Some of the biggest issues in the environment are caused by carbon emissions, resource mining, excess trash, and deforestation. While these issues are very separate and may require separate modes of confrontation, what if there was something we could do to fight them all at the same time?

One of the most recent concepts we have learned about in class is that of the black box. It is described in an article by Langdon Winner called Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty (which I have mentioned in a previous post) as “a device or system that, for convenience, is described solely in terms of its inputs and outputs.” This means that we simplify the functions of objects to what they can do for us without thinking much about how those objects do those things. With this idea in mind, I propose a method of addressing climate change that will impact ALL of the aforementioned areas of emissions, resource extraction, waste, and land destruction, as well as how it will accomplish those things. The method I suggest is: consuming and producing less food.

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The most obvious way eating less can promote a more sustainable world is by reducing waste; by putting less food on our plates, the more likely we won’t throw any away. According to the U.S. FDA, 30-40% of the country’s food is trashed every year. To put that into perspective, if every person had three meals a day, one of them is thrown into the dump rather than consumed. So, by buying less at stores and making sure you eat everything you have, landfills will not be full of food that doesn’t need to be trashed in the first place. To make it simpler, it’s better to get seconds because you didn’t have enough on your plate than to take too much and not be able to eat it.

As for the other issues, the way they are impacted by less food consumption is through the packaging/preparation processes used to get food to consumers. The majority of containers used to store food at stores are plastic, and plastic is created from oil that is taken from the ground. Therefore, if not as much food was eaten, there would be less amounts of oil extraction required to store food. And because not as much plastic is needed, there would be less necessity to remove trees for the creation of new oil rigs and less emissions produced to make and operate those rigs. This chain of events shows how everything can influence each other if the right means are provided to bring them together.

I could even keep going. Less food consumption would mean that we wouldn’t need to use as many resources to raise/grow the food itself. Not as many animals would need to be fed and not as many crops would need treatment against harmful bugs. We could even turn some of the excess land used for food into a restoration area and plant more trees.

Overall, there is a lot that can result from the simple action of eating and producing less food. It is also a practice that everyone can participate in, and it isn’t something as drastic as shutting down factories or developing expensive electric-powered objects to address emissions. In my post about politicization, I brushed on the efficacy of providing everyone with the means to promote sustainability by using the example of price. In this post, I do the same by using food. The more people who can implement sustainable methods into their lives, the more effective those methods will be.

My suggestion of decreasing the amount of food we consume can be treated like any other habit we want to apply to our lives – by being patient and practicing.

If you were asked to define the word “sustainability,” what would you say?

The word is everywhere, in the news, politics, advertisements, and especially in this class blog. But even though it is always present in some aspect of our daily lives, it is actually quite difficult to describe when one thinks about it. The dictionary defines sustainability as the “avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance.” While that may seem like an all-around, agreeable explanation, many people do not use this particular meaning when discussing sustainable topics.

And this is where things get tricky with how communication about sustainability functions. Every person has a different interpretation of the word based off of their position in life, ideologies, and experiences, whether they know it or not. This introduces a sort of psychology to the issue of Earth’s health, which I propose is one of the reasons to why there are still many disagreements and conflicts about what actions to take to address detrimental effects to the environment.

Way in the beginning of the semester, our class read an article from Communicating Nature: How We Create and Understand Environmental Messages by Julia B. Corbett, which introduces the theory of identification with the land one is from and how that influences one’s formation of environmental beliefs. In this, the author describes how childhood experiences with nature, sense of place, and historical/cultural context are big factors in shaping these beliefs.

Recently, we discussed how providing a narrative behind an argument can be an effective way to add support. Even though these lessons occurred separately over a long stretch of time, the topics of identification and narrative style can be linked when describing how one defines sustainability. I intend to provide examples of different types of people who are influenced by these things and how that can affect the ongoing discussion of sustainable advancements. I do not speak for everyone when I describe how people may think, but I am making generalizations based from my experiences.

Example 1: The Farmer

Someone who works with land for a living will probably imagine sustainability as a relationship between themselves and the earth. As the earth provides crops for the farmer, the farmer takes care of the earth by rotating those crops and allowing the land to rejuvenate itself before being planted on again. Without all the noise and business of a more industrial environment, a farmer will have more one-on-one time with the land they farm and will therefore have lots of time to understand it.

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Example 2: Scientist

A professional studier of the environment will have more knowledge of the elemental workings of nature and will probably think of sustainability in a more analytical fashion of how our actions towards the earth will affect further generations. Scientists have lots of experience with conducting experiments and physical fieldwork with the land itself, which gives them the ability to predict what will happen to the earth depending on how we treat it.

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Example 3: A Middle-Class Member

This last example reflects my upbringing, so I will explain how I specifically thought about sustainability before college. In elementary school, I (like many others) was taught the Three Rs of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and these principles became what I thought was the best way to take care of the earth. I didn’t really do any more than make sure I turned the water off while I was brushing my teeth and put my water bottles in the recycling after I was finished with them. Since I couldn’t physically see how I was impacting the land around me, I only saw sustainability as just another lesson they taught in school.

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With all these identities, it can be seen how differences would arise if their ideologies converged. Who someone is plays an integral role in how they view topics, so when entering the conversation of sustainability, it would be beneficial to understand the backgrounds of other members of the discussion in order to decipher what they truly mean by “sustainable” and carry on from there.

Therefore, determining a definition that everyone agrees upon isn’t as important as listening to others’ perspectives and cooperating through differences on how to best help the earth.

What do electric cars, reusable grocery bags, and biodegradable utensils have in common?

