10. Encourage more social insight, short term vision planning and community based discussion from existing leadership within CEDO and local government
11. Establish the City of Burlington as a leader in the recruitment, retention and support for employment of ethnic and culturally diverse in leadership and other positions across all City departments
12. Increase direct participation and representation of ethnic and culturally diverse, and economically oppressed populations on City of Burlington boards and commissions
13. Increase and promote equal access to all City of Burlington services and programs with thoughtful and strategic outreach and educational activities
14. Encourage and support community-based organizing around ethnic and culturally diverse barriers, racism and immigrant issues
15. Visibly, technically and financially support diversity initiatives and curriculum throughout the Burlington School District and other educational outlets in the City of Burlington, including alternative schools, early education programs, and colleges and universities
16. Work with UVM and business community on offering customer service training to retail/restaurant staff to better serve a diverse customer base
17. Work with Stakeholders, local government and existing leadership about sharing power, restructuring racial equity lens “who gets to decide”, being a learning community of leadership “not a binding community” and support ethnic and culturally diverse leadership participation in their own decision making.10
The Social Equity Investment Project, and all the goals and targets the city set for governance and social well-being, represent a significant contribution by the city to ongoing discussions about sustainability. Burlington was the first city to address issues of equity and justice in a planning project that otherwise would have been seen as having only an environmental and economic focus. Sustainability had traditionally been presented as a three-legged stool, with legs of environment, economy and a broad category of subjects lumped under a “social” heading. With the emphasis on equity and governance issues, Burlington added a fourth leg to the stool, effectively dividing the broad social category into two — social well-being and governance.
On March 16, 2009 in Washington DC, the City of Burlington was honored with the runner-up 2009 City Cultural Diversity Award by the National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials and National League of Cities. Burlington was honored for implementing the innovative program, the Social Equity Investment Project, and promoting the necessary cultural diversity leadership in community governance to make the program a success.
Burlington Bread
The local currency that the Burlington community created, called Burlington Bread, was not a direct result of the Legacy Project; it was already in circulation when the Legacy Project began. Modeled after Ithaca Hours, Burlington Bread was a fiat currency — a form of currency that is issued in notes and accepted in stores and service businesses around the city.
The currency was reinvigorated in the years immediately following the conclusion of the Legacy Project, when Gwendolyn organized an international conference on Sustainable Communities in Burlington in 2004. A new note design was created, and student interns at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, founded by Robert Costanza, fanned out across the city to encourage new businesses to accept it. The conference provided a marketing tool for the currency — participants in the conference were provided with Burlington Bread as part of their conference materials and encouraged to find stores to spend it in while they were in town.
Ultimately, the administrative burden and cost of maintaining a paper currency spelled the demise of Burlington Bread, and it doesn’t exist today. It was replaced in Burlington with a Time Bank system that serves the North end of town, a traditionally low-income area, and a new commercial barter system called the Vermont Sustainable Exchange. Since both of these systems are structured as mutual credit systems, they are easier to manage and have promise for long life.
The Earth Charter
At the same time that Burlington was completing their plan, another global project was underway that had come to the same conclusion about the need to include social justice, equity and democratic practice in any discussion about long-term environmental sustainability: the Earth Charter. Back in 1992, the first global Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was convened, and the hope was that a Charter would be drafted to capture the compelling interest all nations had in protecting the global environment. The Rio Earth Summit marked the first time that world leaders — presidents, premiers, prime ministers, kings, queens, despots, dictators and other heads of nation states — got together with the express purpose of discussing the degradation of the global environment.
During the summit, no consensus about the Charter was reached, and so the summit created a new Commission to study the subject, draft a Charter and report back to the United Nations. The Commission was chaired by Maurice Strong — a former under-secretary general of the UN who had chaired the Earth Summit, Michael Gorbachev, former head of the Soviet Union and Steven Rockefeller, a college professor and philanthropist from the United States. In the first seven years following the summit, an ambitious and massive global dialogue was undertaken, with representative committees in 52 different countries engaging people from all walks of life to ask the fundamental questions about what is required to create a just and sustainable future for the Earth and for future generations.
This effort was completed in 1997, and all the input was sent on to a drafting committee that had been created by the Earth Charter Commission in 1996. Professor Rockefeller was appointed by the Commission to chair the drafting committee, and the committee held meetings with groups of experts, including scientists, international lawyers and religious leaders and then circulated numerous drafts back to all the national committees, focal points and organizations in the countries that had engaged in the dialogue for comment. At the Rio +5 Forum in 1997, a benchmark draft of the Earth Charter was released for circulation and comment. In 2000, the Earth Charter Commission came to consensus on the document in a meeting held at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. A formal launch of the Earth Charter was held in the Peace Palace in The Hague.
