ABSTRACT
The famous salmon of Seattle have inspired counties, cities, towns and villages throughout the UK to develop their own sustainability indicators. Reaching the goal relies on overcoming two major obstacles. The first is empowering people to recognise that jargon words like ‘sustainable development’, ‘quality of life’, ‘wellbeing’ actually mean somethings that people truly value. The second is the inertia, mistrust and cynicism that people feel with conventional economic indicators. Community indicators have been tried at a wide variety of scales, from regions of over two million inhabitants, down to single villages and parishes. Helping the community to think through and reach agreement on the issues that are of most concern and interest. Turning the information that has been gathered into understandable indicators for the community. Critics have seen the enthusiasm for sustainability indicators as a ‘green herring’: as part of the old measurement obsession, words and numbers instead of action.
