Sustainability advocates have regrouped to focus on community organizing to collect relevant indicator data, market the need for sustainability programs to the general public and local elected officials, work more closely with the business community, and to continue advocacy for implementation of specific components of the sustainability plan. A larger community base is being created through the worldwide web and other media. Without an action plan, a community risks collecting data that will provide it with an attractive graph of environmental, economic and social decline, without a strategy for changing the slope of the curve. With an action plan, it may get that downward slope anyway, if there is insufficient political support for implementation of the plan. Key to implementation of any sustainability action plan is the support of the local power base.
Indicators are useful only insofar as they serve to create and maintain that support.
In some situations, a necessary component in implementing sustainability will be to organize the sustainability constituency to lobby more effectively, and to work to elect people more in tune with sustainability goals. She served as the first president of the new Commission on the Environment formed in 1996, and was founding director of the Department of the Environment. She is a senior fellow with Redefining Progress.