Visit the websites below and spend some time going
through their resources. Think about the questions posed at the bottom
of this page. Participate in the threaded discussion.
Resources - Look at at least two of these in depth
Sustainable Society Directory
http://www.sustainable-society.co.uk/
London Sustainability Exchange
http://www.lsx.org.uk/default.aspx
U.N. Div. for Sustainable Development
http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/
Sustainable World Coalition
http://www.swcoalition.org/
ConservationEconomy.net
http://www.conservationeconomy.net
Sustainable Northwest
http://www.sustainablenorthwest.org/
Reading Assignments
Read
Edwards: Chapters 6-7.
Read about Gaviotas: Colombia’s
sustainable community
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC42/Colombia.htm
http://www.urbanecology.org.au/articles/gaviotas.html
With the world's population set to double within half
a century, people will soon have to live on land previously considered
unlivable. This knowledge guided visionary Paolo Lugari to his decision
to build a sustainable tropical civilization in Colombia. He explained
to a team of scientists, agronomists, engineers, and doctors that he
believed they had three choices for where to develop a new community:
burn down the Colombian Amazon, do the same to El Choco, the large
rainforest on Colombia's western coast, or preseve the forests and
follow him to los llanos, the barren plains east of the Andes. In 1971,
Lugari staked a claim to 25,000 acres of the llanos, where the group
began to transform the worst soils in Colombia into the miraculous
community of Gaviotas.
Read
Proops, JLR;
Faber, M;
Manstetten, R;
Joest, F.
Achieving a Sustainable World. Ecological Economics, vol. 17, no.
3, pp. 133-135, June 1996. Link to it at:
Proops Article
See the threaded discussion for the username and
password.
Lesson Description
This Module is an overview of
sustainability and pollution prevention at the highest level, that of
society and culture. It is intended to raise questions such as:
Why do we consume so many resources and
waste so much when it does not benefit us to do so?
How could we organize ourselves and our
society to maintain the things which are beneficial to us but to be more
sustainable?
What barriers stand
in the way of the culture change we need?
