Sustainable Development Defined - Living a bare-bones, waste not-want not, "sustainable" lifestyle entails having your life and the lives of your loved ones micromanaged through an internationally governed system of laws and mandates purportedly designed to ensure the equitable redistribution of wealth, but which, in truth, will totally destroy our Republic and our U.S. Constitution and all the protection it was designed to give to the American people.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Agenda 21 | Global agenda and plan of action crafted during the Earth Summit, the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is a comprehensive set of plans of action to promote sustainable development and eliminate national sovereignty in favor of allowing global control by the United Nations and their approved NGOs |
| The 4 "E's"of Agenda 21 are not what they appear: |
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| Biodiversity | The degree of variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, or an entire planet. Ecologists claim that biodiversity is a measure of the health of ecosystems. Used by environmentalists to prevent development to protect biodiversity. |
| Blight | A term used to target an area for eminent domain takings to redevelop it for what the planning groups decide is a more productive use. |
| Brownfield | Similar to blight but also usually denotes that the area may have some kind of need for environmental remediation but this is not always the case. |
| Civil Society | A society that places the community values higher than the values of any one individual. |
| Climate Change | Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years, caused by human activity. |
| Community Mapping | A way of collecting personal information about people who live in a community for both identifying assets and those who are not assets to the community. |
| Consensus | Groupthink - usually a manufactured group opinion |
| Core Cities | Urban areas where environmentalist want everyone to live. |
| Degrees of Disadvantage (DOD) | A way of measuring populations on a needs scale so that those who are deemed as most disadvantaged are placed higher on a priority list to receive government funding or government resources help. |
| Disparate Impact | An impact which is deemed to be harmful only to a specific minority group - such as industry located in a poor black neighborhood is deemed to have disparate impact on the black community. The uneven impact of a decision, but usually only as it applies to a minority group. |
| Eased land | Land that has been taken by the government for preservation or land which cannot be developed because of some nebulous environmental impact. |
| Easement | Usually a forced agreement about how a piece of land may be used or not used. |
| EcoMobility | EcoMobility describes mobility without dependency on the private car. It includes:
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| Elastic cities | Suburban areas which consolidate with cities so the cities can rope in the suburban tax base. |
| Environmental Justice | A view of justice that considers how the environment of a minority group is impacted to make sure that the impact is fair. |
| Exurban | Suburban upper class homes on outskirts of cities. |
| Focus Group | A group of hand picked people who are supposed to represent the public, such as, a group which engineers a particular public opinion outcome. |
| Future Growth Area | An area of a municipality or multi-municipal plan outside of and adjacent to a designated growth area where residential, commercial, industrial and institutional uses are permitted or planned at varying densities and urban services may or may not be provided, but future development at greater densities is planned to accompany the orderly extension of urban services. |
| Green Energy | Sustainable energy sources are most often regarded as including all renewable energy sources, such as hydroelectricity, solar energy, wind energy, wave power, geothermal energy, bioenergy, and tidal power. |
| Greenhouse Gases(GHG) | Water vapor and CO2 being the major ones which are a normal part of our atmosphere. Humidity leads to rain and CO2 is necessary for plant life to exist. |
| Greenbelt | An invisible line encircling a certain area - preventing development of the area allowing wildlife to return and be established. |
| Greenspace | An open space preserved as green where development is not permitted |
| Greyfield | A term used in the United States and Canada to describe economically obsolescent, outdated, failing, moribund and/or underused real estate assets or land. The term was coined in the early 2000's as a way to describe the sea of empty asphalt that often accompanied these sites. Greyfield is a relative neologism when compared to more commonly known terms such as brownfields or greenfields. |
| Human Rights | Human rights are "basic rights and freedoms that all people are entitled to regardless of nationality, sex, age, national or ethnic origin, race, religion, language, or other status." Human rights are conceived as universal and egalitarian, with all people having equal rights by virtue of being human. These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights in international law. |
