Sustainable Lives
We are a group of people working in various fields related to planning for communities and neighbourhoods, the development of open spaces and buildings, and environmental change.
This website was started because we wanted to know for ourselves, in the simplest possible terms, what everyone is talking about. So we started to look at sources of information where the words sustainability, sustainable living, sustainable communities, sustainable construction, sustainable development, etc ... are used.
And we discovered it's very confusing, sometimes misleading. Everyone seems to mean different things when they talk about sustainability. Lots of people don't know what the words mean and other people use narrow definitions that are not very helpful. There is far too much 'jargon' and that makes the whole subject difficult to understand.
We are not in the business of preaching, especially not to the converted, and the purpose of this web-site is to inform not to lecture. However, we can see lots of contradictions in the information that is available, and in the guidelines we are being encouraged to follow.
We have always admired the way Martin Lewis (moneysavingexpert.com) explains the most complicated financial issues in terms we can actually understand. We want to do the same for issues related to sustainability.
We plan to add pages of basic information for interested individuals, for community groups and for people working in the development industry. We know there is lots of information and guidance out there for professional users, including architects, planners, engineers and landscape designers so we will try not to duplicate more technical sources. We will however summarise any information provided by other organisations that may be of more general interest.
When we find helpful links to other useful web sources we will include them. When someone suggests an interesting new topic or issue that we think is of general interest, we will add it.
All your suggestions, comments and contributions will be welcome.
Please get in touch, we would like to hear from you (link to email)