To become practically
involved environmental appraisal requires the critical evaluation of all
possibilities for environmental management.
Appraisals of 'place'
focus on the local Agenda 21, which is a practical expression of the
interrelated notions of 'biodiversity' and 'sustainability' carrying underlying value-messages to
protect, through management of the community's finite natural resources. To fully engage
people in sustainable development requires a large element of critical enquiry. This can be
partly achieved by inventing new surveys, although there are dangers in departing too far from
standard protocols acceptable to planners. Another powerful route to critical engagement is
making and operating a management plan for improvements, which often has to steer a course
between opposing value judgements about the environment. A third approach is to make
historical, literary, or artistic appraisals of the neighbourhood, so as to know its creation, and
find a place in it. This act of the imagination could provide an important added value to support
an action plan.
- The notion of sustainable development is
embedded in the historical values and moral
attitudes of all societies, but emerged with force in the 19th century where people came
together in masses that exceeded local biological productivity. From this point of view,
could a formal networking procedure be developed to elicit and share notional
contributions from young people as inputs to environmental action plans at the deepest level
?
- The development of patriotic attitudes
has been underscored consistently by banners, flags,
medals and other commemorative paraphernalia, statues and a variety of monuments,
buildings and dedicated spaces. Notional values about neighbourhood are also expressed
personally, in many ways, through landscape paintings, poetry, patriotism, homesickness,
and the creative work of all people serving a local need, who make everything from
pictures to cathedrals, furniture to homes, jewellery to statues.
- Each culture, or society, produces personal
images and forms which are unique and
peculiar to it. Even when similar images or forms are common to more than one culture or
society, they almost invariably have different meanings or values attached to them. Personal
images constitute not only an embodiment of a society's attitudes, values and beliefs, but
are also a major means by which values and beliefs are actually formed and realised.
Identifying and
teaching areas of moral, aesthetic and humanistic concern could be coupled to
the incorporation of these value systems into sustainable action plans.
