California Center for Sustainable Energy

I know a lot of you don’t read a newspaper every day. So much attention goes to what’s online and then secondarily to TV. That’s not a bad thing, but I do read the newspaper – several of them on a regular basis – and it’s an opinion article I saw in the San Diego Union Tribune that I want to tell you about. Interestingly, it’s regarding something new online: The San Diego Regional Quality of Life Dashboard.

The Dashboard is a product of the Equinox Center, a local nonprofit research group formed last year to track and report on quality of life issues and the state of sustainability in the San Diego region. In his guest editorial, Aaron Contorer, Equinox founder and chairman, made the point that resolving sustainability questions requires objective, nonpartisan facts and figures and summarized that “What gets measured, gets fixed.” How true.

We all know there remains a great deal of work to provide enough energy, water, clean air, open space, transportation alternatives and healthy buildings throughout our region. We’ve also got pretty good ideas about what needs to be done.

There are lots of organizations, businesses, individuals and others involved in studying, analyzing and making recommendations about local sustainability. And there are numerous independent, government and academic reports about where we are with sustainability and quality of life. But not all of us have the expertise or time to drill deeply into these issues, and Equinox’s Dashboard gives an easy to digest and understandable review of the facts and trends that are shaping our local environment and lifestyles.

I urge you to take a few minutes to read the Dashboard. Decide for yourself if our quality of life is improving, and consider how you, your family and business can help move us toward sustainability.

By tracking and measuring what we truly care about, we can better assess the world that we are creating and focus on what we need to do to improve that world, both today and for tomorrow. Fundamentally, we do this for ourselves, our children and future generations. These are the measures that truly matter.

Visit the Equinox Dashboard.

Continue reading March's newsletter.