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.