The Envisioning Sustainable Communities Final Paper
In this final paper, you will consider the sustainability challenges that your home community currently faces and propose components of a plan tailored to meet those challenges. Think about your home community; this might be the community where you are living now, or a previous place that you identify with closely and still consider to be home (such as where you grew up). Drawing on your own memories and some online research, explore the challenges the community faces to becoming truly sustainable someday. In this paper, you will consider the sustainability challenges that your home community currently faces and propose components of a plan tailored to meet those challenges.
You will map out specific, concrete changes (in policy, technology, or everyday life) that your community would need to take to achieve sustainability. Provide clear, detailed examples of strategies, drawn from all you have learned relating to this course’s five weekly themes. Your examples should be based on our current scientific knowledge and level of technology (in other words, no inventing a new energy source from lightning or a new, low-energy means of generating fresh water from the oceans). Your suggestions should be tailored to the particulars of your chosen community. If you live in the Pacific Northwest, proposing solar power throughout your town would not be highly effective. Finally, you will imagine what that sustainable future neighborhood, town, or region would look like. How would it be fundamentally different from today? The final paper is worth 12% of the course grade.
To prepare for this assignment, review all chapters of Bensel and Carbone’s (2020) Sustaining Our Planet text.
In your assignment, craft a seven-paragraph essay that includes the following:
Paragraph 1
Describe your home community, using the Arzaville description in past class discussions (Weeks 2 through 4) as an example of the kinds of information you might include.
Discuss at least three of the biggest challenges that your home community faces on the path to achieving sustainability.
Paragraph 2
Explain at least three concrete actions that your community might take that would enhance its ability to sustain local biodiversity and ecosystems.
Paragraph 3
Discuss at least three specific steps your community might take to improve its capacity for sustaining local soils and sustainable agriculture.
Paragraph 4
Describe at least three measures that might be taken by your home community to help sustain its freshwater resources.
Paragraph 5
Propose at least three concrete steps your community might take to better sustain local air quality and reduce negative impact on the global climate.
Paragraph 6
Discuss at least three specific actions your community might take to manage, reduce, or eliminate its waste more sustainably.
Paragraph 7
Identify three specific actions that you might take, at the community level, to help support sustainability for your home place.
Considering the strategies that you have shared in your essay, assess whether your community could achieve sustainability at some point in the future. Why or why not?
