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Green Action: Creating Sustainable Communities - Mar 2010

Syllabus for Green Action: Creating Sustainable Communities

John Kinch's picture
Fri, 2010-02-19 23:06

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P2PU.org

Spring 2010

John A. Kinch, Ph.D.

kinch@msu.edu

 

GREEN ACTION: CREATING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

“There is no single template for a sustainable community.”

Daniel Sitarz, Sustainable America: America’s Environment, Economy and Society in the 21st Century

Course Description

How sustainable is your community? How sustainable does it have the potential to be?

This course is going to get at the principles and practices that are making communities everywhere more sustainable. Sustainability is guiding and empowering communities to develop and evolve in ways that are more just, transparent, healthier and more environmentally responsible.

Many communities, such as Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, are, in fact, defining their identities by how sustainable they are today, and aspire to be. Green is good!  But what exactly is this new green—sustainability—and how do you harness it to improve the quality of (all) life where you live?

This course has two main objectives: 1) To examine and understand sustainability as a visioning and organizing principle for communities.  2) To apply this knowledge toward developing the beginnings of a sustainability plan/outline for our own communities (defined at whatever scale you wish: neighborhood, group, work, school, city, town, region). 

Learning exercises in this course will build toward these plans. We’ll work collaboratively and individually and the final project can be in whatever communications medium you prefer: written, graphic, video, audio, digital, a mix.

We, ourselves, will come together as a community virtually. A course wiki, video conferencing and other digital means will connect and engage us.

Areas of sustainability we will cover are: Foundations and Origins; Grassroots and Government; Greening of Business; Education; Your Community; Greenwashing and Other Perils.

 

Syllabus

FOUNDATIONS AND ORIGINS (Week 1)

Our first week looks at the foundations and origins of the concept of sustainability—its intellectual, philosophical, scientific, historical and social movement roots.  One such origin comes from the international environmentalism and humanitarian relief arena of the last two decades. But there are others sources of sustainability as well.

Listed are some of the foundations and origins.  There are others. Please take a look (and give a listen) to as many of these resources as you can.

Assignment: Is there an aspect of sustainability that especially appeals to you?  Why? Please write a response and post to our blog (500 words or so).

Environmentalism Principles

Humanism Principles

Ecosystem Services

UN Millennium Development Goals

Brundtland Commission

Gurus: Aldo Leopold, Lester Brown, Paul Hawken, William McDonough, Jane Jacobs

Environmentalism 2.0

 

GRASSROOTS AND GOVERNMENT (Week 2)

Two of the levers for change in societies are grassroots movements and governments. Sometimes the two are in conflict; sometimes they are symbiotic. At the heart of this aspect of sustainability is the concept of equity, or, equality: environmental, social and economic. 

Assignment: Take a position on this question: Where’s the best answer lie for creating sustainable communities: with grassroots activism or local/regional/state/national/international governments—or something in between? Blog 500 words.

Global Green Cities

Green US Cities

Grassroots Sustainability

Sustainability Nonprofits

Green Drinks

West Michigan Environmental Action Council

Friends of Grand Rapids Parks

Grand Rapids Green Master Plan

Local Governments for Sustainability

West Michigan Strategic Alliance

Great Lakes Guy Blog

Good Governance and Sustainability

GREENING OF BUSINESS (Week 3)

The dominant economic model of the last several hundred years in the Western world, and increasingly today in the developing world, has been natural resource utilization to drive economic growth. Put less diplomatically, we have exploited nature for human gain. New thinkers and leaders in environmental and business circles are challenging this paradigm. Among the concepts to emerge from this trend is the “the triple bottom line.”

Assignment: Please find an example of a green business in your community—one that has a website. Analyze its website’s messages, images, graphics and offer a critique as to how “green” you think it really is.  Your critique can be in any output: written, graphic, audio, video, presentation software, etc.

Triple Bottom Line

Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)

Local First           

Business Alliance for Local Living Economies

US Green Building Council

Cradle to Cradle: Steelcase and Herman Miller

Green Jobs

James Howard Kunstler’s Blog

EDUCATION (Week 4)

Heard about the new “Sustainability Major” being offered at your local college or university? Just what does a sustainability major do for a career? Plenty. Higher education is becoming more green, both on campus, and with its outputs—graduates.

Assignment: Take a look at some institutions of higher education and see what they’re doing around sustainability. Anything grab you as especially innovative? Important? Any interest in the curricula or programs that are greening campuses across the nation? Blog.

Grand Valley State University’s Sustainable Community Development Initiative

Sustainability in Higher Education

 

YOUR COMMUNITY (Week 5)

Maybe your community is already sustainable or well on its way. Maybe you need to get green in a big way. Whatever your circumstance, those communities that are already becoming more sustainable have a wealth of information and best practices to share with others. Creating a sustainable community is a complex undertaking and draws upon diverse groups and individuals to make the ideal a reality.

Assignment: For this section, take a look at these resources, and others in your community, and then decide on the Top Sustainable Things your community needs to do or continue doing. Then do a “gap analysis” of these—that is to say, identify where there are gaps in information, resources, people that are preventing the job from getting done.

Feel free to tackle these in greater depth by coming up with a strategy (a plan, an outline) of how you might help make this aspect of your community more sustainable. 

Maybe there’s a group in your community that you can identify and volunteer to help as well.

Sustainable Communities Network

Green Grand Rapids

Charrettes, Transparency, Planning

Center for Neighborhood Technology

Worldchanging.org

Community Sustainability Partnership

GREENWASHING AND RELATED PERILS (Week 6)

. . . Or, “The-Five-Easy-Things-You-Can-Do-at-Home-to-Save-the-Planet Fallacy.”

These days, it seems everybody wants to be greener—individuals, corporations, communities, countries. Some are making legitimate progress toward this laudable goal.  Others may just be posers.

Has “sustainability” already become so overused and misappropriated that it has lost its meaning and significance? Does acting local at the community level matter if the global community isn’t doing the same?

Assignment: Make your world a little greener.

Is Wal-mart green? Fast Company, Inhabit.com, Thomas Freidman

Does cap and trade work? Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal, Center For American Progress