When elected officials and Town staff in Acton are making decisions, they are thinking of maintaining health, welfare, financial solvency, and other measures of the town’s well-being. “Sustainability” takes those same measures, but deepens them to include future generations, and broadens them to include the wider web of life of which we are a part, including people beyond Acton. Because of the intertwined environmental emergencies we are in the middle of, sustainability usually has an environmental focus: a large part of these emergencies arise from short-term and narrow thinking, and making progress on environmental crises requires a consistent focus on the wide and deep impacts of today’s decisions.
In 2017, the Acton Board of Selectmen voted during their annual goal-setting exercise to put the creation of a sustainability policy as their top priority for the upcoming year, and they asked Green Acton to help them think this through.