Each of us, each of our communities, paying attention to how it is by Us -
Around us.
How does it smell?
Is it warmed by the sun?
What grows there?
What thrives there?
What's thriving depends on the wellbeing of where we are?
Are our actions enhancing life throughout the ecosystem we are but parts of?
How would we know?
By devising the cultural means to share our understandings of How It Is By Us.
Through perpetual Citizen Science Programs in our Communities , documenting the pattern of life in the ecosystem we are merely a fragment of, each of us.
See Meridian Design's Concept Paper calling for the development of programs engaging citizens in urban design and related citizen science programs. We’ve been helping develop an urban design academy in the South Bronx and are working towards similar programs in my home town of White Plains.
WHY THIS IS ESSENTIAL TO LONG-TERM COMMUNITY SUSTAINABILITY?
An essential and currently largely ineffective basis for judging the merits of proposed environmental changes is to assess their “CUMULATIVE IMPACT” on the well-being of the living systems we inhabit.
Cumulative impact is a cultural construct, one we must define, and to the degree we wish to have uncontroversial civic processes to use this construct, we must develop the skillful means, language and common understandings necessary to civil discourse.
That isn’t working well for the communities I’m a part of just now.
For cumulative impact to be meaningful we need an effective means to account for the cumulative effects of our inhabitation of the landscape and thereby to concur, without rancor on the full cost impacts of our policies and decisions.
Maybe, here in White Plains, our Citizen Science can become an endless and authoritative record of the cumulative impact of human inhabitation of these hills, and of the bottom-lands where once the mist on the marshes looked like “white plains” from the surrounding highlands – could work in your community too.
Want to help?
Two beautiful red/yellow tulips!
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