My house vs Sustainable Community

In John Prescotts first white paper for sustainable communities it he states that a sustainable community should be:-

♦ economically prosperous;
♦ have decent homes at a price people can afford;
♦ safeguard the countryside;
♦ enjoy a well-designed, accessible and pleasant living and
working environment;
♦ are effectively and fairly governed with a strong sense
of community.

The Super output area that i live is East Lindsey 018A which is a very rural part of England with 2032 people in a very spread out place. However this is not a very economically prosperous area with nearly 25% of the population being unemployed. This area does safe guard the countryside due to the fact that it is in the countryside and the majority proportion of the land is arable and pasteral farm land. IT is a well structured area with wide country roads and many of them as well





Because of the rural feel to this part of the country there is a strong sense of comunity and with many small villages it is known that everyine in the village knows everyine and this is true in the SOA that i live in.

The Decade 2105-2104 is the 'United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development'

Education in the classroom is of great importance for learning about sustainable development due to the fact that in the classroom is where you learn most of the stuff that you know latter in life. It is not just in the classroom that sustainable development should be taught and openly discussed however, it should be a topic of conversation between adults, teenagers and children alike. The subject of sustainability should be common place and just influence every decision that people make from what people buy from the shops to how a teenager gets to school or what you do with the left over waste whether it be domestic or food waste.

Geography can be used to highlight sustainable development and sustainability on the whole however i believe that i should be separate in the curriculum to geography especially as it is a pivotal part of today's society and possibly to be taught as a new subject or as a module in citizenship. This will increase the average persons knowledge of what is happening to the word and what will happen if we continue to use natural resources the way we are at the moment.

This module has taught me a great deal about sustainability and it has changed my personal view on what is "right" and "wrong". This assessment also has showed me how to express these thought on paper which in turn got me to think about the module and subject area in alot more detail and has helped my understanding of the topic area.

Bad Crunch, Good Crunch?

To some extent you can argue that as people have less to spend on luxury items then previous years then the waste from these items will obviously less. However the capitalist society that we still live in state that the money that goes in to advertising is still the same amount as previous years and sometimes even more. This is shown in the latest NFL Superbowl where 30 seconds of advertising costs the company 30 million dollars you would have thought that with the economic downturn the amount of these "30million dollar" ads would have taken a sharp descenders. However this is not the case as this year it was the most adverts that we have seen in recent years. This just goes to show that as peoples pocket gets gradually shorter and shorter the huge multinational companies want to continue to take the worlds money in the form of their individual product and not care about the economic crisis that is set on them by destroying other social sectors. However i digress, On the whole due to this economic downturn, credit crunch, global economic recession (call it what you will) means that people have less disposable income which was historically used on alcohol, cigarettes and fuel. Also as taxes go up on these luxury products we will see these products be used less and less.

"We're Counting Cars"

In the bleak cold car park, frosty all around, stood our group, not forgotten.

We had to conduct our traffic survey, on Park Campus, University of Northampton. We split ourselves in to two groups, Luke, Brianna and Hannah interviewed people, on a random sampling method, asking those whom they met outside the Senate building to complete the questionnaires on students use of cars on the campus and their attitudes towards other forms of transport. Katy and Mary-Anne stood at the car park 3 entrance, where the new barriers have been installed. Every car that drove in to the car park was counted in the survey, and with the barriers now being installed, allowed for easy counts of the amounts of passengers in each vehicle.

Luke thought that the data he collected through the interviews conducted, came across as random and not a very fair reflection of the situation that has occurred on Park Campus. Where as Mary-Anne believed that the traffic count did record accurate data, reflecting the pattern of traffic on campus.
The findings didn’t cause much surprise, as the results were expected. Through the analysis, there may be surprises due to the look over all of the data together.

If the survey was to be conducted again, then it would be suggested that the car count was conducted over a full day, with no gaps in the collection of data. Maybe extend the questionnaires to electronic, to be emailed through the universities email server, to not only save paper, but hopefully question all car drivers and none drivers, but this would be A LOT of data to analyse and synthesis.

Hopefully the data will enable to make accurate reflections and suggestions on the University of Northampton’s Green Travel Plan.

Can one person make a difference?

The common arguement is that can 1 person make a difference?? The answer is simple ...no. The fact of the matter is that as this word becomes more environmetally friendly in the west and less so in the east 1 person in the west will never make a difference. However if many people think to tryand make a difference even they think that they are only 1 person if many people do this "1person" stratergy then it could ultimatley make a difference. Making a difference can come in may different forms and can be as simple as not taking a carrier bag from the campus express an carrying the loaf of bread, pint of milk and a packet of crisps back to your flat rather then taking a bag when really it is not worth it as it is only 5 minutes away.

It is not things of this nature it is the little things that use up more electricty then normal for example doyou really need your music on the loudness that it is on this uses more power to power the speakers and if it is played at a late enough hour then it could keep people from sleeping and forcing them to watch a movie or play on their compter thus using more electricty. It is like the butterfly effect as one person using much energy by playing their music loud make evryone in close proximity turn there tv sets, laptops or stereo up just to hear what they want t here, all of this uses up electricity. The thing is in university that people dont feel the full force of this becasue you pay the rent and that come inclusive with the electricity however we had to pay the something towards the electricity bill i now the I personally make saw that i switched my laptop off every night before i went to bed and probably when i was out aswell to save money ... and the environment.

U.N Debate

The U.N. style debate was very informative for all the students that were involved in it and i dont think any of the countries/groups have been dissapointed by the task that they were set or the country that they were assigned. So a pat on the back for the lecturer's on that front. I learned more about most countries that i didnt know before esspecially that Denmark was a huge powerhouse in the form of sustainable development. As for my country i realised what a creul old world it is out there with the aid that countries give poorer countries such as malawi is not "free" aid however it has to be paid ack at a extortionate rate of interest meaning that they need another loan from another country to pay off the interest that they have borrowed from a bigger nation in terms of aid. I also learnt that the U.S.A have one of the worst sustainable development policy and the fact that they want to spen more on the military when there is 60 million people every year that go without health care because of the non socialised medicine that the USA of implamented.

The sustianable development development stragies in my country was very easy to find becasue it was mostly on the UN and CIA websites however i know that some people did not find this as easy as i did and some of the webpages on the CIA website were in the language that the country spoke meaning that it rendered these websites useless. I feel there was a huge variety in the decisions of all nations and what they decided to spend the money on. The decisions came with economic wealth due to the fact that economically well ff countries dont need the sustainable devolpment policies that poorer countries need

Recyling

Recycling is a brand new concept to most people and if you are used to putting out just black bin liners full of all your waste for the past 'x' amount of years then 3 recycling bins can be a very confusing time for families. People have do have the best of intentions for the environment and no body would go out of their way to harm the planet or the people living on it, however some people can not be get used to the new system of recycling everything that you have because it takes effort and if it is a choice between just dumping things in the general household waste or thinking about it and put. I myself have only just got used to the concept of recycling everything i throw away due to the fact that as i only live in a very rural part of England the system has only just been introduced and for myself the concept is very new to me. This is just one of the reason why recycling numbers can fluctuate month in month out. However over a period of ten or twenty years there will still be fluctuations however the general trend will be a downward curve. This is for the sole reason that it will become second nature to most people meaning that they wont need to think whether an item is recyclable or not because they will just know via habit.

Recycling rates have can become very low very quick if councils don't influence people and encourage them to be "greener". Therefore cash incentives could be used to encourage people to recycle and make them think about in terms of how themselves may benefit. Also stronger punishments must be enforced for people who blatantly disregard for the "3 bins system" and education for offenders which will ensure them not to re-offend.