Cities and Towns Support the Charter
The launch kicked off another large-scale global effort to endorse and adopt the Earth Charter, and one of the first groups of people identified by the Commission as important partners were cities and local governments. The Earth Charter was presented to the ICLEI World Congress in 2000, which is a coalition of local governments all over the world who have been implementing Local Agenda 21, another major agreement that came out of the Earth Summit in Rio. ICLEI endorsed the Earth Charter and made a commitment to use its resources to move the Charter toward adoption at the Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002.
Gwendolyn attended the ICLEI World Congress in 2000, and was inspired by the connection between what she had seen on the grassroots level in Burlington and on the global level with the Earth Charter — the similarities between the two processes were a clear indication that there was something universal in the aspirations shared by people all over the world that transcended all political, religious, national and cultural boundaries. When she got back to Vermont, she immediately started work to bring the Earth Charter to people and local governments there.
Part of this effort was working in cooperation with some Vermont artists who had been inspired by the Earth Charter to organize a celebration event in 2001. Another part of the work was through a campaign to ask Vermont Town Meetings to demonstrate to the world grassroots support for the Earth Charter by endorsing it at their annual meetings in March of 2002. Vermont Town Meetings are pure democracy in action; in those towns, the citizens themselves voted for the endorsement.
In March of 2002, 23 cities and towns in Vermont voted to endorse the Earth Charter, and Gwendolyn was invited to speak at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg to
talk about this campaign. The Local Government Summit that was held as part of the World Summit included a reference to the Earth Charter in their political statement presented to the leaders of the World Summit, and ICLEI also went on to adopt the Earth Charter as guiding principles at the following World Congress they held in Athens in 2003.
The Town Meeting campaign and the Local Government Summit made it obvious that if local governments supported the Charter, they would need tools to turn their support into concrete action plans. It is one thing to endorse a set of principles; it is another thing altogether to use the principles to shape local government policy and implementation efforts. Working with Steven Rockefeller and the World Resources Institute, this idea about a tool for local governments gave birth to a project called the Earth Charter Community Action Tool (EarthCAT). Steven Rockefeller convened a committee of Earth Charter supporters from all over the world to develop the tool, and over the next two years GCI and WRI formed a partnership to develop both a workbook and a web-based management support system.
A Community Action Tool
EarthCAT combined the principles of the Earth Charter and the insights from the Burlington Legacy project about the importance of using a broad spectrum of human needs and their corresponding city systems as a starting point for long-term sustainability planning. The work in Burlington had explored and articulated the sustainability of five critical systems in cities — social and human development, governance, economics and livelihoods, the built environment and infrastructure and the natural environment. The Earth Charter provides a set of global principles that can form the ethical and sustainable guidelines for all these systems as well as hope that they will to continue to provide for our needs and the needs of all life on Earth into the future.
Cities can easily see the link between the key themes which form the categories of principles of the Earth Charter and their city systems:
• Respect and care for the community of life
• Social and economic justice
• Environmental integrity
• Democracy, non-violence and peace.
The daily work of cities involves all of these themes, and our municipal systems reflect the way we address all of these issues as a human community. This makes a link between the Earth Charter and city planning conceptually coherent, but the politics were far from easy. Some of the advocates of the Earth Charter in the United States were targeted by the John Birch Society and other right-wing ideologues. The artwork created by the artists celebrating the Earth Charter — a beautiful Ark of Hope — was defaced while it was on exhibit in the Midwest. In Vermont, Gwendolyn received hundreds of letters and messages of hate mail during the campaign she ran to get local towns to endorse the Charter. A slick, magazine-quality piece of John Birch propaganda was distributed that likened the artists and advocates of the Earth Charter to the anti-Christ, and in Vermont the members of the society toured communities to alert them to the “dangers” of the document.
To avoid other city planners and local leaders being targeted in a similar way, the EarthCAT methodology does not make the links to the Earth Charter obvious enough to attract this kind of negative attention. Rather than structuring the planning process principle by principle, the principles are embedded in the methodology itself. References in the margins alert planners to the key links, and the entire approach is designed to emphasize the integration and connection among the actions taken to insure environmental integrity, democratic practice, social and economic justice and the underlying respect and care for the community of life. This whole system approach pioneered an important alternative to the dominant practice of considering each area of work separately, dividing government into silos of expertise that cannot understand other imperatives.
