Chapter 4 and Greening The City

Chapter four in Agyeman's book describes an index to compare sustainable organization's directives and evaluate their relation to sustainability and environmental justice. Agyemen outlines her methodology and explains that her descriptions of the organizations within this chapter all have the same score on her index because organizations that rate below a 3 should not be considered relater to JSP.

I noticed that many of these organizations were located in either on the East coast (mainy New York city) or the West cost. It is interesting to think about what influences people in different locations who face the same worldwide environmental crisis react differently. I would assume that organizations formed in NYC or California were formed out of disparate need for their services. States in the Midwest are so sprawling that people who live there do not face the same realities of overcrowding, pollution and climate change in the same ways as city-dwellers. In the same vein, the Greening the City chapter highlights organizations and practices for city dwellers to become more sustainable. Coincidence? Sadly, we as a society seem only to find environmentally nurturing alternatives to our daily practices only when put in disparate situations and atrocious conditions. The critique for both the Greening the City chapter and chapter 4 would be that the issues raised and practices prescribed seem too practical to spend time reading. People are driven by challenge, and once they fulfill their task, they will generally lose interest. Planting prairie wildflowers in your yard, or simply allowing primary succession to occur, is too easy and simplistic for people to accept. We all want to figure something important out, or buy that new technology--but all we really have to do is get a sense of what the ecosystem we inhabit is like and conform to it.