Sustainability Blog

Curt Rosengren at Passion Catalyst International hosts a blog called The Sustainable Future. I'd like to direct your attention to the blog if you're interested in sustainability, and steer you to a couple of recent posts about community indicators around this concept of creating a sustainable future.

His post this month on Sustainable Community Indicators references Maureen Hart's work with Sustainable Measures. (You'll remember this earlier discussion of how Connecticut is using her work.) I like the way Curt leads into the conversation around indicators:

I think the sustainable transformation that needs to happen is going to do so at the individual and community level.

One of the challenges in developing a sustainable approach is taking it out of the abstract and into the tangible. It's nice to have a high-minded philosophy of sustainability, but what does that mean when the rubber meets the road, and how do you implement it?

This is a follow-on discussion to his earlier blog about The Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, which are another important foundational framework for community indicators conversations. If you aren't familiar with the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators or with the rest of Hazel Henderson's work you owe it to yourself to take some time to dive into this re-envisioning of the future.

Here's Curt's description of why this is important:

Part of the reason the world is in such a mess is an over-focus on the financial as the sole measurement of how we're doing.

If we're going to make different decisions to build a sustainable future, we have to recognize that we're operating in a holistic, interconnected system and take into account a much wider range of factors.

If we in the indicators world are going to do a better job in story-telling and engaging people around indicators to bring about community change, we're going to need to pay attention to those who are passionate about community change who discover indicators -- the recently-converted, as it were, can help us use better language to describe the critically of measures of progress as part of any effort to transform community.