Greetings from the lovely Finger Lakes region of New York State! Today I drove to Syracuse and back to Corning in the sunshine, admiring the beauty of the fall foliage and thinking about next spring. The Annual ESATYCB Conference will be hosted by Corning Community College on our campus on April 24-26, 2009. We have chosen the topic of Sustainability for the theme of this conference. This came about in part because Corning Community College has designated the 2008-2009 Academic Year as the sustainability year, and it seemed fitting to finish the year with a sustainability conference. It is also a topic that is of great concern and interest to us all.
Sustainability, in a general sense, is the capacity to maintain a certain process or state indefinitely. In recent years the concept has been applied more specifically to living organisms and systems. We are particularly concerned with sustainability in the human community, where it has been expressed as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Sustainability in the human community can be expressed in terms of circles within circles shown below:
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A view of community as three concentric circles: the economy exists within society, and both the economy and society exist within the environment. |
As this figure illustrates, the economy exists entirely within society, because all parts of the human economy require interaction among people. However, society is much more than just the economy. Friends and families, music and art, religion and ethics are important elements of society, but are not primarily based on exchanging goods and services.
Society, in turn, exists entirely within the environment. Our basic requirements -- air, food and water -- come from the environment, as do the energy and raw materials for housing, transportation and the products we depend on.
Finally, the environment surrounds society. At an earlier point in human history, the environment largely determined the shape of society. Today the opposite is true: human activity is reshaping the environment at an ever-increasing rate. The parts of the environment unaffected by human activity are getting smaller all the time. However, because people need food, water and air to survive, society can never be larger than the environment.
Sustainability requires managing all households -- individual, community, national, and global -- in ways that ensure that our economy and society can continue to exist without destroying the natural environment on which we all depend. Sustainable communities acknowledge that there are limits to the natural, social and built systems upon which we depend. Key questions asked in a sustainable community include: 'Are we using this resource faster than it can be renewed?' and 'Are we enhancing the social and human capital upon which our community depends?
Sustainability is an issue for all communities, from small rural towns that are losing the natural environment upon which their jobs depend, to large metropolitan areas where crime and poverty are decreasing the quality of life.
We hope to address some of the issues at this conference. Several colleagues from across the state will help us in these pursuits and I would be happy to hear from anyone who would like to contribute to the conference. The topic can be approached from many different ways. Obviously we cannot hope to comprehensively cover all or even many of aspects. We do hope to present you with some ideas, some “thinking material,” and best of all, some interaction with colleagues.
I encourage you all to plan to attend.
President-elect ESATYCB
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