What would you ask your community leaders to do to encourage sustainable lifestyles?

i vote for 'other'. the government's best course is to stop enforcing non-sustainable lifestyles. stop forcing us to waste water, petrol, and other resources to follow landscaping regulations. stop placing industrial, commercial, and residential zones so far apart to force people to consume more transportation. stop pouring out trillions in corporate welfare money to build roads for use by the automobile companies (instead, maybe spend a small fraction of it on tramlines for the public to use). stop forcing citizens to own motorcars and then forcing them to drive to the ends of the earth collecting various 'emissions testing' and other stickers for them (i.e. if you want to pollute less, drive less not more). stop coercing municipal rubbish services; let people burn their own rubbish (if people have to take care of their own waste -- i.e. stew in their own filth -- of course they will consume less). stop forbidding ideas to be conveyed through p2p traffic and coercing people to waste money on tv signals and cinemas. stop enforcing building codes which do not allow us to take responsibility for the energy efficiency of our own homes, instead leaving it up to 'experts' who can follow all of the meaningless regulations. in short, rather than causing new problems, why doesn't the government merely stop causing the problems in the first place. and yes, i am aware of the well known argument that all problems are actually caused by exotic foreign lands like china or by the so-called problem of 'immigration'. i have some bad news for the klansmen who are my fellow posters: the earth is not the set of one of your simplified hollywood movies -- there are people here who aren't white anglosaxon protestants (and there always have been). just get over it.

Community leaders should adopt programs and regulations to accelerate the uptake of green building. In North America, less than 5% of new construction is green. This should be low-hanging fruit, and community leaders can get us to start picking it! Geoff in Montreal

It is not easy to do in Western culture, but if community leaders made an effort to live in solar homes, eat sustainable, local, organic food, drive wind-electric cars, and so on, they'd quickly become acquainted with the barriers and obstacles to sustainable lifestyles and how to change public policy to remove the barriers and create incentives.

There are too many special interests and too many diversions in places like the United States, so what I think is needed is a program similar to the old military draft, but in place of going off and fighting wars I would think a "public service" draft would do wonders to expose insulated social groups to new experences.

The program would be run akin to the "peace corps" but for a short time period of something like 4 months so that it is not all much of an inconvenience or as disruptive as a 4 year tour in the military, but the time needs to be long enough to actually get some work done. The objective of the "public service draft" would be to improve the basic infrastructure of a country, which would be geared toward having long term economic and environmental benefits.

For example say a type "a" college bound student get their number called up who has been exposed to all the benefits of a wealth suburban lifestyle, such as all the college prep classes, soccer camp, connections to classmastes from higher social economic levels. What I think would be an eye opener for an individual such as this brought up in a pretty affluent life style would be to have this person tutor under-privileged elementary aged school kids. That way both groups gain some benefit and insight.

Another example, I think would be kind of a learning experence is take inner city youth who have never seen or experenced the great outdoors and give them an opportunity to learn a skill such as maintaining buildings in a national park. I think this would be a win/win situation, because youth never exposed to the out doors get a chance to gain working skills out doors and public park infrastructure is maintained, something like

http://www.thesca.org/internships/

Saw the comment above "In the USA, population growth = immigration"

the fact of the matter is most of these people are "economic refugees" both "documented" and "undocumented" for the most part people tend to stick to their own kind and have very little intereaction with dissimilar social or economic groups.

What I think needs to be done, is take say an "undocumented economic refugee" and make them serve time in their own community to improve public infrastructure. For example here in southern california, for the past couple of years before the subprime mess put an end to the real estate boom, it seemed like most of the guys doing construction where mexicans. Chances are some of them were just "undocumented economic refugees" just trying to make a living, cause there were no economic opportunities in their home country. My pragmatic approach would be to draft these individuals who have some skills, and draft them to improve infrastructure in run down communites, by painting out graffiti, fixing up roads and side walks (all this stuff would improve property values), and I would make this kind of public service in addition to the other requirements of learning the language and american history a prerequisite for US citizenship.

All the public service draft programs would be geared to teaching people another skill, that of utilizing natural resources more efficiently. The thing that really scares me about the USA is people now seem to take for granted natural basic resources like water and oil. Over the years I've been to some way off the beaten track areas, for example the Aral sea, and I've seen first hand what happens when water resources are wasted, and with impending "post peak oil" which is off the radar screens of 99.99% of the general public, I think a "public service" draft for not only citizens of the USA, but all countries will focus attention and solve many of the ill effects of neglecting basic public infrastructure, and basically wasting natural resources (water and oil) that are the basis of modern life.

