Sustainability and Communities

Bringing the focus back on to the community is essential to sustainable development.  This limits the scale upon which the development would be instated.  Often harmful environmental effects are related to the size of the development. By limiting the size, the environment will be more prone to overcome the strains placed upon it.

By keeping development confined to the size of a community also increases the public’s awareness of the economic, social and environmental impacts as the community is generally directly involved or affected.  Often the residents are employed by the businesses and industries located in the community.  By engaging the residents and creating distinctive boundaries between communities, the residents are given a sense of pride and invested interests in sustainability. 

At the community level, sustainable development can inspire innovation in technology and produce social benefits.  These innovations are generally scale and place specific and can lead to an aggregation of sustainable solutions.  The solutions will generally be readily adopted as they are created by and for the community.  The adoption of a series of place specific solutions allows change to take place at a faster rate than globally or individually.

A sustainable community should be innovative, proactive, thriving and adaptable or resilient.  Communities generally share an overall goal, ideas and interest in development and thus change can take place faster as they do not run into the conflicts of interest seen on a global scale.

One example of a community working towards sustainability, that is particularly close to home is the group called “Save Mary Lake”.  Every Sunday, the community gathers to save Mary Lake and you can see bikes and cars lined up and down Munn Road.  They represent the concerned Highlands residents who believe in protecting the endangered Dry Coastal Douglas fir ecosystem surrounding Mary Lake.  The foundation must raise $4.5 million dollars to save this ecosystem from residential development.  The Mary Lake property provides one of the last green links between Gowlland Tod Regional Park and Thetis Lake Regional Park.  This link is a part of the sea-to-sea greenbelt and is essential for wildlife conservation.  Their ultimate goal is to save 65, 000m² of greenbelt and to date they have conserved 18,706m².  Without community involvement and all of the donations this could not be possible.  Currently, they are reaching out to the extended global community through an online campaign. This lake will most likely be protected from residential development as there are many people who are passionate about its preservation have come together to create change.

The Highlands district is not a virgin to inhibiting development; many communities have joined forces to ensure there are no commercial developments in the ecologically sensitive area and that residential development is limited.  This is not just for environmental reasons as seen above when saving Mary Lake, but also for social and cultural reasons.  For example, there is a community of people trying to stop the development of Colorado Christian University (CCU) from developing on 100 acres of open space ranch land.  The Highlands cattle raised on the open ranch lands in Highland are culturally important to the area and are a symbol of the Highlands ranch community.  These cattle are unique with their long horns and long hair.  I have often heard ranchers in our neighbourhood boasting about their cattle and that Highlands beef is better than Angus beef.  The cattle also contribute to the community’s food security, enabling resident to get their beef from local farmers.  This group is known as Save Highlands Ranch Open Space.

These are just some impacts of the local community in my area, but sustainable developments are happening on a community level all over Victoria and the world.  These two examples are examples of the community action to stop unsustainable developments from occurring.