User:Sarah Bilchak/sandbox

Social Movements (Sarah) There are several current social movements that are contributing to the promotion of sustainable living. The Take Back Your Time Movement, lead by John de Graaf, focuses on the concept of working fewer hours and devoting more time to living a healthy lifestyle. The Take Back Your Time Movement suggests that allowing shorter work days and longer vacations would in turn help better distribute work, while also reducing stress and making for healthier living. Additionally, people would have more free time to make more rewarding and sustainable choices for themselves. The Voluntary Simplicity Movement or Simple Living movement emphasizes reducing one’s material possessions and desires and increasing self-sufficiency through skills such as gardening and DIY. The Voluntary Simplicity Movement suggests that one should focus on cultivating their own best inner being rather than focus on making material gains and wealth. It also promotes activism within the community to create engaged, educated citizens. The Degrowth movement is based on anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist ideas, focusing on reducing consumption and promoting happy, healthy lifestyles in non-consumptive fashions. Main aspects of Degrowth include more equally distributing the workload and sharing work, consuming less, and setting aside time for personal and cultural growth through the arts and creativity. Movements such as ecovillages are gathering momentum, spreading sustainable community ideas around the world, teaching through example and also offering classes and training on sustainable living, permaculture, and local economics. Ecovillages seek to integrate themselves harmlessly into the ecosystem surrounding them, so as to live and interact in a way that is sustainable and supportive of the natural world.

Sources: - link: http://blogs.worldwatch.org/transformingcultures/contents/social-movements/ - link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth - source: Pimentel, David, Laura Westra, Reed F. Noss. Ecological Integrity: Integrating Environment, Conservation, and Health. Washington, D.C. : Island Press, 2000. Book.

Non Profits Non-Profit groups play major roles in building and maintaining sustainable communities. For example, The Institute for Sustainable Communities created by former Vermont Governor, Madeleine M. Kunin, leads community based projects around the globe that address environmental, economic, and social issues. Many of these groups help to cultivate local talents and skills, empowering people to become more powerful and involved in their own communities. Many also offer plans and guidance on improving the sustainability of various practices, such as land use and community design, green transportation, energy efficiency, waste reduction, and climate friendly purchasing. The Global Integrity Project is focused on bringing together top scientists and thinkers from around the world in order to analyze the problems of inequality amongst humankind. These thinkers examine economic and ethical issues faced in protecting and enhancing our environments and make recommendations on restoration techniques that aid in promoting social justice. Finally, they call for a major and imperative paradigm shift in order to ensure good quality of life for many future generations. Sustainable Seattle is a non-profit organization which has created regional indicators for sustainability through grassroots activism and become a world leader in these sustainability indicators. Sustainable Seattle has printed newsletters on a wide range of sustainable community topics, from building to recycling and more. Sustainable Seattle is believed to be the first “sustainable community” organization, founded in 1991. There are now hundreds of “sustainable community” organizations across the USA.

-institute for sustainable communities - http://www.iscvt.org/what_we_do/sustainable_community/ -sustainable communities online- http://www.sustainable.org/ - institute for local government http://www.ca-ilg.org/sustainable-communities