CLEAN AND SAFE ENVIRONMENT

People need a clean and safe environment. This means clean air, clean water, uncontaminated soils, and healthy buildings. (The safety described here relates to environmental hazards, rather than human ones.) Wildlife and natural systems also need a clean and safe environment; the emphasis on human needs does not mean to ignore the interconnected ecosystems involved. Recognizing a healthy environment as a fundamental human right has not yet been institutionalized on the national or the international levels, however. This is the next frontier for sustainable development advocates.

Sustainable development has long been associated with environmental protection. It’s time to ask what the sustainability orientation is toward a clean and safe environment? Does it mean that all other human needs should be sacrificed for this goal? When is some environmental degradation or impact justified because of other needs being met?

The working definition of a sustainability strategy is that it does not erode the capacity for future generations to meet their needs, and it doesn’t prevent current needs from being met. So the orientation toward a sustainable clean and safe environment would be one where there is a balance with the other economic, social, and governance needs being met. If a community is experiencing a housing crisis, for example, where families are being evicted from their homes and being forced to live in motels because of the high housing prices, the need for affordable housing needs to be balanced with the ongoing pressure to preserve open space.

Strategies that minimize environmental impact, that reduce the emissions, effluent, and the waste stream from homes and businesses by trying to identify ways in which the pollution can be prevented in the first place are practices that work to promote a sustainable safe environment. Treating waste that is already being produced, recycling materials whenever possible, and finding markets for byproducts of manufacturing processes are ways in which current problems can be mitigated.

The Natural Step is a methodology that has been developed in Sweden; it first broached sustainable development’s relationship to human needs, saying that in a sustainable society "resources are used fairly and efficiently in order to meet basic human needs globally." It calls for an equitable distribution system for resources that meet human needs. The Natural Step states that in order for a society to be sustainable, nature’s functions and diversity cannot continue to be systematically impoverished by:

1) increasing concentrations of substances extracted from the earth’s crust, including fossil fuels, mining of metals and minerals, greenhouse gasses, metal toxicity, and the contamination of surface and groundwater.

2) increasing concentrations of substances produced by society, including synthetic organic com-pounds like DDT and PCBs, freon, and ozone depleting compounds.

3) physical displacement, over-harvesting, or other forms of ecosystem manipulation by taking more from the biosphere than can be replenished by natural systems, and by destroying the habitat of other species.

THE PRACTICES:

Brownfields Pilot Initiative
Burlington EMPACT Project
Burlington Wastewater Treatment
Climate Action Task Force
Lake Champlain Basin Program*
Landmark Landscaping*
Open Space Protection Plan
Pesticide Ordinance*
Pine Street Barge Canal
University of Vermont Environmental Council
Waterfront Urban Reserve

* Interview included