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Tell Me More About Sustainability

Summit Director Dan McCarthy

I mentioned in my first blog post that I would tell you more about our sustainability initiatives here at the Summit, so let’s begin with an overview.

Baden-Powell once said: “While you are living your life on earth, try to do something good which may remain after you.” That’s a great way to think about sustainability: preserving our environment for future generations.

Sustainability can be thought of as having three main focus areas: economics, environment, and people (the “triple bottom line of sustainability”). The economic component recognizes that financial success is essential to growth and ultimately enables improved quality of life. The environment component recognizes the importance of natural resources and systems in sustaining quality of life- everything from bees pollinating crops to forests filtering pollutants from the air and wetlands treating water. The people component recognizes that people are the lifeblood of our communities and the ultimate engine of our economy; their health, safety, and education are essential to our long-term well-being.

At the Summit we are working to embrace this triple bottom line perspective of sustainability; moving from green, an area the BSA has always embraced, to deep green, if you will. That means we are constantly focused on achieving the right balance of our responsibility to the environment, people, and financial success. I’ll be telling you more about those efforts in future blogs.

[pullquote]“No one can pass through life, any more than he can pass through a bit of country, without leaving tracks behind, and those tracks may often be helpful to those coming after him in finding their way.”—Baden-Powell[/pullquote]

The Summit will be home to Scouts for at least the next 100 years. Who knows what the world will look like a century from now? What we do know is that our actions today and tomorrow will shape that world and what we do at the Summit can help set the example for the BSA’s sustainability practices in the next century.

Stay tuned to learn more.

Good Scouting!
Dan

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