Articles/Publications

Articles

ASU gets $15 mil for new institute
The new International Institute for Sustainability will be created at Arizona State University as the result of a $15 million gift to the college. The Institute will study and formulate solutions for global and regional ecological, economic and societal issues, school officials said. The gift was announced in November 2004.

Building Sustainable Civic Lives offers steps to achieve successful civic action in sustainable planning. 

Building Sustainable Communities: The Historic Imperative for Change discusses a number of sound local government level approaches for tackling environmental issues and creating sustainable communities. 

Building Sustainable Communities: An Opportunity and a Vision for a Future that Works offers a well-crafted presentation on changing toward a sustainable future, with focus on local government, citizen involvement and the interconnectedness of issues. 

Changing Direction Toward Sustainable Culture explores the concept of sustainability and its importance and offers recommendations for achieving sustainability. 

Chattanooga on a Roll:  From America's Dirtiest City to One of its Greenest and Cinderella Story: Chattanooga Transformed describe Chattanooga, Tennessee’s progress toward becoming one of the most talked about successes in sustainability. 

A Closer Look: A Casper Case Study (pdf format) describes the efforts of the Casper, Wyoming Community Economic Renewal Summit, which was organized to begin a meaningful discussion about the future of the community and possible ways to achieve goals and objectives from a sustainability approach.

Community Cultural and the Environment: A Guide to Understanding a Sense of Place is a 293-page flexible toolbox, developed by EPA, to help understand the social dynamics involved in community-based efforts and for conducting a community cultural assessment. Readers learn about community social factors--information crucial to developing sustainable strategies for a specific community. The guide was developed particularly for watershed groups, to help in identifying goals, community assets, involving stakeholders, and developing partnerships in their geographic area, but it is also useful for other community-based initiatives. Specifically, the guide offers a flexible, step-by-step process for building a picture of community cultural preferences and priorities by identifying local values, beliefs and behaviors are they relate to community life and the surrounding environment. It also contains 15 community case studies from throughout the U.S., some of which have a watershed, forestry, or urban focus.

Conserving Communities examines the challenges of rural communities and their economies and offers a set of rules for how a sustainable local community might function. 

Developing Sustainable Communities: The Future Is Now discusses the importance of sustainability in optimizing our future. 

Environmental Management Systems: A Guidebook for Improving Energy and Environmental Performance in Local Government, from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, is aimed at helping local governments and municipalities walk through the implementation process of an Environmental Management System with a minimum of outside support.

Environmental Partnerships Envisioned descibes Louisville, Kentucky's new Partnerships for a Green City that aims to better collaborate on environmental education, research and policies that improve energy efficiency and reduce waste.

Envisioning a Sustainable Future explains how our current approach to resource consumption will lead to our own self-destruction and offers some approaches to achieving a healthy, sustainable future. 

Fostering Sustainable Community introduces the importance of sustainability. 

Heart of the Community: Downtown Planning and Sustainable Development
Provides a model for a sustainable downtown plan that addresses important issues like land use and economic development, re-inventing traditional planning and community zoning processes.

Local Ecosystem Analysis: Garland, Texas
Discusses cnservation design, which includes designing for water conservation and stormwater management, restoring degraded ecological systems, clustering communities, and building energy-efficient housing. A number of studies have shown that conservation design cuts development and municipal costs and generates developer profits.

The Sustainability Movement: Rhetoric or Reality?
Examines the meaning of the term "sustainability" and outlines the factors common to successful sustainable development programs.

Sustainable Cities explains the principles of sustainability and their importance. The article also recounts the recommendations of participants in the first Sustainable Cities Symposium, held in March 1996 to spur action toward sustainable development. 

Sustainable Communities: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?  introduces the sustainable communities movement, its strengths and its challenges. 

Toward a Sustainable City presents a report on natural resources prepared for the city of San Jose, California, that includes ways to increase alternative energy use and conserve natural resources. 

Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of the Human Economy argues that humanity's use of natural resources, or its Ecological Footprint, has exceeded the regenerative capacity of the Earth since the 1980s, according to a paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). According to this analysis, human demand (or Ecological Footprint) in 1961 was about 70 percent of the Earth's regenerative capacity. By the 1980s demand had risen to match total global supply, and by 1999 demand exceeded supply by at least twenty percent. "Sustainability requires living with the regenerative capacity of the biosphere," write Wackernagel and his colleagues.

Transforming the Rot Belt: Sustainable Rural Communities offers principles for achieving sustainability in rural communities. 

