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<The Councillor as Guardian of the Environment>

An Essay and Workshop for Local Elected Leaders on Environmental Governance
with Emphasis on Adopting Environmentally Sound Technologies (ESTs)
- Training for Elected Leadership -

Part II - Workshop on the Councillor as Guardian of the Environment
- WORKSHOP -

WORKSHOP COMPONENTS

13.5 Trainer Presentation: VISIONING

This presentation is to provide participants with a perspective on visioning as a critical step in the process of moving from an awareness of environmental issues to the achievement of sustainability.

Develop a short presentation to prepare participants for the following exercise on visioning. As preparation, use material on "the importance of vision" from the preceding essay supplemented by the following information and ideas of your own.

According to an old Chinese proverb, "unless you change direction, you are likely to arrive at where you are headed." The message of the proverb is that we are destined to repeat past mistakes and suffer the painful consequences without a vision of how things might be in the future and a plan for realizing the vision. For the next few minutes we will be discussing the importance of vision as the inspiration and motivating force for environmental change and an indispensable tool for councillors as Guardians of the Environment.

It has been said that the surest way to find what we want is to imagine an ideal future while holding an uncomfortable, current reality in our minds. The tension between the two creates in impulse in us to close the gap.³ Once you know what you are dealing with, a useful next step is to create an image or vision of the best situation that could exist at some specific future time, spelled out in the most descriptive way possible.

Vision has been defined as an affirmation in the present of an ideal and inspirational future;⁴ a realistic, credible, attractive future.⁵ Inspiring visions are focused on a better future. They encourage high aspirations and appeal to common values. Inspiring visions make use of word pictures, images, and metaphors to state positive outcomes. When successful, they communicate enthusiasm and kindle excitement.⁶

Thinking about the future takes practice. To think long-range, it helps to focus your attention on a community problem in urgent need of corrective action. Let's assume, for example, that the concern is air quality. You might, individually or in cooperation with others, identify some trends that are likely to influence the community's air quality in the future. These trends might be classified for convenience as economic, social, political, technological, or simply as community "wants or needs." The resulting trends may be good with respect to the abatement of air pollution or they may not be. Either way, they may be foreseeable and, thus, useful as a basis for planning. Here are some examples.

1. What major changes in community needs and wants could affect air quality in our community in the future

• ?Increasing opportunity for community self-reliance?people have the freedom to make decisions on how best to satisfy their own needs.
• More universal access to resources and income-producing opportunities for an increasing share of the urban population.
• Wider distribution of social benefits (nutrition, health, protection from environmental degradation).
• Opportunities to release the creative potential in more people so they can contribute to and benefit more from the communities to which they belong.

2. What major economic changes could affect air quality in the future?

• More and universally accepted and stringently enforced standards for air quality.
• Widespread use of industry incentives like tax breaks, low-interest loans and depreciation allowances to encourage less toxic products and more energy efficient processes.
• Trend toward a decline in the energy intensity of industrial production worldwide.
• Economic policies and practices that manage the demand for renewable resources so that the rate of depletion falls as the demand declines.

3. What major social changes could affect air quality in the future?

• Increasing reliance on community initiatives and low-cost technologies to alleviate basic human needs for housing, water supply, sanitation and health care.
• Movement toward the equalization of energy use between industrialized and non-industrialized countries.
• Environmental education that fosters a sense of responsibility for the environment and teaches individuals how to monitor, protect and improve it.
• Redistribution of work and work patterns that reduce commuting distances.
• Social systems in which people are able to enjoy rather than have to endure the conditions in which they live.

4. What major political changes could affect air quality in the future?

• Multilateral treaties prohibiting the production and stockpiling of chemical weapons of war.
• Shifts in public policy that support the restructuring of investments to favour the development and use of energy-efficient technologies.
• Governmental action that promotes increased use of gaseous fuels for domestic uses and cooking owing to the lower CO2 content of these fuels.
• Sustained governmental policies that encourage investments in renewables, energy-efficient industrial processes, transport vehicles, and energy services.
• Greater public participation in environmental decision making and free access to relevant information.

5. What major technological changes could affect air quality in the future?

• Effective removal of sulfur and nitrogen from coal reducing the prevalence of acid rain in the atmosphere.
• Dismantling of nuclear reactors at the end of their service life and safe disposal of nuclear waste products.
• Removal of many air pollutants from fossil fuel combustion processes.
• Transition from gasoline powered vehicles to electric powered.
• New communication technologies, like fiber optics, that lead to a redistribution of work and work patterns.

These issue lists and the discussion leading to their formation helps to build a foundation of knowledge for the visioning process. In environmental visioning, it is important to identify the end product or "vision" in the most concrete terms possible. The focus should be on the condition or conditions that must exist for the achievement of environmental sustainability in a specific area of concern. In an industrial area, for example, levels of particulate matter from industries, power plants, heating plants, and automobiles reduced from three times to twice the "allowable" level in the fifth year and reduced to allowable levels by the end of the tenth year.

In approaching this task, focus your thinking on one simple question (in relation to their environmental area of concern): What do you want? In the search for an answer to the question, avoid thinking about how to get it. This kind of thinking causes confusion. If you try to find the way to get somewhere before you know where you want to go, you can expect confusion to accompany the journey.

Shifting the focus from what you want to how [see note] it can be achieved also leads to doubts about whether or not the vision is achievable at all. Once doubt surfaces, it is quickly reinforced by others who say: "be practical; be more realistic; consider the magnitude of what you're up against." Public officials who are preoccupied with the how quickly lose sight of the why and can be readily persuaded to abandon the quest for sustainability.

Confusion also results when you qualify what you want by becoming preoccupied with the obstacles [see note] that stand in the way (concerns about financing, political feasibility, technological capacity). Instead of a description of what you really want, your vision gets blurred and is reduced to the best you can hope for under the circumstances." This is a good way to repeat history; but, it's a poor way to bring something new into existence.

Keep in mind that for every urban place that has been stopped in achieving its environmental vision because of difficult circumstances, there is an urban place somewhere in the world with similar circumstances that has achieved and even exceeded its vision. Knowledge that there are "benchmark" places in the world can encourage the search for environmental visions that do not depend for their achievement on current policies, practices, and technologies. This is known as an exercise in creative thinking, an indispensable tool of all visionaries and planners.

A vision of sustainability is a "snapshot" of the future we want to bring into existence for ourselves and for our children. More accurately, a vision of sustainability is a composite of snapshots, each focusing on a category of future environmentally-related events?social, economic, political, technological?that together create an ideal picture of how things will and must be. Creating and holding to a vision takes persistence, commitment and hard work. Potent forces within a council or outside can destroy or distort the vision. Staying on track means not becoming preoccupied with how to achieve the vision before becoming committed to why, and not becoming overwhelmed by the obstacles that always confront any significant effort by responsible officials to change things for the better.

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• Brochure
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• International Year of Forests
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• World Environment Day
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