• Executive Summary
• What are indicators?
• Create your own indicators
• Ecological footprint of a community
• Measuring progress and development
• Sustainable Seattle Indicators
• Resources

Once the whole is divided, the parts need names. There are already enough names. One must know when to stop. Knowing when to stop averts trouble. Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea.
--- Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching

Executive Summary

If we accept the idea that sustainability is an integration of ecological, economic, and cultural concerns within and among communities, and over time, then we need tools that will help us better understand these dynamics and complexities. Indicators provide evidence that a plan or project is moving us toward or away from desired conditions. Indicators must evaluate both objective and subjective information if they are to be effective. The process of creating and using indicators is in itself a useful planning tool.

What are indicators?

Indicators ideally do more than merely provide information. They are intended to inspire and provoke action. Community indicators can help us understand if we are headed in the direction we think we are, and they can help us see what kind of world we are creating for future generations.

Indicators of sustainability:

• Measure quality of life, not just quantity
• Evaluate long-term economic, ecological, and social health of a community
• Evaluate short-term political acceptability of plans and programs
• Are based on commonly accepted data or information (objective in nature)
• Can be developed at all levels, however, most are being created at the city and community level

Create your own indicators

Farmers are aware of subtle changes in their landscape. City people often are not. David Orr, a noted ecologist, calls this "ecological illiteracy." Ecological illiteracy unfortunately breeds a dependence on the professionally trained. To reverse this trend and help plan for change in their own communities, the public must be much more involved in decision-making than occasionally voting at the polling booth, or consuming goods at the supermarket.

Sustainable planning calls for a valuing of both objective and subjective information. At the neighborhood level, for example, "objective" analysis might include evaluating energy and material flows. This study would complement a "subjective" study of the inhabitants' needs, wants, and aspirations. At the regional level, an objective look at population and land use trends could complement a subjective survey of citizen hopes and fears.

Ecological footprint of a community

A community is more than just the people and land of a particular place. The total area impacted by any community is the total of the energy, resources, people and information that flow through it everyday. This total area impacted is called the "ecological footprint" of a community.

Here in North America our ecological footprint is large. We import many of our resources and export our wastes. We do not usually directly see the full impact of our lifestyles. The areas falling under our ecological footprints are scattered around the world and far out of our sight, so we generally do not have a good understanding of the damage caused by our communities or their sustainability.

Measuring progress and development

Progress over the last century has been increasingly measured in narrow material and economic terms. We have been conditioned to believe that the hourly numbers coming to us from Wall Street are a fair indicator of the progress being made by our country. As the market has influenced every aspect of our lives, and our world has been steadily commercialized, we often believe that to "improve" our situation we must produce and consume more, as individuals and as a nation.

Our emphasis on a material standard of living has trivialized the importance of quality of life. Our once conservative notions of saving and conserving for the future have been overwhelmed by the drive to maximize short-term gains and profits.

Integral to sustainability is the idea that our current obsession with quantitative growth must be balanced with an appropriate emphasis on qualitative development. Our exclusive reliance on economic indicators must be replaced with a more comprehensive indicators that include social, ecological, and economic development.

Sustainable Seattle Indicators

The Indicators of sustainable community: a report to citizens on long-term trends in our community, developed by Sustainable Seattle in 1993 and again in 1995, are a good example of a simple yet comprehensive tool for assessing whether a community is indeed moving toward or away from conditions of sustainability.

The reports cover forty indicators of cultural, economic, environmental and population-related trends for the Seattle area. These indicators show that the Seattle area is in general moving away from conditions of sustainability, although progress has been made in a few areas over the last decade.

While sustainability activists around the world have heard of the Seattle indicators, most people in Seattle still do not have the foggiest idea what they are. Although the intention is that the indicators will be popularized and picked up by the local media on a regular basis, this has not yet happened.

Sustainable Seattle designed their set of indicators to be a model of a process for developing community indicators. The indicators developed by Sustainable Seattle are only suggestions of types of indicators. Someday, people in cities and neighborhoods around the world will create their own indicators to be specific to local challenges and opportunities. These locally developed indicators will be updated and publicized on a yearly basis.

Resources

Center for Sustainable Communities. 1996. Sustainability assessment checklist.

Corson, Walter H., ed. 1990. The global ecology handbook. Boston: Beacon Press.

Orr, David W. 1992. Ecological literacty: education and the transition to a postmodern world. Albany: State University of New York.

Rees, William E., ed. 1989. Planning for sustainable development: a resource book. Vancouver: UBC Centre for Human Settlements.

Sustainable Seattle. Indicators of sustainable community: a report to citizens on long-term trends in our community, 1993 & 1995.