IMHO the only way, people are going to avoid a hell on earth when the have nots try and take the remaining natural resources from the individuals lucky enought to have, will be to educate everyone about the big picture that natural resources such as water and oil are indeed limited, and what first needs to be done is work on public infrastructure which can then be leveraged to achieve sustainability.

Noticed other people in this comment section suggested "carbon taxes," "changing diets," "putting up solar panels" on roofs, "end consumerism," etc., but IMHO the problem of "sustainablity" will not be solved, until all individuals are more of less on the same page, economic incentives are in place and public infrastructure is fixed up to keep up with demend.

BTW as much as I dislike president bush and his administrations idiotic policies, I realized that in order to address problems as grave as "post peak oil" and "global warming" we are going to need some kind of benevolent dictator who has the guts to take decisive actions and stay the course (much like president bush and dumb IMHO geopolitical idea to try and bring "american style" democracy to afghanistan, iran, iraq, etc.).

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." —Albert Einstein

I get pretty frustrated when Al Gore & other environmental icons never mention vegetarianism as a path toward sustainability. I'm not talking about animal rights, I'm talking about the food, oil, water, electricity, etc. it takes to raise livestock for food.

Here's some detailed information (with sources) on livestock's effect on the Earth, please read:

www.goveg.com/environment

- Nearly half the water in the U.S. is used for livestock.

- In the U.S. animals are fed more than 70% of the wheat, corn, and other grains.

- According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, animals raised for food produce 20 tons of manure for every household in the U.S. each year.

Take away all the values, philosophies and the like and look at what we are and what we have done over 1000's years.
We are voracious, greedy little buggers just like many other critters. The difference being that we seem to have outbred the others.

We do not conserve, we do not preserve, we compete savagely and hungrily beyond rationality or reason no matter if we live in New York or Darfur.

Those populations that have wealth and power will keep that wealth and power and seek even more. The populations that do not have wealth and power are not seeking to live in a balanced world at all, they are seeking to grab as much as they can and at whatever cost.

If we could stop pretending otherwise then we could start making change.

For many, many years we have been building our houses upon sand. Now we need to build our houses upon rock. (In view of global climate change and warming even more so - although these world affecting may be the catastrophes that are required to overcome our own species limitations).

Just as an addon. What happens if it turns out that we are permanently planet-bound and we cannot live elsewhere? (Refer to long term and permanent musculo-skeletal changes to the bodies of astronauts).

Here's a scary one.

Life Season Tickets - you are born, allowed a certain number of years to live and then your life is terminated. The time of killing will depend upon what you have been able to contribute to your society.

We need a cultural change away from consumerism.

We need to reframe the meaning of high "living standard" and high "quality of life" away from high "consumption".

The education of the young (and even the old) is crucial and community leaders can be instrumental in effecting change.

Worldwatchers know that our problem is more than global warming and our carbon footprint - there is air, water, and land pollution of many kinds; we are rapidly using up non-renewable resources, and driving many species to extinction, etc. All of this combined paints a pretty ugly future for our grandkids well beyond warming alone.

It's also pretty obvious that achieving world-wide sustainability will be an extremely complex, difficult, and generations-long undertaking and will probably require many solutions from many different quarters.

Population growth is critically important and will be very difficult to tame in the 3rd world. But I think that for the industrialized world the most difficult issue is this:

Virtually all of us want a sustainability solution that doesn't require us to make any SUBSTANTIAL changes in our lives. Many or most of us don't want to give up anything! And the more we have, the less we want to do so. So we turn the earth upside down to find technological fixes so that we won't be required to give up anything. Fat chance!

In the end, it is not likely that technological fixes will make us sustainable, because every technology brings with it, its own environmental costs. When you look at the entire lifecycle of each technology, and the potential unintended (or intended) consequences of each, there are few technologies to date that show any promise of having a substantial impact - small contributions, yes, but a big dent, probably not.

The only real solution for the West is to use a great deal less of everything, and of course recycle, repair, and reuse the much smaller pile of things we will then have, i.e., living simply. This means a much lower standard of living for all of us (although potentially a much higher level of happiness and fulfillment) which flies in the face of everything Americans in particular believe in. It is our egos that will kill us or our grandkids. Our personal and cultural inability to say "enough - I can do with a lot less" will trump all our technological efforts.

I propose that we mount a national campaign to educate everyone about, and support value and behavioral change toward living more simply - a campaign such as we have had for smoking (a very successful, but 30 year long campaign)along with local, state, and national policy changes to support the shift. This will probably take much more than 30 years because we would be targeting extremely deeply held beliefs and desires. But it can be done. I would also suggest that such a campaign could begin in churches. Every major faith has a significant element of "living for others and not being selfish" in its value system. We in each faith, should challenge our religious membership and bureacracies to walk our talk, and take a strong leadership role toward this end!