Twelve Gates to the City presents a dozen ways to build strong, liveable, and sustainable urban areas. 

What Are Sustainable Communities? introduces the concept of sustainability and offers six basic strategies that communities can implement to achieve sustainable economic development. 

What is Sustainability Anyway? is the transcript of an online discussion with Worldwatch Institute researchers Thomas Prugh and Erik Assadourian. fielding more than a dozen questions on the broad topic of sustainability.

Publications

Back Home Magazine provides useful do-it-yourself information on sustainable, self-reliant living. Its bi-monthly issues include proven information and resources about rural land, mortgage-free building, solar and renewable energy, chemical-free gardening, wholesome cooking, home business, home schooling, small livestock, vehicle and workshop projects, and family activities.

Blueprint for a Sustainable Bay Area offers a detailed planning document to create a sustainable future for the Bay area. The document is available to order or in a variety of electronic formats through the U.C. Berkeley Digital Library Project. 

Coming To Terms With Sustainability (pdf format) helps communities organize and conduct a discussion about sustainability. This publication ncludes exercises, activities, information sheets, reporting forms and a list of additional resources.

The Global Environment Outlook-3 (GEO-3) report released by the United Nations Environment Program takes a unique look at the policies and environmental impacts of the past 30 years. It then outlines four policy approaches for the next three decades and compares and contrasts the likely impacts on people and the natural world. The report is available online. The full report is available in PDF, as well as other formats.

Investing in Minnesota's Future: An Agenda for Sustaining Our Quality of Life (pdf format) summarizes the results of a 30 member roundtable appointed by Minnesota's governor. This report offers five principles as guideposts along the path of sustainable development: Global Interdependence, Stewardship, Conservation, Indicators and Shared Responsibility.

Minnesota Environmental Atlas
An electronic textbook that delivers the best of Minnesota's GIS (geographic information system) data to governmental, educational and citizen users. Designed by the Minnesota Land Management Information Center (part of the MN Department of Administration) in cooperation with secondary and college level instructors, the atlas contains 300 data layers along with the software to retrieve, display and analyze information. Included are maps, data tables and aerial photography on vegetation at the time of settlement, current metro land cover and land use, feedlot inventories, flood plains, wetlands, precipitation and temperature normals, population change, and more. The Atlas is used by agricultural educators, environmental planners, government officials and citizens. More than 120 school districts currently have the Atlas and Minnesota teachers have won two national competitions using it.

The Neighborhood Charrette Handbook outlines the community charrette process, designed to stimulate ideas and involve the public in the community planning/design process.

New Urbanism: Comprehensive Report & Best Practices Guide
From the editors of New Urban News, this publication is devoted exclusively to providing detailed, substantial news and analysis of the New Urbanism trend. The 384-page book includes project lists, plans, renderings and photographs.

Planning for Results Guidebook: Practical Advice for Building Successful Rural Communities
County and other local government officials, planning commissioners, staff who do not have formal training in planning, and interested citizens can use this book as a starting point in designing and conducting a local community planning process that is inclusive and action-oriented. The 104-page guide was developed with the Sonoran Institute to help rural Western county officials effectively manage growth. The $12 Guidebook is available for on-line ordering at the web site above or from NACo Publications at 202/942-4256.

Putting Sustainable Development Into Practice — A Guide for Organisations from the Sustainability: Integrated Guidelines for Management (SIGMA) initiative in Britain includes guiding principles to help an organisation understand how it can contribute to sustainable development, a management framework to allow an organisation to develop, plan, deliver, monitor and report on its sustainable development strategy and performance.

Oregon Sustainability Forum 2001 transcripts are available at the Sustainable Northwest website. The site includes transcripts from keynote speakers like Paul Hawken, David Orr and Vicky Robin, as well as numerous wide-ranging sessions such as "Sustainability: Three CEO's Discuss the Reasons Why," "Sustainability and Ethics," and "Developing Community Food Systems."

UNESCO's Our Fragile World: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Development is a two-volume, 2,263 page publication, with an accompanying CD-ROM that presents the vision and thinking of over 200 authors on efforts to solve problems connected with peace, equity, justice, world stability and global sustainable development. A series of interviews with leading world thinkers is also included. This publication is a forerunner to the "Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems," a comprehensive web-based reference on the life support systems of Earth, scheduled to be released later this year.

Principles for Designing and Planning Homeownership Zones is intended to assist community revitalization efforts.

