CLIENT: Community Workshop, Seattle CATEGORY: Sustainability Toolkit, Education TOOLS USED: Adobe Illustrator, MS Word
Connect the Green Dots is a sustainability toolkit for home life and community. This toolkit was developed for local community workshops, in the Seattle area, as a resource for individuals and organizations to provide an easy to understand roadmap for making more sustainable choices in their daily lives and how to influence their community. The goal of the toolkit is to get people thinking about their role in making more sustainable choices based on each of the four system conditions. The toolkit was presented in a video format. Each system condition was presented with examples, and participants actively participated in discussions creating an open dialog and idea generating workshop.
This toolkit was designed using The Natural Step Framework (TNS) guidelines. It is a science based framework consisting of four system conditions.
- Eliminate our contribution to the progressive buildup of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust (for example, heavy metals and fossil fuels)
- Eliminate our contribution to the progressive buildup of chemicals and compounds produced by society (for example, dioxins, PCBs, and DDT).
- Eliminate our contribution to the progressive physical degradation and destruction of nature and natural processes (for example, over harvesting forests and paving over critical wildlife habitat).
- Eliminate our contribution to conditions that undermine peoples’ capacity to meet their basic human needs (for example, unsafe working conditions, not enough pay to live on, a lack of safe affordable housing, and access to healthy food and safe water).