Living Sustainably

Globalization has made families and individuals powerful actors in the world economy. Our daily choices as consumers affect the lives of workers in distant places and the way people live. Living sustainably means buying goods and services that do not harm the environment, society, and the economy. Although it is predominantly an issue for high-income and emerging economies, consumption is an excellent entry point for teaching about sustainable development. Consumer education is practical, touching the daily lives of people near and far away. Local consumer action can have a global, social, economic, and environmental impact, both today and tomorrow.

Education therefore has an important role to play for consumers, in terms of:

• learning to know about the products we buy; encourage curiosity about how and where goods are produced as well as what the working conditions are in the country of origin? How far are goods shipped to reach the supermarket shelves? What is the environmental footprint of the production and transport of certain products?
• using knowledge about the impact of our economic choices in order to change our behaviour and consumption habits. However, knowledge is not enough. The wiki linked to this page has been assembled as a transformative learning process and aims to change the way people interact with the world.

When the UK biodiversity and sustainable development strategies were created the idea was mooted, though never implemented, that there should be a citizen's environmental network to spread ideas and practical achievements at a community level. The goal of 'Resilience in Wales' is to use the GMS to establish a citizen's network to record and promote the inclusive participation of people in planning actions to create sustainable communities. This wil be achieved within a cross-curricular knowledge framework of cultural ecology to unify the manifold themes which have a bearing on planning for local sustainability. These interdependent themes fall within the GMS categories of 'sustainable living', 'nature' and 'culture and society'.

Philosophy and key issues.

Sustainability is an attribute of dynamic, adaptive systems that are able to flourish and grow in the face of uncertainty and constant change. Resilience is the capacity of a system to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of unforeseen changes. Where sustainability aims to put the world back into balance, resilience looks for ways to manage limited resources in an imbalanced world. Resilient cultures perpetually evolve through managed cycles of growth, accumulation, crisis, and renewal, and often self-organize into unexpected new configurations. Therefore action plans to increase resilience - resisting disorder - are the key to global sustainability. This stresses that the interdependence of ecological and social systems gives resilience a wider and deeper meaning than planning the response of emergency services to an acute disaster. This wider meaning in the here and now includes planning one's day to day activities to keep within Nature's productivity, maintaining local ecosystems in a favourable condition so as to maintain ecosystem services and promoting community plans for inclusive social betterment