Sustainability and Me
INTRODUCTION: Here is my last reflection, belted out all at once at the crack of dawn on about four hours of sleep. I had a rough week last week with many responsibilities and not as much time as I would have liked to handle them. I listened to Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman album about twice through while writing this. I think this one stands on its own a little better than the others, hope you enjoy or at least find some key concepts to google and think about.
Before I took this class, I had grown to be disillusioned with all the ‘green’ talk surrounding supposedly sustainable activities. A lot of companies and people were trying to get my attention about how green their product was, or how a football game was carbon neutral because a lot of trees were planted, or how we should trap all the CO2 in our atmosphere underground in rocks, and I responded by turning myself off to sustainability. I just didn’t want to deal with all that propaganda and noise. I lacked the wherewithal to be able to process all these different approaches to sustainability. I was asking myself, ‘How do all these things mean the same thing?’ This class has helped me step out of my own personal sustainability crisis, and it has helped me to start caring again. I learned that all those things don’t mean the same thing, that there are many different contexts and systematic facets of sustainability, and some of the things we are doing might be better than others. That is a frighteningly general thing to say about what I have taken away from this class, but the best part about that generality is it means so much more to me now that I have been exposed to all these different perspectives and ideas in this class. If I had to try to formulate a new thesis on what sustainability means to me, it would read something like this: Sustainability means saving what we value for future generations by using those values of ours as the strongest kind of rhetoric for actively designing new systems to promote worldwide social equality, to reduce the mindless exploitation of natural capital and preserve the incredible intrinsic value of the natural world, to stop hiding behind the objective thinking that technology will solve all our problems, and to realize that economic growth is only as valuable as the man-made construct that defines it. Sustainability means caring and about the little things, too.
As you can see, I have a very idealistic, much more thick (vs. thin) view of sustainability. I emphasized making decisions based on our values, because I think if you ask someone if they value polar bears, or their beaches, more than the GDP, they would choose polar bears and the beaches. But if you ask them if they would support a policy to increase the GDP because it will create more jobs, they would wonder why you are even asking them that question. More jobs is good for everyone. But in that step, we have separated our values from our constructed social-political-economic system. We forgot how awful it would be if polar bears drowned in the ocean that rose so high New Orleans became the new Atlantis. I tend to get existential when I think deeply about sustainability because I imagine ourselves needing to extensively re-define what we are doing.
I also mentioned ‘worldwide social equality’ in my definition of sustainability. I think it is unfair that the United States burns through such a large proportion of the finite natural capital available in the world. And it can be a touchy subject, because I don’t think anyone would support redistributing all the wealth by some sort of great mandate. That is communism and to me it only works in an ideal world. That wouldn’t work because people need a motivation to work hard. It is what this country was founded on, and it is what made us ‘great’ in our sense of the idea. I think we need to reimagine what it means to be great. Instead of using all our energies to burn resources to be comfortable, and distracted, we should redirect our energy to being happier and healthier with less. And to me this can even come down to personal choices made by people every day. Choices like not driving your RV across the country, not eating over-processed fast food, not buying smart phones and plasma TVs, not leaving the AC all the way up, and so forth. One of my favorite quotes was made by representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland. When asked about his views on energy conservation, he responded:
“And I can imagine Americans going to bed at night saying, today I used less energy than I did yesterday and I am just fine. Tomorrow I am going to do even better. I think there would be fewer people on alcohol and watching bad movies and so forth if they just had some real direction.”
I love this quote because it is made with a tongue-in-cheek sort of delivery but still falls heavy if you stop to think about it. Not surprisingly, I fell into the group that believed sustainability would be achieved from the bottom-up through social change during the exercise in class.
I used the phrase ‘actively designing new systems’ in my definition of sustainability. I loved the example Michael went over in class of how the city of Olympia built a three-lane bridge even in the face of strong dissent from the public. Traditional forecasting indicated that at least a four-lane bridge was needed to handle the traffic across the Puget Sound. So logically, the city built a three-lane bridge with bike lanes, wide pedestrian walkways, and lookouts and benches to stop and admire the scenery. This is a wonderful example of how we can use our values to actively design new systems to work in harmony with those values. It would have been easy for the engineers of Olympia to work within the system they had already created, and to build a much larger bridge to handle projected population growth and increasing transportation demands. I was glad to hear that the bridge reduced traffic entering the city, and that people were riding their bikes and in general found themselves to be happy with their three-lane bridge.
