“Once you learn certain things — once you learn to ride a bike, say — your life has changed forever. You can’t unlearn it. Sustainability is one of those distinctions.
Once you get it, it changes how you think. It’s just part of who you are.”
— “Choices for Sustainable Living.”
Learning about sustainability is not easy because it is indeed life-changing. As we have talked at Stillwaters, read and explored sustainability concepts over the years, we have come to care deeply about the future of our planet, and the future of our society, even more than we did before.
All of us humans need to live in a world that is cared for, or we will lose what we have. We are quite capable of spoiling our nest to the point of destruction and we don’t want to do that. We will need to look at our choices, as individuals and a community, very carefully, studying the implications of those choices.
We need to make sure that we don’t carry over into our conservation efforts the same moral assumptions and habits that have led humans to exploit Earth. Often, in trying to preserve the natural health of the planet, we have followed an exploitation model. We have assumed that some parts of the natural world can be set aside and preserved as “wilderness,” making it all right to destroy other parts. Not that we shouldn’t save the wildernesses, but the assumption that preservation of one space makes it permissible to destroy another is not a good assumption, but a very common one.
Categorizing human actions into “good” and “bad” often is not helpful. It is common in environmental work to see the extremes of beautiful, pristine areas that have been preserved, and scenes that have been devastated with pollution, construction and mining. The extremes get our attention and our funding. And certainly they should.
However, as with most things, the middle ground is what is more imperative, because it is where most of us live and work. We are living on Earth, consuming her resources, and we do not have another world where we can go to live. We are stuck with the fact that we are creatures of this planet, and we will have to use some of Earth’s resources to sustain us.
So in preserving the health of Earth, we must preserve ourselves as creatures with the cultural will to care about and to be caretakers of the planet, and to be good neighbors to each other and our fellow creatures. When we include ourselves as part of the Earth that needs preservation, we cannot think of Earth or the environment as something “out there” that needs attention when we have time to give it. Earth’s preservation is a part of ourselves and our own free will. It’s a learned way of being for most of us, one that we certainly don’t want to un-learn, even if we could.
With the identity of a creature of Earth, we have a different view of the natural Earth. Plants, wildlife, trees and rivers are not our property to be manipulated at will. They become fellow inhabitants, and our job is to be their caretaker, not their oppressor.
We all have the ability to affect the preservation or destruction of Earth; if we have the sustainability mindset, there is only one way to go. It’s like riding a bike!
Our next sustainability discussion course will be on voluntary simplicity. If you want to participate in a seven-week class, call Joleen Palmer at (360) 297-1226 or email joleen@stillwatersenvironmnetalcenter.org.
Naomi Maasberg is administrative director of Stillwaters Environmental Center in Kingston.