After the preparation of the EarthCAT workbook and management support system, the next step was to make cities and towns aware of the importance of sustainability planning. To this end, Gwendolyn and an organization that she founded in 2001 called Global Community Initiatives organized an international conference called Sustainable Communities in July of 2004 in Burlington, Vermont. Over 500 people from 48 different countries attended the conference, where workshops and conference structure mirrored the EarthCAT materials and methodology and included an official launch of the workbook and website as a session at the conference.
Since that time, more than 50 cities, towns, regions and other organizations around the world have used the EarthCAT workbook and website to complete their long-term sustainability plans. In Chapter 14, we describe three cities who used EarthCAT to complete their plans, along with the links between the unmet needs they identified as part of the planning methodology and the possibilities these needs offer for new complementary currencies.
CHAPTER 14
A Tale of Three Cities
The axis of the earth sticks out visibly
through the centre of each and every town or city.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.
Among the 50 cities that have already used the EarthCAT approach, the following three were chosen as case studies because they are very different from one another — different in size, different in means, different in the objectives pursued. They are respectively Calgary in Canada; Newburg in New York state and Montpelier, Vermont. A detailed account of these three initiatives is also possible because Gwendolyn worked with each of them to carry out their planning projects. Many of the other cities using EarthCAT do it on their own — the workbook is detailed enough for cities to use without the help of a consultant.
Calgary’s 100 Year Plan
In 2004, the Mayor of Calgary, Alberta played a pivotal role in reaching further than was typical of city planning anywhere in the world at the time: he challenged the city to create a 100 year plan. He might have been challenged by a healthy sense of competition with the nearby city of Vancouver, BC, that had just prepared a similar plan, and he certainly saw synchronicity in the fact that Calgary was about to turn 100 years old. Taking a look forward 100 years into the future at the same time the city would be celebrating its centennial had a symmetry that was irresistible.
The initiative was pursued at the outset by the city’s environmental department, but was quickly transferred to the planning department as the links between the sustainability orientation of a 100 year plan and the city’s other planning responsibilities became clear. As they started to contemplate how to execute such an outlandish program as a 100 year city plan, Calgary’s planners looked around for resources that could help. Gwendolyn had spoken earlier that year about the Earth Charter and the Burlington Legacy project at Globe 2004, a large conference held biennially in Vancouver, and the staff of the mayor and the environmental department attended the talk and had bought her book.
Later that year, she was sitting in a parking lot in Burlington, having just left a meeting about the Sustainable Communities conference, when she got a call from Calgary, asking questions about how they might proceed with the planning exercise. The multi-stakeholder approach Burlington had taken was all well and good for a city of 35,000, but could it work for a city of a million people? How would they insure broad representation? How would they reach the different neighborhoods? Gwendolyn spoke of breaking the public outreach part of the project down into manageable parts, and mentioned the EarthCAT workbook as a resource, offering to come to Calgary and train the staff at some point in the future. Over the wavering signal of a patchy cellphone, a partnership was born.
The challenges of an effective public outreach campaign in a city of a million people were not the only issue the planning team in Calgary had to face. It’s a lot more complicated to achieve political buy-in and ongoing support in the multi-dimensional city that is home to the Canadian oil industry than it is in a small, politically progressive college town like Burlington. Even the project methodology had to be carefully considered, and the city convened a peer review session to insure that all the different possibilities for how to proceed were effectively i
ntegrated into the planning process. Several consultants were invited from all over Canada. Gwendolyn came from the US, and out of all the input, an approach and peer concurrence on the methodology emerged.
The EarthCAT workbook was the primary material to be used in the planning process, but Calgary added some activities and perspectives from other experiences as well — a charrette from the Vancouver project and a few other enhancements. This made the approach uniquely Calgary’s, which gave the city a greater sense of ownership of the methodology.
In Calgary, the relationship of principles to planning methodology was clarified in a way that hadn’t occurred before. The city considered adopting the Earth Charter, but since there were so many elements of the document that didn’t directly apply to cities — it called for a ban on space weapons, for example — they opted for the more city-oriented Melbourne Principles instead.1 The city saw the principles as guardrails — as the framework within which the planning and action would take place. But more than principles were needed to effectively address all the complex issues cities face. The integration of both a principled approach and the rigorous methodology based in systems dynamics that was offered by EarthCAT gave Calgary a new and relevant way to proceed.
Integration and Whole Systems
A couple of flawed habits of thought have led us to our current unsustainable trajectory. The first is our obsessive prioritization of short-term results over long-term outcomes. While this flaw largely defines the standard operating procedure for corporations, governments are not immune to short-termism either (the politician’s version of NIMBY is NIMTO — Not In My Term Of Office). The EarthCAT method calls for a long-term time horizon for planning, looking out 30–100 years instead of the usual 3–5 year time frame.
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