They are all examples of objects deemed as sustainable, but the similarity many of us probably thought of first was that they are expensive.

This sets up a bit of a predicament, being that one of the most effective ways to create an eco-friendly world would be to allow every single person the ability to use sustainable items in their lives – except that simply does not work with the ones aforementioned. While they are available to the public and do indeed have better effects on the world than their cheaper counterparts, not everyone can afford these things. This is just one example that shows how difficult it is to promote sustainability, and I plan to go deeper into the issue of cost as well as other ways that contribute to this subject.

But first, I want to address a topic that we have learned about in class that also applies to this matter. In one article we read, Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty by Langdon Winner, we were introduced to the concept that technologies can have political purposes behind them along with their original purpose to address a problem. I suggest that although these expensive sustainable items (and others I don’t mention) are made for a good cause, they have some political effects on consumers, however unintentional they may be.

• Cost (Cont.)

The price of sustainable items is significantly higher than their less-sustainable versions. For example, the average cost of an electric vehicle is around twice the amount of a gas one (electric estimated to be $66,997 and gas $33,797 on this car guide). This separates the amount people can contribute to eco-friendly practices into classes of wealth; it is far easier for the richer to own these things than others. And since the extremely wealthy make up a much smaller percentage of the population than everyone else, these products are not having as strong of an effect as they are intended to.

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• Availability

Another way that it can be harder for everyone to bring sustainable products into their everyday routines is whether or not they are able to obtain such items in the first place. Using the electric car again as a sample, there are more in stock at certain dealerships than in others. One could still choose to custom order one, but then it would be even more money to ship it. For reusable grocery bags and biodegradable utensils, the same circumstance applies. Some stores offer these items while others don’t; this limits the amount of people who can participate in obtaining these products.

• Location

Lastly, whether or not sustainable products are available depends on where they are being offered. Naturally, in a place such as a city, where there are more people and where there is more business, there are going to be more marketable objects. Therefore, there is a higher chance that those who live in an urban area will have easier access to buying eco-friendly items – which may be more obscure in a rural setting.

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So, there are quite a few things that change how effective sustainable products truly are. How much they cost, how accessible they are, and where they are being sold all play a part in allowing or preventing certain groups of people from buying them. Mostly, the biggest factor in determining if someone purchases an eco-friendly item is the price. If people cannot afford these products, then not as many of them will be utilized. If they are not utilized, they are not really helping the earth against humanity’s harmful practices.

Of course, this is if the people who can afford these products even do so in the first place. How many people have the opportunity to implement sustainable practices in their lives and don’t? But that is a question for another time.

On one of the first days of class, we discussed climate doomism – which means pretty much what it sounds like:

It is inevitable that the world is going to end due to our usage of resources.

Dagomar Degroot, associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University, provides a more academic definition in his article “Our planet is not doomed;” doomism “holds that greenhouse gas emissions are soaring beyond control, that runaway heating will continue even if emissions decline, and that ecosystems, then societies, will collapse once heating exceeds thresholds that will soon be reached.”

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Or so it would seem.

Degroot goes on to explain that Earth’s demise is not quite as imminent as it’s made out to be and that there is indeed hope, as long as we make the right adjustments.

But I would like to challenge the implications of doomism altogether.

In fact, I challenge on the grounds that ecosystems will not collapse if we run out of resources, that they will not cease to function. At least from nature’s point of view, anyway.

Simple, deductive reasoning helps piece together the idea that if we no longer possess the means to survive, we probably won’t survive. But all because we lose the ability to sustain ourselves doesn’t mean that the rest of the world will suffer the same fate. There are countless instances of the world experiencing changes that it has adapted to, including:

• The Dinosaurs

A classic example. When the meteor came and caused their extinction, life still persisted; creatures like alligators and turtles managed to survive through that time and still exist today. Even after a catastrophic event such as that, nature recovered itself and evolved. A study at the University of Alaska Fairbanks determined that it only took about two to three years for life to return to the meteor’s impact point, but up to 300,000 years in other places; the restoration time varied depending on different biological factors such as the amount of water circulation in the area.

This shows that it doesn’t matter how terrible the damage; the earth will work to repair itself, no matter how long it takes. As Ian Malcom from Jurassic Park says, “Life finds a way.”

• Natural Disasters

Then come events that the world deals with daily. Fires, landslides, and floods, to name a few, are all occurrences that cause some sort of disruption to the environment they target. Plants may die, animals may be displaced from their homes, and the land itself might be altered. However, that doesn’t stop life from regenerating.

Ash from wildfires serves as fertilizer and aids in the growth of new vegetation, and the levels of soil that were made unbalanced during a landslide reorient themselves. After a flood, the changed quality of the dirt after its intake of water allows for different plants and organisms than what previously lived in the area to prosper. The word natural has the same stem as nature; nature will naturally take care of itself.

• Water Rerouting

This one may seem like it should fall into the last category, but this example is slightly more personal and less noticeable. There was a creek close to my house that I played by when I was younger, and I would build bridges on it by placing logs across the banks. After months of time away from the creek, I went back to see that one of the bridges had gotten completely washed away because the creek rerouted. In this case, water had overpowered the manmade bridge in order to change its course, demonstrating that nature will continue doing what it needs to do, regardless of the obstacles.

Therefore, it is not what happens to the environment that determines whether it will survive, it is whether it is given the opportunity to adapt. It follows that the survival of humanity depends on our ability to change after all the changes we are making to the earth. So, whether the world “ends” is more a question of whether it will end for humanity, not everything.