The Three Spheres in Your Own Community

Picture: someone cycling to work on a busy road.

Good for the environment: a cycle burns no fuel and dirties no air. Good for people: a cyclist is in the street, seeing and being seen, not sealed inside a car. Good for the money: cycles barely wear the road, and road repair comes out of the same budget as everything else.

Picture: household waste separated into wet and dry.

Good for the environment: material sorted at the door gets used again instead of dug up again. Good for the economy: sorting, collecting and reselling is somebody's living, and that work already exists here. Good for people: the municipality spends less on carting and burying waste, and can spend it on something else.

Picture: the sabzi mandi early in the morning.

Vegetables grown nearby travel a short distance, so less fuel is burnt getting them to the plate. The money goes to a farmer a few hours away instead of into a long chain. And food picked yesterday is usually better food.

Picture: the kirana at the end of the street.

One rule of a local economy: keep the money moving inside it for as long as you can. Money spent at a big chain leaves for a head office and its shareholders, most of whom have never seen this town. Money spent at the kirana buys vegetables from the mandi, which buys shoes from the cobbler, who buys groceries from the kirana. Every round of that is somebody's wage. Picture: steel tumblers stacked beside a pile of paper cups.

A tumbler washed and used again is waste that never existed. Collection and disposal cost the town money, and making a new cup costs energy every single time. The steel glass on the tea stall counter is not nostalgia. It is the better design.

Picture: a sapling being planted and staked.

A tree holds the soil where it is, shades the street and cools the air around it. That cooling is free, and it is competing with air conditioners that are not.

Picture: the public library or the reading room.

Libraries are among the most sustainable things a town owns. They let people read far more than they could ever afford to buy, and they hold the town's own record — old newspapers, registers, maps — which is what anybody needs to argue a case at a meeting.

Picture: an older person teaching a group of children.

Handing on skill and knowledge is social sustainability in its plainest form. A generation that does not pass on what it knows makes the next one start from nothing, and what goes missing is usually the practical knowledge — about weather, crops, repair, and getting by.

Picture: a mohalla or residents' association meeting, or the notice announcing one.

People who will have to live with a decision should get to speak before it is taken. That needs two things: a government willing to ask, and residents willing to turn up. The second one fails more often.