What local community leaders can do is support efforts that bring the full spectrum of viewpoints to the table for dialog around sustainability through town meeting opportunities.

In Peace, Justice & Sustainability

Community leaders should be looking at every aspect of sustainability, including population, and helping the people in their community to act effectively. That said ...

Food is a major factor in our environmental footprint. Roughly two-thirds of that impact is due to the products of animal farming. You can cut roughly 1 global hectare by switching to a balanced, delicious vegan diet.

Community leaders can support local people to move to sustainable plant based food in many ways. Helping people to grow their own fruit and vegetables - in private gardens, allotments or community gardens, for example - is a great step. Supporting Farmers Markets, cookery and nutrition classes, and communal cooking e.g. for vulnerable local people are also useful options.

(Community leaders can lobbying 'upwards' too, for a shift in subsidies away from farming animals, toward sustainable horticulture.)

This issue of food production need to be addressed as a person can halve their carbon foot print through diet.
The UN report “Livestock’s Long Shadow” showed that the live stock industry contributes more to global climate change then the entire global transport sector combined.
The report found the live stock industry to be “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global”. Additionally the report showed that 90% of all soya protein grown and transported around the globe is fed to livestock animals and not humans.
Plant based diets are proven to have less of an impact even when compared to locally sourced organic diets that contain meat and dairy.
Removing meat and dairy products from the diet and instead following a vegan diet can reduce the amount of food related carbon emissions by 50-60%, which is good news for the planet
I would like too see foods that are the least sustainable to produce taxed and climate friendly food receive the food subsidies already given out.

Not a popular subject in some counties but I think if we didnt have 5 kids and 25 grand kids we could all stop rubbing shoulders. Lemmings know what to do by instinct. We dont.

The subject needs to be addressed on a much deeper and more individual level than which we are typically accustomed. Being the next proximate environment to the home with which individuals interact, community action has great potential to effect these deeper personal levels, which can then effect larger more ultimate systems. So I agree with Rene Dubos' "think globally, act locally" with one's self being the most local.

Additionally, truly sustainable lifestyles are also healthy lifestyles, and the converse. Seperating these entities may lead to polarized solutions, good for one, bad for the other, health=sustainbility. I contend that the above mentioned equation S=PxCxC (which should be 1/S=PxCxC) is bettered by adding technology as a factor (1/S=PxCxCxT) which is then equivalent to another popular equation, I=PAT. Impact=population x affluence x technology. CxC=affluence in this equation. Impact=1/sustainability=1/health. I'd like to add one more variable, N (nature), which I believe is the most powerful variable, to complete the equation, I=PAT/N. Through altering the psychological, social, ecological, and physical environements, changes in N never remain isolated and always produce inverse changes in A and T, and also directly compensates for some effects of I through ecological means.

So, I would ask my community leaders to first protect local ecosystems and natural areas from destruction, contamination, or privitization, to second introduce or reclaim additional natural areas and greenways, to third encourage public interaction with these spaces by maintaining primitive pedestrian access or functional bikeways where necessary, and to fourth support community permaculture or gardens (especially in urban areas such as rooftop permaculture). This can simultaneously encourage active transporation (instead of vehicle use and dependence), outdoor recreational activity (replacing sedentary and energy intensive indoor activity), increased vegetable consumption, cleaner air, cleaner water, increased yet more regular sun exposure, more stable biodiversity, more ecosystem resilience, less pollution (including CO2 and particulates), increasing personal appreciation and connection to nature (and therefore motivation to live sustainably), and the list goes on and on.

Nathan Daley, M.D.
Jacksonville, Florida

We have to be positive; a lot of children are counting on us. We only have so many resources - Earth is finite - and each person deserves a chance to live a safe, productive, healthy life.

To paraphrase Albert Einstein's famous mathematical equation:

S=PxCxC2 (Sustainability equals Population, times consumerism, times consumption, squared). It's as "simple" as that.

If all three factors were to somehow be reigned in, then we, the planet and our fellow creatures might have a fighting chance.

To put things into perspective, I highly recommend the following article from the current issue of Living Bird magazine, published by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It provides an excellent overview of humanity's history, the effects it has had in a geological twinkle of an eye and a plea for mending our destructive ways (as well as the not-so-subtle implication if we continue on our present narrow-minded, arrogant, anthropocentric path).

http://www.livingbird.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=274&srcid=265

Ron Landskroner
Oakland, CA

Hank Stoddard, personally/professionally/persistently/politically reduce one's enviromental footprint.

Our community leaders can't limit population growth or impose a carbon tax, as vital as both actions are.