Recommendations for Achieving Sustainable Communities, a report by the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE), underscores new approaches for creating strong economies and healthy communities and provides constructive ideas to address complex issues such as economic development vs. ecosystem protection. The “Top 10 Keys To Sustainable Communities” identifies the crucial aspects for achieving sustainable communities at the local, regional and national level.

The August 2002 issue of Science features a collection of articles built around the theme of sustainable development, and the role of science and technology in achieving it. The articles are also posted online, along with a selection of previous articles from the magazine concerning sustainable development. The posted items include news, reviews and commentary.

Shelterforce, published by the National Housing Institute, provides tools to rebuild neighborhoods, organize communities and create affordable housing. Highlights of current and back issues are available on-line.

SmartGrowthNews.com is the Smart Growth Daily Website of the National Town Builders Association. The website is updated daily with top news stories and features the leading smart growth news stories of the month and year, as well as other references.

The National Wildlife Federation has released "State of the Campus Environment: A National Report Card on Environmental Performance and Sustainability in Higher Education," to provide a broad portrait of how successful colleges and universities are in creating and modeling solutions to environmental problems. NWF asked every college and university in the U.S. to describe its environmental practices, from recycling, landscaping and transportation, to campus policies, curriculum and energy use. The results of this survey were used to compile the national report card, which indicates that many schools are making the grade by embracing sound environmental practices, but at the same time others are due for environmental remediation.

The State of the States: Assessing the Capacity of States to Achieve Sustainable Development Through Green Planning is a report from the Resource Renewal Institute. The study examines the readiness of individual states to address and attain sustainable development, based on the Green Plan Capacity Index, a measure for evaluating core attributes of effective environmental management and successful green planning. According to the report's rankings, Oregon tops the list of states with greatest capacity for sustainability, followed by New Jersey, Minnesota and Maine. The entire content of the report is online in PDF format.

Sustainability Within a Generation: A new vision for Canada (PDF, 1M) is a 2004 report by the David Suzuki Foundation that says Canada can achieve economic and environmental sustainability within a generation if governments work with industry and public policy groups to address major issues like using water and electricity more efficiently, reducing waste and pollution, increasing investment in urban transit, and improving urban planning.

Sustainable Consumption and Production: Strategies for Accelerating Positive Change - A Briefing Guide for Grantmakers, published by the Funders Working Group on Sustainable Production and Consumption and made available by the Environmental Grantmakers Association, offers government, foundation and corporate grantmakers advice in tailoring their funding awards to reduce demand for resources in jeopardy, increase demand for sustainable products and services, and change destructive practices of companies.

Thinking About Forever: A Personal Journey, from Communities by Choice, explores the principles individuals can use to guide their personal path toward sustainability. (PDF)

Thinking Like a Sustainable Community: A Workbook for Applying a Sustainability Framework to Community Challenges (pdf format)
Produced by the Minnesota OEA's Sustainable Communities to help users think about community challenges with a view toward sustainability. The workbook is divided into five topic areas that represent priority concerns for many communities. Each topic area contains several questions, categorized into environmental, economic and social considerations.

State of the World 2002, from the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington D.C.-based research organization, is a special edition that focuses on issues central to the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Terrain: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments includes columns, essays, articles and other resources to help communities develop and redevelop more sustainably.

Twin Cities Green Guide creates a printed guidebook and website to educate Twin Cities Metro area residents about environmental issues, serve as a quick environmental reference tool and promote a self-sustaining and community-oriented lifestyle.Compiled largely by volunteers, the Green Guide and website contain educational articles on 200 sustainability topics in Minnesota.

Under Construction: Tools and Techniques for Local Planning was produced by Minnesota Planning as a guide for citizens interested in shaping the future of their community, be it a county, city or township. Unlike most every other guide to comprehensive planning for communities, this one is based on both the principles of sustainable development and community-based planing. It offers citizens and local governments a roadmap, ideas and best practices for developing a comprehensive plan that articulates the aspirations and vision of a community.

Visioning and Empowerment in Small Watersheds: A Process to Control Urban Sprawl Through Better Decisions (PDF) is an online user's guide from the Center for Neighborhood Technology.

Working for a Sustainable World: U.S. Govenment Initiatives to Promote Sustainable Development is a 2002 report from the U.S. Agency for International Development that distills the results of a survey of 400 sustainable development initiatives by federal agencies and departments. (PDF format.)

Last updated: November 23, 2004

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