Today I was speaking with a colleague about getting people to engage with sustainability ,this was partly prompted by the Hexham debate on Saturday .
He said that sustainability is a force for bringing back equality- to bring jobs, to bring communities together, people work together and have enriched lives.
The knock on effect is the environmental benefit.
Food is a good example E.g. Newcastle has recently become a sustainable food city. The economy isn’t the only bottom line, there are triple bottom lines:
1Economic
2 Social
3 Environmental
(I looked it up on Wikipedia:In traditional business accounting, the “bottom line” refers to the sum of revenue minus expenses …Over the last 50 years, environmentalists and social justice advocates have struggled to bring a broader definition of “bottom line” into public consciousness, ….. For example, if a corporation shows a monetary profit, but their asbestos mine causes thousands of deaths from asbestosis, and their copper mine pollutes a river, and the government ends up spending taxpayer money on health care and river clean-up, how do we perform a full societal cost benefit analysis?The concept of a triple bottom line adds two more “bottom lines”; social and environmental concerns. …An example of an organization seeking a triple bottom line would be a social enterprise run as a non-profit, but earning income by offering opportunities for handicapped people who have been labelled “unemployable”, to earn a living recycling. The organization earns a profit, which is controlled by a volunteer Board, and ploughed back into the community. The social benefit is the meaningful employment of disadvantaged citizens, and the reduction in the society’s welfare or disability costs. The environmental benefit comes from the recycling accomplished).
We also spoke about how many people are de skilled and lack confidence in their power to create local projects however small.
