Sustainability and Stuff...

Welcome back to your Pilot lessons for 2007 - remember that your exam is later THIS year.
This half term we are going to welcome 2 outside speakers: a former Chief Development / Planning Officer for King's Lynn and someone from the developers behind the South Lynn Millennium Community. We are going to look at the future for King's Lynn, and lead up to our second piece of fieldwork.

Today we were looking at the idea of SUSTAINABILITY: the S in FUGIS...

I started by showing you the "Tragedy of the Commons": the way in which a field can be used to graze animals indefinitely as long as the "carrying capacity" is not exceeded. Did you like my sheep ?
We then looked at a good definition of Sustainability, which was used in the Brundtland report. This report was published in 1987 (I didn't realise it was so long ago, I remember it being published...) and was named after Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway.

The definition that we came up with was:

"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs"

Sustainability is also the basis of the Agenda 21 framework of the United Nations.

We then used the old favourite Geog.1 books, which have a rather good summary of the features planned into the Greenwich Millennium village (thanks to Mrs. Clarke for sourcing this) and also completed a mind-map of the features. More to come on this next lesson.

Finally, we looked at what each of YOU could do to make your house and lifestyle more sustainable.

As reading, I recommend you look at this article by Jonathan Porritt on the BBC News site: "

The recent STERN REPORT showed that our current lifestyle is not sustainable...

I also talked about the term ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINTS: basically, it is the extent to which the way we live our lives affects the planet...
We'll be using the BP CD ROM which we were sent recently. HERE is the website version for you to work out your own FOOTPRINTS. You might like to consider the irony here....

Got home tonight and in the Lynn News there's an article saying that the first phase of the development is gone, and 10 new houses are soon to be released. The houses are very popular with those who have visited the show home.

Also check out a local project: ART SUSTAINS. May be one for local teaching colleagues to check out...