Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
each other and may sensually experience the wider environment, is absolutely central.
Acknowledging the ideas of urbanists Dolores Hayden (1997) and Daniel Kemmis
(1990), Shutkin sees the power or sense of place as the capacity for everyday
landscapes, towns or cityscapes to foster within local citizens, neighbourhood residents
or individual householders a public memory, a sense of a shared time and territory:
The relationship between the environment and civic life is thus not just about
the physical effects of development, such as pollution or sprawl. It is also about
the feelings, attitudes and sensory experiences nurtured by the environment that
contribute to civic consciousness and identity. Just as civic attitudes and the
'habits of the heart' that Tocqueville saw as critical to the success of democratic
communities affect the way in which physical space is developed, so too does
the sense of place and experience of nature influence our civic sensibility and
consciousness.
(Shutkin, 2001: 49)
It is important to embrace the humble and the everyday, local solutions, to be
inclusive, and to link environmental problem-solving with the building of community
capacity. Shutkin explores some empirical real-world and ongoing examples of civic
environmentalism, such as community conservation and conservation-based planning
in Colorado, the development of a transit village in Oakdale, urban agriculture in
Boston, and community planning and cooperation in a New Jersey suburb. Although
inevitably incomplete, Shutkin elicits from his analysis the core concepts of civic
environmentalism:
•
Participatory process: meaningful and informed participation in the decision-
making procedures that impact on the quality of people's lives. This means a
bottom-up approach to democracy and a public recognition of the worth of all
inhabitants or citizens.
•
Community and regional planning: meaningful structures to facilitate involvement,
multi-stakeholder participation and collaboration, and a sense of responsibility
for the future of places in which citizens live and may also work.
•
Environmental education: developing the recognition and understanding that the
economy, society and the environment are interlinked and that local communities
are able to alter their circumstances. This may mean people understanding the
environmental consequences of their actions - CO
2
emissions produced by
commuting by car, increased landfill use through profligate waste disposal, and
so on.
•
Industrial ecology: focusing on such actions as integrated pollution prevention,
full-cost accounting, and ecologically sensitive development planning and
economic growth.
•
Environmental justice: the awareness of the social and spatial distributive aspect
of environmental degradation and environmental protection.
•
Place: developing a sense of place or, as Alistair McIntosh (2004) puts it,
recognizing the intimate connection between soil and soul.
Civic environmentalism involves many things, ranging from the development and
articulation of a place based on existential and cognitive processes of reasoning to
