Back to reality

I would like to ground things a little bit and talk about real examples of moving towards living sustainably. Although this might come across as a bit more about "green living" than "sustainable development" my take is that it demonstrates an example of what development could be aiming towards.

So we'll start our little tour right here in Kitchener/Waterloo. There are quite a number of people who are working together to live as sustainably as possible. One example can be found at Little City Farm. This couple grows much of their own food, generates much of their own electricity (of which they minimize their usage) and many other green efforts. The key is that they do this all on a normal city plot, not out in the country.

A note for two of the links on their site. One is to Bullfrog Power - a power company here in Ontario that sells power from renewable sources. Another is to the EF Schumacher Society which I had never heard of before. According to their website,

"Founded in 1980 the mission of the Schumacher Society is to promote the building of strong local economies that link people, land, and community. To accomplish this we develop model programs, including local currencies, community land trusts, and micro-lending; host lectures and other educational events; publish papers; and maintain a library to engage scholars and inspire citizen-activists."

Very interesting stuff!

But what about the things that simply cannot be produced reasonably independently...
For food there are food co-ops where people can buy local food (which is often organic and all that) - eg Bailey's Local Food.
For clothing, appliances and electronics check out Good Guide, a website that ranks all sorts of products from toilet paper to cell phones. There are a number of these kinds of sites and IMHO they are still fairly rudimentary and probably not very accurate but I think Good Guide is a strong start.

But what about sustainable communities (this is where Jordan could probably provide much better links) the US Green Building Council has put out guidelines for a sustainable buildings and even neighborhoods through its LEED program.

I will save your time and let you surf some of those sites but I wanted to tie it back to development. I wonder how our development efforts in the rest of the world would be different if this kind of mentality were much more pervasive in our society. I say this with the whole actions affect beliefs conversation in the back of my mind. If our development efforts concentrated on changing developing AND developed countries into a sustainable society instead of using the wildly changing western society as a "goal" I think things would be a lot different and the real weight of development would be an international burden, not just for the developing world.

Any other links to what a sustainable society looks like? I know they're out there, I'm just stopping myself from searching for "sustainable society".

Kurtis (in Waterl00)