FOSTERING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITY

Wingspread Journal, Volume 18, Issue 2 Spring 1996

President, The Johnson Foundation 

Slightly more than twelve months ago, our Board of Trustees issued new program guidelines to govern the Foundation's work through 1999. They decided that our long-standing interest in the environment would focus for the coming five years on issues of sustainable development, perhaps with particular attention to the development of sustainable communities. A year later, we are discovering what many of you have known for some time: environmentalist John Muir was right when he said that "when we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound by a thousand invisible cords ... to everything in the universe." 

A sustainable community is one brought and bound together by "invisible cords," some of them described in this issue. Seattle has developed 40 indicators of sustainability. The President's Council on Sustainable Development lists 10. A meeting of concerned individuals in Duluth listed five. Elizabeth Kline suggests four. 

What is interesting is less that the numbers range from four to 40—or even to John Muir's 1,000—than that all of the lists remind us how encompassing a concept "sustainability" is. It includes not only the physical environment, but the economic, social, political, and human environments as well. Justice, equity, voluntarism, and philanthropy contribute to sustainability of communities. Strong families, healthy and educated children, a competent workforce, and jobs with decent pay are essential. 

We have known all these things, indeed have used much of this vocabulary for years. But somehow, only a very few have put it (or gotten it) all together. Jobs have preoccupied some of us, pollution has been the overriding focus for others, and so on through the litany of nouns in the preceding paragraph. To use the words of the folktale, few of us have responded, when asked why we are cutting stones, that we are building a cathedral; mostly we have had our heads down somewhere in the quarry. 

Solomon reminds us that there is a season for everything. Perhaps we are now entering the season in which large numbers of Americans (and others) are beginning to discover just how damaging our inattention to the simple things of life, such as the vitality of our communities, has been in recent decades. Can there be a community in this country today in which growing numbers of citizens are not coming together to rebuild the "thousand invisible cords" which have frayed so badly over the past generation? 

The relatively recent American concern for the quality of our physical environment is joining forces with our long-standing interest in the quality of our human communities. The sum of these may prove far more powerful than their individual parts. Our national prospects as we enter the 21st century may, therefore, be much brighter than we might have feared a few years ago. As Janet Maughan's report suggests, the sustainable community movement may be an idea whose time has come—and may be arriving just in time. 

We hope that many of our readers will be inspired by the contents of this issue to propose Wingspread conferences related to the issues of sustainable community, whether they be on the kinds of topics suggested in Janet Maughan's report or others. 

The Wingspread Journal is the quarterly publication of The Johnson Foundation, Inc., P.O. Box 547, Racine, WI 53401-0547; phone: 414-681-3343; fax: 414-681-3325.

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