This submission has been made in response to the Irish Department of the Environment’s request for comments on its Draft Framework for Sustainable Development in Ireland.

Major earthquakes are proving to be a catalyst for the Lyttelton community, near Christchurch in New Zealand, to create a sustainable future. Margaret Jeffries writes in Fleeing Vesuvius that “Rather than waiting on the sidelines for a Government agency to hand out solutions, Lyttelton is seeking out what its own localised answers might be.”

by Pete Russell, from Fleeing Vesuvius. Ooooby began in December 2008 on Waiheke Island, Auckland, as an online social network of food gardeners. An evolving project, it now also facilitates the distribution of locally grown food and has launched a currency, Roobys, based on this food and on food processing labour.

Feasta’s particular approach to sustainability economics is to focus attention on the inadequacies of underlying systems. The development of local economies suffers from two particular adverse systemic effects – the in-built transfer of wealth from those that need money to those that already have money via the servicing of debt; and the transfer of wealth from the locality to the centre as globalisation progressively centralises economies. Local currency developers need to develop strategies that mitigate these two effects or they will remain limited in size and influence.

Credit rating agencies do a terrible job of forecasting their clients’ futures, and yet their ratings can have catastrophic effects on financial markets and on vast swathes of the world economy. Clearly something needs to change here. Could a proposed new European agency help?

From the New Zealand edition of Fleeing Vesuvius. John Mc Kay describes how freeing farmers from the stress of competing in a market place enables them to plan for ecological integrity: healthy soil, nutrient-rich crops and a satisfying diet for consumers.

Ronan Lyons’s report on Site Value Tax in Ireland is available for download. The report assesses the obstacles to implementing SVT in Ireland and how these can be overcome. It also assesses the revenue potential of the tax and the distribution of land values in Ireland.

Creating a sustainable world is about getting individuals, organisations and nations to shift their perspectives and practices. What can you do to influence this process? Nicki Harré describes three psychological principles to help sustainability advocates be more effective. From Fleeing Vesuvius.

by Brian Kallor. We in the modern West have grown up surrounded by mountains of food – grown, picked, processed, preserved, cooked and refrigerated for us, and in such quantities that a third of it is through away uneaten, and obesity presents a major health crisis. Fossil fuels made this brief state possible, and now that we see their end on the horizon we must reacquaint ourselves with the more basic methods of getting nutrition — ideally allowing more of us, not just to survive, but to eat well.

In the New Zealand edition of Fleeing Vesuvius James Bellamy describes how crises are opportunities to change things at a deep level – to rethink our relationships with one another and the world.

As Naomi Klein has been pointing out recently, effective action on climate change requires changes that go well beyond simple shopping decisions about which lightbulb to buy – what’s actually needed is political change on a global level. Rather than shrinking back from this idea, what if we embraced it and recognized that such change, if carefully planned and implemented, could bring about vital improvements to the lives of most people around the world?

Jack Santa Barbara writes in Fleeing Vesuvius that while New Zealand will inevitably make a transition to a steady-state economy, the onset of energy descent — having less and less energy to use with each passing decade — will push it to do so sooner rather than later. So the critical question is whether the transition to a steady-state economy will be by design or disaster.

Brian Davey has produced two more posters for the Occupy movement which can be downloaded from this site. They describe the Eurozone crisis and the “monetocracy”: the one percent who exercise power over the rest of us.