I mentioned that ‘sustainability means caring’ at the end of my definition. This seems like a curious phrase, but nonetheless I think it is an important sort of marker on how we are doing. I am an engineer, and I make decisions based on data and logic and sound analysis. If you told me that I could clean up my city and improve efficiency of garbage-collection operations by voting yes, I would verify that what you are saying really makes sense, and if it does, I would vote yes! I am getting at another fascinating experience Michael presented in the last class about his time in Reading, PA. Although the city had an atrocious garbage problem, and smelly streets, people voted no on a referendum to clean up the city because it meant that they would lose a very personal connection with their garbage collector. It turns out that many of the small garbage operators, although they were doing a poor job, were family and friends, and people were not willing to see their family and friends out of a job even if it meant a cleaner city. This example highlights the importance of always recognizing the human element of sustainability. It is critical to engage people in the issues, to educate people, to help them get good information, to get them to care, and allow them to form their own opinion. Michael mentioned that what he took away from this experience was that if he had gotten to know the citizens of Reading on a more personal level, the new garbage collection plan might have been successful if not different. And what ended up working was allowing people to sign on to the new plan on an individual basis. To me this was a great example of how community influences our decisions. We are often afraid to make changes without the support of our family and friends, and we tend to believe in our current systems even when they break down, because we don’t like to acknowledge we may not have created the best system. Sometimes just building trust can be the hardest thing.
I am particularly passionate about another idea I mentioned in my definition of sustainability, that we need to ‘stop hiding behind the objective thinking that technology will solve all our problems.’ I am passionate about this because I think we have this misguided faith in technology instead of ourselves. We think we can build levees to hold back the ocean, we can recycle all the industrial waste, we can build spaceships and mine space resources, we can do whatever we want whenever we want because technology will make it all right. I actually believe technology is great, but I make an important distinction in that we must actively harness technology and develop technologies that give people more freedom in a more sustainable world. Attaining this freedom means using technology not to exploit the environment further and further, but to save it. This means using technology not to dictate what people do, even if they can do it more comfortably, but to give people the freedom to do what they would like to do. This means using technology in harmony with our values. I have always taken issue with objectivist thinkers because I think they are just hiding behind an overly simplistic ideology. Just because it is convenient doesn’t make it right.
I stated that we must ‘realize that economic growth is only as valuable as the man-made construct that defines it’ in my definition of sustainability. Bill gave a great talk getting at this point. He referenced the Robert O. Vos paper where the concept of the three- (or actually two-) legged stool that we are sitting on is introduced, arguing that economic feasibility is inherently a social construct, but it is still built on what the environment provides for us. I enjoyed Bill’s talk about the holon theory and how the intentions of the holon as an agricultural identity, and the context the holon works in, fit into this social-economic-environmental system. I see the holon as a great framework to understand how families (or large agro-corporations) must manage their finances, their crop environment, and their response to markets and subsidies with their values and spiritual beliefs (or those of the public) to exploit these contexts, but avoid outright veto by any of them, and how this delicate balance always creates tensions. If one of these contexts gets out of control, the holon suffers. We have defined economic growth as more and more and what we are left with is industrial farming where animals are confined to giant feedlots, corn is subsidized heavily so we can produce cheap food, and pesticides and herbicides are so widespread that we have to mine phosphorus and potassium and our lakes are turning poisonous. Bill mentioned that sustainability in agriculture has turned into a grab-bag of ideas, which I think was a subtly poignant way of stating that we are not sure what we are doing when it comes to food. On the one hand, our industrial systems churn out a vast quantity of food that feed an ever-increasing population; after all, the green revolution made doomsday predictions of drought and starvation (not really) laughable today. But on the other hand, I have to wonder if we just aren’t delaying the results of those predictions. If I had it my way, the cows would be in the pasture, and I would be able to work the farm with my own tractor right alongside my neighbor, and there would be lots of vegetables in the garden.
This class was particularly enjoyable in the short time that it has lasted. The speakers were all wonderful, and they introduced me to a lot of novel ideas and perspectives, that I think you can tell from reading this paper, I am still trying to process. I would like to emphasize that my definition of sustainability is framed around ‘saving what we value.’ We get to decide what it is we value, whether we realize it or not, and that is a powerful thing in itself. All we must do is to just stop for a minute, think, listen to each other, and then maybe we will start to agree that our world is pretty great, and it’s worth making some sacrifices to save it. That’s what I would hope for anyway. Now I am left asking myself, ‘What can I do to make this world a better place for the next generation to live in?’ And I’m still not really sure, but at least I am thinking about it and doing the best that I can.