At this moment, CitNet member Rob Wheeler is busy trying to get various people and organizations who care about sustainability to cast their vote to make sure that "Develop and Implement a National Sustainability Strategy" is among the Top Ten ideas for the Obama Administration, as highlighted by the Change.org initiative. Right now, out of hundreds of ideas submitted, the National Strategy idea, with 4,098 votes as of Friday, January 9 at 5:40 pm EST, is in eleventh place.

The idea of a National Sustainability Strategy is not exactly new. In fact, all the national governments that attended the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro all agreed that when they went back home they would each develop a national sustainable development strategy to implement the various relevant plans and commitments they painfully negotiated in the now historic Agenda 21 document, officially described as "A blueprint for action for global sustainable development into the 21st century."

It sounded good at the time, enough to bring thousands of concerned citizens from around the world, including those attending under the U.S. Citizens Network for UNCED, which later became the Citizens Network for Sustainable Development. Those veterans of the so-called Rio Summit were energized with the possibilities and excited with the fact that the Earth Summit represented one of the biggest gatherings of civil society yet seen. The question then, as it still remains, is: If and when will our governments implement these commitments?

Now that we are well into the 21th century, many of us look back at the various efforts to put into practice the principles and promises made 17 years ago. We have indeed seen many new developments. "Sustainability" is no longer thought of as obscure jargon. We have seen the rise and fall of our own national President's Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD) with its recommendations to achieve a "Sustainable America." We have also seen the review of progress at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development which noted the fact that after a decade only a few countries had actually adopted the national sustainability strategies, and those few only somewhat recently.

So, with the new Obama Administration moving into town this month, the question stands as to whether or not "change" will include implementing the Earth Summit commitment to develop a National Sustainability Strategy. members of the Citizens Network will be especially asking this question and doing what we can to encourage a positive response, demonstrating a truly "sustainable change."