I will ask my community leaders to develop a plan specific to my community that will first set up a sustainability measurement system, followed by a short assessment period (2 to 5 years) to establish a baseline and trendline, followed in turn by a shorter public input period aimed at developing a plan of action, finally followed by a formal plan to reverse the trendline and achieve sustainability by 2050.

Beyond that I will seek and support candidates for public office who are committed to achieving sustainability with special focus on global population growth, national reform of our energy, transportation and agricultural policies and systems.

Immigration is a special case since it is a double edged sword. History has demonstrated that the human intellect is the only true source of wealth. Even a cursory look at the PhD dissertations, patent applications, peer-reviewed publications and new business incorporations in the USA will show that immigrants are disproportionately represented. This country attracts people who are smart, ambitious and willing to work hard; that has been the source of our success. Do we really want to change that? People are willing to risk death to come here.

Yes, illegal immigration is a serious problem that must be solved. Its solution is much simpler in principle than that of sustainability. We must be careful, however, that we don't solve the immigration problem by destroying the reasons that make people want to come here.

A more reasonable approach is for each of us to ignore the axe grinders from the right and left who are making this an emotional flash point simply for their own aggrandizement and enrichment. Cool heads make better decisions than hot heads.

Controlling population as a means of controlling consumption is not the be-all and end-all of the sustainability problem. I think population control is over-emphasized. It is more meaningful to look at the type of consumption. If everyone on Earth lived an American lifestyle, we would be toast in a hurry -- the Earth would quickly run out of natural resources; on the other hand, if we all lived a sustainable lifestyle, consuming only what we can sustainably produce, the carrying-capacity of the Earth would be much greater.

There is also the enormous problem of an aging population, if you implement population control. Prof Bridgeman states that we need to build a "Philadelphia" for all the new immigrants coming in. But retired folks need young workers to support them. Social Security, for example, transfers wealth from workers to retirees. What will we do if there are not enough workers to support the elderly? Maybe we could start the population control by throwing them off the train.

Amoebas in a petri dish consume their environment until they all die out. I wonder if mankind is much more advanced than they are. Time will tell. As long as it is acceptable for rich nations to invade and occupy poor but oil-rich nations on the basis of lies, and to finance it with cuts to social programs and money borrowed from China, I think there is little hope for America or the planet as a whole.

Consumption (stress on the environment) is use per person x number of people. We now add 3 million to the US population each year, a group the size of Philadelphia. We need to add all the infrastructure of Philadelphia - the housing, roads, schools, businesses, and the farmland to support them - just to keep even. and then do it again next year, indefinitely. This is not sustainable. We know that 4 HEEP reforms (Health, Education, Employment, Pensions) can stop population growth. It has happened all over the world in countries that have these reforms and control immigration. The countries can be rich, like Germany, poor, like Poland, non-western, like Japan. (Health includes reproductive health and voluntary contraceptive services.) The most important thing we can do for our environment is to institute these reforms in the US and around the world. Only when population growth stops will reductions in consumption per person translate to reducing the total stress on our irreplaceable environment.

Bruce Bridgeman
Professor of Psychology and Psychobiology
University of California, Santa Cruz

I would ask them to learn about sustainability, climate change, ecoeficency, cleaner production, tragedy of commons, externalities, etc. and to act (lead) in consecuence

I would ask for strong support for an ambitious target limiting greenhouse gas emissions and permit trading underneath this limit. This must be combined with recycling of revenues from the auction of permits towards encouraging employment and growth in renewables. Only a strong price signal will effect the structural adjustment economies must make. The market will work wonders (as it is already showing signs of doing) and consumption that is more sustainable will follow. Greenhouse gas reduction must be our first priority - that will be hard enough.

It is difficult to stop population growth but it is possible to educate people on the rational consumption style.Peoples like investment and cutting consumption is the way for global resources investment.

We can not be sustainable without stopping population growth. In your short synopsis of the seven principles for a sustainable global economy, I see no mention of the dilemma and how we are going to stop overpoulation. There are ecological limits, and with maybe very few exceptions, they have been exceeded. It is time for homo sapiens to take responsibility. Time for life as we know it is running out.

Linda Brodman
Santa Cruz, CA

Consumption has two drivers:
1) per capita consumption
2) population

In the USA, population growth = immigration. The US population is growing by over three million people every year, 100 percent from immigrants and their children. We have high legal and illegal immigration rates for only one reason: Corporate America supports virtually all politicians, and their job is to keep the immigration gates open to maximize easy corporate profits. In America, our population is easily controlable. And since Americans lead the world in consumption, cutting our population growth would make a difference in world consumption. That, of course, would not make me very popular in corporate board rooms . . . assuming that they would ever hear this message.

If you do not stop population growth, nothing is sustainable.