"Sustainability and me"

Now that this class has ended, I definitely have even more questions about sustainability than when I originally started. Is it enough to have my own personal understanding of what this term means? Or is it necessary to take it further and have clearer, more universal guidelines about what sustainability should and should not entail? Such questions usually lead me to more questions and sometimes I long for some cold hard facts. However, I wonder if the definition is out there waiting for me to "discover" it in the first place. While I believe it is important to ground the movement for sustainability in tangible ideas and plans, I also think it is important to remember that such issues are not static. The earth is continually moving and changing – I believe that our attempts to live harmoniously together must also be ever adapting and growing. As we talked about in class, is sustainability a final destination or is it an ongoing expedition?

Issues of “sustainability” pertain to everything around me – after all, there doesn’t seem much point to anything else if I cannot live and breathe in the world that I have helped create. As Derrick Jensen says, “If you have no planet, nobody can ask questions.” So how do we humans address such a broad, all-encompassing matter? Sustainability is not just an “environmental” issue – it concerns matters from animal welfare and economics to social justice and human rights. For developed, industrialized countries such as the United States, I do not think that sustainability is about prolonging our current standards of living for as long as possible - we are going to have to find a new way to live more equitably. However, what would that look like? Imagining that future can be rather bleak and scary – I know that I have grown rather accustomed to the many luxuries that my country provides. However, as illustrated by The Story of Stuff, such amenities come at a hefty price. The richer developed world may not be paying as dearly for our actions yet, but the environment and poorer developing countries are already bearing the brunt of such choices. I do not think we have the luxury to tiptoe around these issues - we can no longer afford for issues of sustainability to be divisive or ignored.

At times, the weight and breadth of these issues can be very intimidating and confusing. However, the longer the world waits, the more nebulous our future seems to get. Our little actions certainly add up - we have to start somewhere. But I think that "sustainability" demands more from us - it requires actions that reach farther than our individual lives. Our personal changes are certainly a step in the right direction, but I don’t think it can stop there. World-wide discussion of our species' role as responsible and compassionate stewards of the Earth *is* growing – a fact that heartens and motivates me. I want to believe that the world is starting to see how sustainability is an issue that concerns us all – an aspect that I hope can give it a strong, unifying power.

In conclusion, I liked the idea of sustainability being more of a verb than a noun. Not something to mostly just talk about, but something that we do. I think that the issues we face today are some of the greatest challenges ever to our creativity as a species – how can we look past the linear way so many things are done to fashion a new, cyclical, and “sustainable” way of living?