What does sustainability mean to you? (Green Educator's Course Journal Prompt)

Using resources in their rawest forms, so they may go easily back into the environment. Learning from traditional practices how to live slowly, as a part of nature instead of as an audience to it.

I think it's important to understand the fundamental systems that have created an environment that necessitates sustainable development. What is development? Why do we need it at all? Why is it that whenever we talk about sustainability, it is in the context of sustainable development? Can development in the current context ever be sustainable? For the past two centuries we've developed and developed and developed, and arrived where exactly? What is the difference in our lives between now and 1922? We can get places faster and we have more place to go, we can communicate faster and we have more things to communicate, we can cure more diseases and we have more diseases to cure. Nothing has changed. As a society, we're going nowhere. The sum total of our 'development' in terms of the actual changes it has brought to our lives, is zero. 

I was reading an article called 'Sustainable Development - Historical Roots of the Concept'. It quoted something by John Stuart Mill in 1848. I was quite surprised to read that this was said by someone back then, but I guess humans haven't really changed much, and neither have our environments:

"I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that the world's population will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it"

So we've established that sustainability shouldn't be about development. But what should it be about then? I think the answer is people. People should be an indispensable part of sustainability. We may be at the top of the food chain, and nothing may directly depend on us for survival, but within the pigeonholed narrative of the Anthropocene that we ourselves have created, all people should matter. 

We are in no position to save anything - not the climate, not the animals, not the soil, nothing. We can only save ourselves. Which is why, I think the core of our SDGs should be the sustainability of people. How can we best improve ALL of our lives? I think if we dug a little deeper into this question, we would begin to realise that the world we're living in right now encompasses a multitude of miseries outside of the climate crisis. Climate change is a burden only a few have the privilege to bear. The rest are dealing with violence, starvation, disease, discrimination, unemployment, unhappiness, loneliness, the lack of time, and the list goes on. We need to change ALL of these things if we want to do something about the climate crisis.

You can't approach people and tell them the world is ending because of their plastic bag when their world has already ended. We live in a world where very few people have autonomy over themselves and their choices. Most of us are getting degrees in fields we don't like, to have jobs we're not connected to, to earn money so that we may be able to spend whatever few hours we have left in the day, doing things we actually care about and spending time with the people we love. We're not happy or connected to each other or concerned about the environment because we can't be. We don't have the space to listen to delegates from the UN who haven't lived a day in our shoes telling us not to watch TV at the end of a hard day's work to save electricity. 

Sustainability is about people. And right now, the world doesn't have the kind of people it needs to drive the kind of change we need to fight the climate crisis.

Sustainability is about people.