn.org/ip/sustainable/index.htm)

The web site of the nonprofit organization which, since 1991, spearheads Seattle, Wash-ington's sustainability project. Here you will find current and useful information about almost every facet of this project, e.g. overall organizational mission and structure, projects, and indicators they are using to measure progress toward sustainability. One thing lacking in this site is a history of this extensive and nationally well known sustainability project. Links are provided to other relevant sites on the Internet, along with a list of available publications from Sustainable Seattle.

Sustainable Communities Network(SCN)
(http://www.sustainable.org)

An extensive, timely and in depth site on community sustainability.

This site is one of the best available on the Net for people interested in accessing resources whether organizational, readings, or case studies on almost all aspects of local community sustainability projects. All of its positive features are enhanced by the Network's commitment to continually update and improve each section of the web site.

The introductory section, "About Sustainable Communities", provides annotated lists of relevant organizations and readings and an extensive file of case studies indexed by states. Currently they have begun to update these valuable case studies. The six major content subsections of this site are:" creating community"," protecting natural resources","smart growth," "governing sustainably," "growing a sustainable economy" and "living sustainably." Each of these six sections have extensive subsections, each with clear documentation of relevant resources including the topic relevant case studies which are within the Network's library and available on-line. Not surprisingly, some subsections are stronger than others, e.g. in the "Creating Community" section the strongest subsections are: "community visioning and implementation" and "conflict resolution and mediation" and the weaker ones are "building partnerships" and "culture, art, ethnicity, heritage and celebrations." Other subsections within "Creating Community" are: "civic engagement" and "inventories and indicators."

This site has an extensive and excellent calendar of upcoming events which is the best I have encountered in any of the web sites focused on sustainable local communities. The "What's New" section of the site is very informative and regularly updated. A library section is very small but has some interesting documents which can be down loaded. I found it helpful that the site lists and annotates the SCN partnership organizations. I wish the site provided a history of SCN, including information on how it is funded and how the partnership organizations joined the network.

Redefining Progress|
(http://www.rprogress.org)

Founded in 1994, this public policy organization is doing important and innovative work on community indicators. These indicators have become an essential element of community sustainability projects. On this web site you will find helpful information on community indicators including an index of 150 different community indicator projects, many of them related to sustainability projects and others related to initiatives on community quality of life, healthy communities and bench marking of community performance. Recently, this program published an insightful historical review and comparative analysis of the field of community indicators. (National Civic Review, v. 86, no. 1, Spring 1197, pp. 43-52) This is only one of several programs of this organization which also has a National Indicators Program which is pioneering the development of the national Genuine Progress Indicator as a more beneficial replacement to the long established GDP (Gross Domestic Product) indicator. This organization, which seeks to reach out across the political spectrum, focuses on economic policy out of a concern to identify antiquated economic assumptions and related incentives which they perceive to be at the root of many of the U.S.'s social and economic ills. In doing this to develop and promote new policy approaches they seek to integrate economic opportunity, social cohesion, environmental conservation and fiscal responsibility.

Additional information for readers:

If you are interested in reading Part I and Part II in this continuing series on resources for sustainability they can be accessed here.

Thanks to reader Julie Eckhardt for calling our attention to relevant resources at Northwestern University's Institute for Policy Research including the work of J.L.McKnight on asset based community development. We will be reviewing this resource in a future article in this continuing series.

I invite readers to suggest resources for review and potential inclusion in this continuing series. If you have other comments or critiques of materials in this article, I would welcome receiving them addressed to the Neahtawanta Center.

Return to the Index of Synapse 43, Spring 1998