Communities ensure their own livelihood

Facebook Twitter

Intentional community. Characteristics[edit] Purpose[edit] The purposes of intentional communities vary in different communities.

Intentional community

They may include sharing resources, creating family-oriented neighborhoods and living ecologically sustainable lifestyles (ecovillages). Local food. Local food or the local food movement is a "collaborative effort to build more locally based, self-reliant food economies - one in which sustainable food production, processing, distribution, and consumption is integrated to enhance the economic, environmental and social health of a particular place.

Local food

"[1] It is not solely a geographical concept. A United States Department of Agriculture publication explains local food as "related to the distance between food producers and consumers," as well as "defined in terms of social and supply chain characteristics. Agroecology. Agroecology is the study of ecological processes that operate in agricultural production systems.



Permaculture is a branch of ecological design, ecological engineering, and environmental design that develops sustainable architecture and self-maintained agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems.[1][2] The term permaculture (as a systematic method) was first coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in 1978.


The word permaculture originally referred to "permanent agriculture" [3] but was expanded to stand also for "permanent culture," as it was seen that social aspects were integral to a truly sustainable system as inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming philosophy. "Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system. " - Bill Mollison [4] History[edit] Bioregionalism. Bioregionalism is a political, cultural, and ecological system or set of views based on naturally defined areas called bioregions, similar to ecoregions.


Bioregions are defined through physical and environmental features, including watershed boundaries and soil and terrain characteristics. Bioregionalism stresses that the determination of a bioregion is also a cultural phenomenon, and emphasizes local populations, knowledge, and solutions.[1] Overview[edit] The bioregionalist perspective opposes a homogeneous economy and consumer culture with its lack of stewardship towards the environment. This perspective seeks to: Cogeneration. Trigeneration cycle Cogeneration or combined heat and power (CHP) is the use of a heat engine[1] or power station to simultaneously generate electricity and useful heat.


Trigeneration or combined cooling, heat and power (CCHP) refers to the simultaneous generation of electricity and useful heating and cooling from the combustion of a fuel or a solar heat collector. A plant producing electricity, heat and cold is called a trigeneration[2] or polygeneration plant. Resource management. In organizational studies, resource management is the efficient and effective deployment of an organization's resources when they are needed.

Resource management


Resource management is a key element to activity resource estimating and project human resource management. Asset-based community development. Asset-based community development (ABCD) is a methodology that seeks to uncover and use the strengths within communities as a means for sustainable development.

Asset-based community development


Asset management. Infrastructure asset management[edit] Infrastructure asset management is the combination of management, financial, economic, engineering, and other practices applied to physical assets with the objective of providing the required level of service in the most cost-effective manner.

Asset management

It includes the management of the whole life cycle (design, construction, commissioning, operating, maintaining, repairing, modifying, replacing and decommissioning/disposal) of physical and infrastructure assets.[1] Operating and sustainment of assets in a constrained budget environment require some sort of prioritization scheme. Historical background of asset management[edit] Civilization has always relied on its technological assets to support key functions like transport, public health, business, and commerce. There is a clear link between the provision and sophistication of technological assets and our modern lifestyle. Self-sufficiency.

Self-sufficiency (also called self-containment) is the state of not requiring any aid, support, or interaction, for survival; it is therefore a type of personal or collective autonomy.


On a national scale, a totally self-sufficient economy that does not trade with the outside world is called an autarky. The term self-sufficiency is usually applied to varieties of sustainable living in which nothing is consumed outside of what is produced by the self-sufficient individuals. Self-sustainability. A system is self-sustaining (or self-sufficient) if it can maintain itself by independent effort. The system self-sustainability is: the degree at which the system can sustain itself without external supportthe fraction of time in which the system is self-sustaining Self-sustainability is considered one of the "ilities" and is closely related to sustainability and availability. Resilience (organizational)

Resilience is defined as “the positive ability of a system or company to adapt itself to the consequences of a catastrophic failure caused by power outage, a fire, a bomb or similar” event[1] or as "the ability of a [system] to cope with change".[2] Disruption seems to be everywhere these days – industries collapsing, storm surges shutting down major urban centers, financial markets imploding, and more.

Preventing these calamities would be everyone’s first choice, of course. In recent years the term has been used to describe a burgeoning movement among entities such as businesses, communities and governments to improve their ability to respond to and quickly recover from catastrophic events such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks. The concept is gaining credence among public and private sector leaders who argue that resilience should be given equal weight to preventing terrorist attacks in U.S. homeland security policy.[3]

Autonomy. Autonomy (Ancient Greek: αὐτονομία autonomia from αὐτόνομος autonomos from αὐτο- auto- "self" and νόμος nomos, "law", hence when combined understood to mean "one who gives oneself one's own law") is a concept found in moral, political, and bioethical philosophy. Within these contexts, it is the capacity of a rational individual to make an informed, un-coerced decision. In moral and political philosophy, autonomy is often used as the basis for determining moral responsibility and accountability for one's actions. One of the best known philosophical theories of autonomy was developed by Kant. Empowerment. Empowerment refers to increasing the economic, political, social, educational, gender, or spiritual strength of individuals and communities. Definitions[edit] The term covers a vast landscape of meanings, interpretations, definitions and disciplines ranging from psychology and philosophy to the highly commercialized self-help industry and motivational sciences.

"Marginalized" refers to the overt or covert trends within societies whereby those perceived as lacking desirable traits or deviating from the group norms tend to be excluded by wider society and ostracized as undesirables.