I think to talk about sustainability, we have to put a solid definition on it first. So what is this “sustainability” everyone’s been talking about?
The best definition of sustainability I’ve ever come across was during a distinguished faculty event that dealt with organic vs inorganic farming techniques. There, we agreed that sustainability was best defined as a way of meeting current needs that did not detract from the ability to meet future needs (i.e, not using up all the fossil fuels and leaving future generations to deal with the consequences).
The issue, however, is finding this happy median between obtaining what we need today without negatively impacting our supply for tomorrow. Well, I suppose it might be more accurate to say finding the median between what we want today and what we want/need tomorrow.
By nature, humans are impulsive creatures, and Americans have seemed to take this natural impulsiveness and maximized it. We’re all about immediate gratification – we’re the birthplace of wonders like the fast-food restaurant, after all. And with this gotta-have-it (and right now, thank-you-very-much) culture we live in, it’s kind of hard to create any semblance of sustainability. We want what we want, when we want it, damn the consequences. (How many of you still buy bottled water when it’s more convenient than finding a water bottle? Drive home alone rather than take the time to find a way to carpool? Leave lights on because you don’t feel like walking over to turn them off? See my point?)
And all of this clearly detracts from our ability to meet future needs – we are depleting our fossil fuels, filling up landfills, cutting down more forest than we can afford to, contaminating scarce water, and polluting the only air we have to breathe. But we don’t really think about that when we toss a water bottle in the trash because there isn’t a recycling bin within arms reach, do we?
It is very hard to develop any sense of sustainability in this impulse, convenience-driven culture. I think it is unreasonable to assume that people will magically be convinced to give up the luxury of extreme convenience in lieu of a more minimalistic, sustainable lifestyle – materialism is a way of life in American society, we can’t abandon that overnight.
I think that perhaps the best way to build a more sustainability-driven society is to attack it from the side of the producers. That is, rather than telling the average consumer that they shouldn’t buy bottled water because it’s bad for the environment, push for more environmentally-friendly options to be created and pushed; make them stylish – if sustainability becomes a mainstream trend, it will make a difference.
And we’re already making moves in that direction – in recent years, a plethora of environmentally and consumer friendly products have emerged, providing more options for those who want to ensure a better tomorrow. The question is just how we can push this farther.