Choosing to gift a future to our grandchildren

Bundanoon Footprint - Start of a conversation

This essay is written to encourage a conversation on the bigger picture for Bundanoon. It is hoped that the conversation will continue. Feedback welcome.

A whole village looking at its environmental footprint

Bundanoon people have come together on a couple of significant environmental projects. The first is the attempt to stop the mining of water in the town for the bottled water market and secondly banning of commercial still bottled water, called the Bundy on Tap project. Though the projects are very small steps in the context total environmental impact and climate change, the cultural significance of a small community coming together to make those changes is huge.

The Town meeting that decided to ban bottle water became an enormous worldwide media event. Something happened, something clicked around the world - what was that? Maybe it was the power of a small town taking control of its future that gave a sense of hope to people in a world where they feel powerless about their ability to affect environmental events. So they cheered. Do we now have an obligation to follow through, leading by example building on our collective hope? What a marvelous gift we can give to ourselves and the world.

The gift could be exploring how a whole village could go about reducing its environmental footprint then sharing that information so that others may benefit from it.

So we say 'let's get serious about this'. It really means looking at the environmental footprint of the whole village and how we can come together to change that for the better. We can poke around the edges and do a few 'feel good projects', but do they achieve anything of substance. If we don't know what the whole villages impact is and can measure it, we won't know about the impact of anything that we improve and we won't know what the most important things are to strive for.

Three critical components

It is important to acknowledge what maybe three critical aspects for such a concept to be viable :-

1. Social - Human and Village behavior change (see a marvelous resource in this week's New Scientist,22/8/09 and on the web www.newscientist.com with links to APA report on psychology and climate change)
2. Technical issues - science, social and economic analysis, engineering
3. Leadership - planning process and management

Although the technical areas have a lot of attraction and media exposure ( wind turbines, electric cars, geothermal energy etc) it is the social issues that are critical to sustaining comprehensive action to address climate change. It is our everyday consumption and choices of goods and services that consume energy and resources. As a society we have reached great technological heights, with satellites, computers, robot manufacturing and so on, but we still have not developed the social systems and individual behaviors that create and sustain the behavioral changes needed to confront the full range of our environmental impacts including climate change. This is the challenge that faces Bundanoon in changing its footprint-The ownership and commitment to changing the behaviors that lead to the destruction of our environment. It is in a sense ownership of having some control over the survival of the human species. This leads to the importance of the leadership issues involved. Wise and effective change management that can engage with all levels of our community is critical to success. This does not mean that all will engage but that all have the opportunity and are encouraged to be engaged. A minimum would be to see that a truly representative slice of the community be engaged, and where this can't be done to clearly understand the issues for any section of the community that does not wish to engage. The enemies of this are individual power plays and us and them ideologies. We have the skills available to us to undertake this community change process, but it must be given space to happen. Opportunistic and ill considered ventures will turn the community against a more reasoned and inclusive approach. Perceptions of what is happening are highly important from the start. High publicity by what is seen as one section of the community holding high moral ground telling the rest what to do is doomed to failure. There is room for many different groups with a variety of views in this process, but it must not be seen to be dominated by anyone group. It must be seen by the community as truly inclusive and respectful of all. A process that is seen as actively engaging all in a conversation around this idea is necessary.

Components for success

1. Village Impact: Measuring the villages total environmental and resource impact. Total energy and related consumptions and the climate change and other sustainable implications of that. This requires a lot of technical work and would require the assistance of academic institutions and some resources.

2. Understanding the village: Looking at the sorts of people that make up our village - age, skills, incomes, jobs, education, family units etc. Mostly available from the census but needs analyzing and reporting. The other aspect is the views, opinions and aspirations of our people. This would need some survey or focus group research.

3. Lowering Impact - An analysis and strategy: Once we have a measure of our impact and an effective conversation going with our community we can start exploring all the ways in which the community could modify the ways they do things to decrease the village impact. This would involve some research and technical input to look at all the possibilities, then discussion with the community about what they think is a feasible way forward. Strategies and action plans could then be drawn up for implementation. This would be a whole new phase of implementation and monitoring.

4. Leadership and Management: It is important to have a skilled group of people involved early on. It would be most desirable that the project be sponsored and under the umbrella of the Bundanoon Community Association, a long established and respected group in the town with four hundred members. It already sponsors a number of significant activities in the arts and environment.

5. Expert Advisory Panel: It is important that such a concept have available a number of skilled people from academic institutions, industry and government to help advise the project and to help link the work with relevant academic, industry and government programmes.

6. Community Engagement: An open and transparent relation with the community is important from the outset. A commitment needs to be made early on to effective communication and involvement with the community. Too often not enough time, though and resources are given to this , which results in tokenistic consultation processes, which alienate the community.

7. Communication Strategy: To fit with the goal above we need to think about using a modern and effective communication strategy that is resource efficient. One possibility here is to use the internet. We first need to find out how many people have access to the internet and invite them to participate by submitting their email addresses. We could assist people to get internet access. There are non profits that recycle computers for community use for $250. We could invite internet users to adopt a number of non internet households to pass on in printed form relevant communications and responses. All progress could be reported on a Wiki style platform (and community notice board) and also by electronic newsletter, that, where necessary this could be printed for non internet households. This has the potential to create a real time communication community. This would need some careful thought so that it did not descend into chaos and confusion.

Development Stages

1. Circulate discussion papers and invite feedback

2. Hold initial informal discussions with interested parties

3. Seek to define a project for adoption by a village wide coalition

4. Create resources required for project initiation, from academic, industry and government sources

About the writer: Paddy Murray is an economist, psychotherapist, Buddhist Chaplain and has been a project manager of a number of large community projects. He admires the work of the post war economist and Buddhist, Ernest Schumacher who wrote 'Small is Beautiful' a best seller in its day. His fundamental concept was one of - Stewardship, by which he meant that we each could attempt to leave the planet better than we found it. Bundanoon Footprint would be such an attempt.

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