Welcome to Contextual Sustainability Express

This blog invites you to join me onto the various roads that will lead to sustaining futures for people and planet in both the global North and South.

Those sustaining futures are viewed with a perspective of sustainability called contextual sustainability (CS): ecological sustainability in the context of social justice, active non-violence, futurity and participatory decision-making. What does perspective does will become clear in its application, particularly to education, aviation, peace, sustainable communities development in the global North and South.

You are invited on this CS express which is not a CS local. A sustainability revolution is emerging, but it has to be speeded up particularly in these troubling times of a teetering international economic system which enriches the few, impoverishes the many and endangers the planet. It is this urgent transition to sustainability based upon an explicit and integrated set of social and ecological values that is most needed now and in the next couple of decades.

Once, again, welcome on the CS Express where civilized language is matched with depth of insights and practical proposals.

Yours for sustaining futures in both industrialized and agrarian societies

Frans C. Verhagen, M.Div., M.I.A., Ph.D., sustainability sociologist,
Chair, UN and Global Affairs Committee at Community Church of NY Unitarian Universalist
UN Ecosoc representative for the International Peace Research Association (IPRA)
Adjunct Associate Professor Sustainable Communities at Pace University, NY
Sustainability Fellow at the Green Institute in Washington, D.C.
Developer of the Sustainability and Peace Institute (SPI) Model of Rural Development in West Africa, particularly Sierra Leone and Togo
Director, Sustainability Research and Education
Earth and Peace Education Associates International (EPE)
97-37 63rd Road, #15E, Rego Park, NY 11374, USAvoice: 1+(718)275-3932; fax 1+(718)275-3932; cell 1+(917 617 6217)http://www.globalepe.org, gaia1@rcn.com

“…..the verb sustaining holds open the actively normative questions that the idea of sustainability raises. We are required to probe: What truly sustains us? Why? And how do we know? Conversely, we must ask: What are we to sustain above all else? Why? And how may we do so?"
Aidan Davison, Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability, 2001: p.64