| Housing Stock | A policy term that refers to residential homes, usually single family homes. Typically the total number of residential units, including mobile homes, available for nontransient occupancy. |
| Human Settlements | A term used by UN and Agenda 21 proponents which refers to where humans will be permitted to live, and only by design. |
| ICLEI | International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives which was renamed to Local Governments for Sustainability to make the group seem less International. Created in the 90's after the 1992 Rio summit by the United Nations. This is one of the primary United Nations certified organizations. Also sponsored by the Kaiser Foundation from Oklahoma. |
| Inclusionary zoning | Zoning which considers the racial and income balance of an area and forces developers to provide low income housing to balance an area more. |
| Infill | Infill in its broadest meaning is material that fills in an otherwise unoccupied space. Suburban infill describes the development of land in existing suburban areas that was left vacant during the development of the suburb. It is one of the tenets of the New Urbanism and smart growth trends of urging densification to reduce the need for automobiles, encourage walking, and ultimately save energy. One exception to this is the practice of urban agriculture, in which land in the urban or suburban area is retained to grow food for local consumption. |
| Intentional Integration | Forced residential integration to ensure racial balance. |
| LEED | An artificial standard in green building design - stands for Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design, Developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) |
| Light Rail | Light rail or light rail transit (LRT) is a form of urban rail public transportation that generally has a lower capacity and lower speed than heavy rail and metro systems, but higher capacity and higher speed than traditional street-running tram systems. The term is typically used to refer to rail systems with rapid transit-style features that usually use electric rail cars operating mostly in private rights-of-way separated from other traffic but sometimes, if necessary, mixed with other traffic in city streets. |
| Livable City | The view that a city is only livable if it does not contain cars or industry, and it must support mixed-use development and support for pedestrians and bikes. |
| Metropolitics | A new form of politics that involves NGOs and land and resource planning agencies working together to plan the future of a city or area. |
| Metropolitan Planning Organization(MPO) | Organizations that deem themselves to be the authorities on city planning in their area - a self-designated label of MPO denotes that they are in the UN Agenda 21 club. |
| Mixed-Use Development | Buildings where residential and business is designed to be mixed so that no one building is only residential or business. |
| Multimodal | Any vision of transportation planning that includes all modes of transportation, not just vehicles, as in rail, pedestrian, bikes, cars |
| New Urbanism | New Urbanism is an urban design movement, which promotes walkable neighborhoods that contain a range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980's and continues to reform many aspects of real estate development and urban planning. New Urbanism has been criticized for being a form of centrally planned, large-scale development, instead of allowing the initiative for construction to be taken by the final users themselves. |
| Non-Governmental Organization | An organization certified by the United Nations as a government created monopoly implementing the ICLEI metropolitan plan in US Cities |
| Participatory Democracy | A communitarian approach to Democracy where the collective voice is more important than the voice of the individual citizen. |
| Preservation | Term used anywhere that these Agenda 21 groups would like to limit development and growth |
| Private Property | Property: Executes one's expression of liberty and insures pursuit of one's life. Never forget that private property is not simply "a thing". It is the relationship between a person and a thing. This relationship allows individual citizens to use and enjoy private property. George Washington described the essence of that relationship when he said: "Private property and freedom are inseparable." |
| Pro-integrative | A policy that considers imposing racial integration as an integral part of that policy. |
| Public Outreach | When policy makers want to appear to include the public and welcome their input but usually these efforts are manufactured consensus |
| Redevelopment | A modern word for gentrification, usually it involves breaking up concentrated poverty as a way to improve an area |
| Re-framing | Changing words to hide the real intent of a project. |
| Regional Equity | Dissolving small city and local governments and consolidating with cities to equalize classes. |
| Resegregation | The tendency for a neighborhood to return to segregation after being integrated, especially if there are more minority residents than white residents. Term used by Myron Orefield of the Brookings Institution |
| Revitalization | Another word for gentrification. Usually this term is used in areas of concentrated poverty where the real estate values are lower because of that concentrated poverty |
