Since 2001 over 200 local Sustainability Street Villages have emerged throughout Australia.

Sustainability Street shifts ...
from being something a community does ...
to becoming something a community is ... and we must ... because,

If we accept that the ecological sustainability issues that we now face, unquestionably provide both the greatest challenge to & the greatest opportunity for all of us, in all of human history … and they do  …
AND … If so many of the solutions are out at the global technological and economic level - and especially at the local level, where amazing reductions in impact can be achieved … and they are …
THEN … why are we not seeing the world palpably and excitingly change with the depth of imagination and effect needed, and with a hint, just a hint, that we may change in time?

Put it this way, if we know what to do, and the need to do it is now at crisis level urgency, then why are we still marking time and losing hope?  The Sustainability Street Approach (SSA) is an attempt to answer that question.  So far, governments haven’t solved it, Science is yet to make the telling breakthrough and the Economy is only just beginning to tinker at the edges of true costing and paying for ecological “externalities”. 

Clearly, it’s time for people power! 

The SSA is a social, non-ideological and very human scale response, fostering the skills, imagination and capacity of local people to take control of the issues and answers relevant to us.  The SSA is completely defined by and thrives according to the ideas and energy of local people. The SSA is way, way beyond the 101 tips mentality.

It is founded on an education program which provides an integrated, wholistic and values based understanding, which in turn creates transformative experiences!  Literally life-changing results!  It is about “relevance to and control by” local people. 

The SSA is an innovative green-print enabling us to influence local and wider culture, through building community, based on increasingly sustainable living and Earth respectful choices and sharing that with others, just next door!

What’s (very) different about the Sustainability Street Approach (SSA) …considering especially …

• The answers are out there.
• Scientists suggest that the urgency has reached a tipping point, a point of no return, runaway irreversible ecological damage.

 

Q: If we know what to do, and the need is now so urgent, why are we still in so much strife?

A: So far it's all very top down, information based.

 

The Sustainability Street Approach is a local, social organisation response! It is about "us" doing it for ourselves. Our energy, our ideas (with little help from Councils)! It's not about the eco-information which is available in droves. Google it!

 

It is about using the information (a course of study) to attract the "awakening mainstrean" to join us and create learning and action for ourselves. Importantly, people are also attracted by a yearning for meaning and local community. 

  Other hands may fell the last stands of the Downey rain-forest or clear-fell forest wilderness for wood chips to make wasteful packaging for goods we do not need. Others may release the pollutants that degrade the oceans,rivers, the air that breathe and the atmosphere which makes the Earth alone among the planets a haven for life. Others are the agents, but we are the principals, or at least the aiders and abettors. It is our values that are expressed in these actions. It is our lifestyle that makes such vandalism profitable. It is the governments we elect that permit it.

         Hal Wooten QC, President of Australian Conservation Foundation: 1986