Since this is my first post, I'm still figuring out how to blog... Just work with me here, alright? I'll get the hang of things in no time.
In other news, let's celebrate my first blog post ever! (Tumblr doesn't count, unfortunately!) I thought I'd start things off with where I am in my sustainability education, and what has brought me here.
Let's go back in time... way back!
I started caring about nature from a young age. You know how kids are always interested in the world - asking questions and such. Of course, "outside" is so big compared to inside the house. There is so much to explore, and a lot of what goes on "outside" is nature-related. I grew up in the suburbs, so I always had a backyard with trees and flower gardens and a play set and a deck or patio. My mom would plant flowers, and she taught me the names of all the plants growing in the gardens in the yard. That passion for knowing about the natural world around me never left, as it often does when we get older.
As I grew up into my "big kid" phase and my early teens, my love for the outdoors became pronounced as a love for camping and playing in the woods with the boys in the neighborhood. Then in high school, I took my first environmental science course. That was the turning point, in a manner of speaking. Even though the class was not what I hoped (most of the students were 12th graders who wanted to do nothing for their last semester in high school), it still showed me that the environment meant enough to me for me to want to help it in my career. It was also in high school that I read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, which opened my eyes to some issues with the food system in place in America. I wanted to save the world! So I decided that environmental engineering was the right field for me to go into, and I started looking for colleges. I decided on Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a smallish engineering school ten minutes from Albany, New York. As I write this, I'm sitting in my dorm room, a third year student here at RPI, but no longer am I an engineering student! Instead, last spring, I changed my major to Sustainability Studies.
During my first two years here, I was planning on doing a Sustainability minor, so I was taking a few sustainability classes. The first one I took my first semester here was called Nature/Society, and it was totally different from what I expected it to be. The description said it would be about the relationship between nature and society but mostly we discussed the history of technology in America and took ethnographic notes on field trips. But hey, we took field trips. That was cool. But what I really missed in that class was a focus on nature. Nature, the thing I loved so much. I didn't understand why so much of the focus of the class was on society!
A good number of my friends were also in sustainability classes, and we would discuss things we were learning. During my second year, one of them and I would talk about what he was learning in Environment and Society. Sounds similar to the first class, but they are actually quite different. This one is your standard intro to sustainability, showing all the issues in the world like climate change and dams and stuff like that. It also gives an introduction to environmental justice. My friend had a really hard time adjusting to those concepts. Things like feminism and racism and classism and how they tie into environmental issues. I found it interesting that he had such a hard time with these concepts, since he was otherwise a very competent student. Talking with him about it also introduced the idea to me that sustainability was more about just the environment. I had become somewhat acquainted with social justice ideas through my casual use of tumblr, but never had I applied these concepts to my love of nature. Once I took the class my friend did, I was well-prepared and able to start tackling the big questions involving sustainability.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that sustainability is not just about the environment, as I once thought. There are three main components, known as the triple bottom line: ecology, economy, and society. All three facets have certain requirements to survive, so all three must be put into consideration. It is true that the ecology part is suffering greatly right now, so we're focusing our attention there. However, there are many economic and social problems that relate very closely with the environmental ones. Unfortunately, solving three problems at once instead of just one makes this job a whole hell of a lot harder. But of course, that's exactly why I started this blog.
My goal here is to explore sustainability topics I'm learning about in my classes, as well as things I do on my own, so that this valuable information can be passed on to you, my readers. Also, as this blog grows, so shall our knowledge of sustainability.
The journey has merely begun.