| Rules of the Game | David Rusk (Brookings Institution) argues that state legislatures must set new rules of the game. He believes those rules require regional revenue or tax base sharing to reduce fiscal disparity, regional housing policies to ensure that all new developments have their fair share of low and moderate income housing to dissolve concentrations of poverty, and regional land-use planning and growth management to control urban sprawl. |
| Smart Growth | An anti-growth agenda that seeks to limit developing any new land for housing, business or industry |
| Social Justice | The principle that all persons are entitled to "basic human needs", regardless of superficial differences such as economic disparity, class, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, religion, age, sexual orientation, disability, or health". This includes the eradication of poverty and illiteracy, the establishment of sound environmental policy, and equality of opportunity for healthy personal and social development. Social justice is based on the concept of human rights and equality and involves a greater degree of economic egalitarianism through progressive taxation, income redistribution, or even property redistribution. |
| Social Responsibility | Social responsibility is a duty every individual or organization has to perform so as to maintain a balance between the economy and the ecosystem. |
| Spatial Equity | Generally refers to fair distribution of income and resources over different parts of a region, or even the entire world. Also known as wealth redistribution. |
| Spatial Racism | A label attributed to the mostly white suburbs which John Powell also calls a form of Jim Crow. He believes whites group together in enclaves and exclude blacks from living near them. A term coined by Francis Cardinal George, Archbishop of Chicago |
| Spatial Segregation | A term often used by John A Powell of the Institute for Race and Poverty. Powell feels that white hierarchies specifically exclude blacks through redlining and moving into areas which are too expensive for blacks to afford therefore leaving the blacks in a neighborhood of concentrated poverty. |
| Sprawl | A negative term used by smart growth proponents that describes any suburban development outside of urban areas. |
| Stakeholders | Any person who is a decision maker and has influence in the making of policy who they would like to rope into their agenda to limit development and reduce greenhouse gases. |
| Sustainable | In their own definition, they describe something as sustainable if it is preserved for future generations by denying use of it in present generation. It also includes anything that they deem does not have emissions, harm any plants or animals or the planet. |
| Sustainable Development | Development that considers future generations in planning and is not allowed to impact the planet or the environment in any way |
| Tax Incentive Financing(TIF) | The original concept of TIFs was to help blighted areas come out of the doldrums and get some economic development they would not otherwise have a chance of getting. When an area is designated a tax increment financing (TIF) district, it means taxes on the property will be frozen for 20 to 30 years. Local governments sell the TIF concept to the public by claiming they are using funds that would not have been generated without the TIF district. But often this means that the rest of the non-TIF taxpayers will be shouldering the extra tax burden in exchange for what is supposed to be the benefits of having that development occur. |
| Triple Bottom Line(TBL) | A made-up way of accounting that now includes carbon footprint in the net worth of a business. |
| Transportation Improvement Program(TIP) | The Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) is a 6-year financial program that describes the schedule for obligating federal funds to state and local projects. The TIP contains funding information for all modes of transportation including highways and HOV as well as transit capital and operating costs. State, regional and local transportation agencies update the program each year to reflect priority projects in the CLRP. |
| Transfer of Development Rights | A method of stealing development rights from a property owner by bribing them with money so that they transfer the development rights to a developer who is then only allowed to use those rights in high density urban core development. |
| Underserved Community | Any minority community which is deemed in need of more of something that the rich elites have. |
| Urban Growth Boundary | The boundary outside of which housing can only use septic and wells. Ultimately, all services outside the Urban Growth Boundary or Urban Services Boundary will be denied in favor of only providing inside the USB. |
| Viewscape | An open space green area that can only be viewed and cannot be disturbed by human activity. |
| Visioning | A technique of planting ideas into an audience and then pretending that the outcome of the meeting was derived from public or stakeholder input. |
| Vehicle Miles Traveled(VMT) | A way of measuring vehicle use that is closely related to trying to portray them as planet damaging CO2 emitting vehicles |
| Walkable City | A city that supports pedestrian traffic more than vehicle traffic. |