What is the phenomena of sustainability? And why is it important?

Over the past few years I have become interested in exploring the experience of sustainability. My own personal experience has inspired new and exciting directions in my own research. I'm very interested in individual and collective efforts to adopt new lifestyles, and promote just relations with nature and people. I believe that our personal experiences with living ethically-motivated lives will reveal opportunities and limitations for creating a sustainable society. While invariably there will be differences in our lived experience, I sense that some common patterns exist.

These patterns may reveal important insights into some of the opportunities that individuals and civic groups can adopt and apply to cultivating sustainable livelihoods. At the same time, these patterns may also highlight forces that constrain people's abilities to live more ethically conscious lifestyles. The way we build and design our landscapes can inhibit and encourage new behaviors, but these landscapes may produce different experiences in terms of feelings of psychological well-being, or cultivate spiritual awareness of ourselves within a boarder ecology of place.

However, before I can move forward in this project I believe it is important to clarify the idea of sustainability, and what I mean by the phenomena of sustainability.


What is sustainability? 
This question often yields different answers depending on the person you ask. A common response I get is, "Doesn't it mean keeping things the same?" I usually respond by saying, "well, yes and no." Yes, to sustain something is to keep something in existence - to maintain something. For example, we are hopefully sustaining life, for ourselves, our families, future generations, and for other species. The concept of sustainability also suggests a radical transformation of the ways we currently relate to each other, and to the environment.

Insistence on personal and social transformation follows from a growing awareness that business as usual is actually threatening our very survival. Industrial production practices, the global distribution of goods, and patterns of mass consumption are at the center of significant social and environmental problems (UNCED 1992). Climate change, deforestation, scarcity of fresh water, and food insecurity are largely products of our "Fordist" economic system (Foster, Clark and York 2010). And although this system has been extremely successful, its benefits (and disadvantages) are experienced unequally around the world.

There is an increased disparity between rich and poor. This disparity is not just economic, but the burden of environmental degradation most often effects the poor. Municipal waste sites, and polluting industries are often located in poorer urban communities.


Rural communities are also often hit hard, especially where natural amenities are abundant. These places often become sites for extensive natural resource extraction. While mining, logging, fishing, and agriculture provide needed jobs for rural residents, these jobs come at a price that can diminish of natural landscape - polluted streams and lakes, clear-cut forests, loss of wildlife, and soil contamination.

Sustainability is about reconciling these disparities, while minimizing the impacts of human society on our environment, both now, and for future generations. This vision presents an alternative to human-environment relations that balances social equity, economic prosperity, and ecological health. This vision recognizes that, while imbalances are the consequence of Fordist models of material exchange, these disparities are also drivers of intensified patterns of production and consumption.

Sustainability calls for a transformation of human-environment relations. This includes new institutional arrangements. Inclusive governance at community, state, regional and international levels will be necessary. Business will need to internalize the social and environmental costs of their activities, which will for many entrepreneurs, require a rethinking of dominant models that adhere to uninhibited accumulation. But sustainability also calls upon a change among our personal relations with each other, our communities, and the environment. In a way, sustainability calls upon all of us to begin internalizing the larger impacts of our lifestyles, and call for greater degrees of personal and community self-reliance.

In the process of internalization - we find motivation to act in new or different ways. New information about the effects of our actions may indeed compel the desire to change our lifestyles. Yet those desires may also conflict with the ways society is currently constructed. Social norms, economic capabilities, physical space and the limits of time all constrain and direct a range of possible and probable choices that one may choose to act upon. But these choices may contradict with what we know, and value on deeply moral or ethical basis.


Connecting through Personal Experience
Recognizing these constraints and trade-offs have become apparent as I have tried to incorporate ethical values for social justice and the environment in my daily life. I have found excitement and frustration in my efforts. Trying to reduce my energy consumption, conserving water, buying fair trade, or local organic foods, growing more of my own food, and adopting a DIY lifestyle can be challenging. It is especially challenging in a world that is designed to facilitate mass consumption. It is also challenging due to basic physics of time and space.

These aren't just theoretical propositions, but lived experiences. This is at the heart of the phenomena of sustainability, and is my over-arching thesis:

That our lived experience of trying to live a sustainable life, will provide guidance to the constraints and opportunities before us, and may help guide efforts to create a more just and environmentally vibrant world.

Learning about sustainability takes time from other activities, and responsibilities. I have to negotiate my time with other things like PTA events, work, spending time with family and friends, helping the kids with homework, keeping an exercise routine, reading for enjoyment, house repairs, volunteering in my community, cooking, cleaning house, and commuting to all the places where these activities occur. Learning about gardening, and water conservation (and teaching the kids) also takes time, and commitment.

There is also the financial investment as well as the time investment. Buying local organic food from my local co-op can be significantly more expensive than shopping at the Super Wal-Mart. I can't buy cheap razors or toothpaste at the co-op, so I end up going to another location. This increases the time it takes to fulfill my material needs, as well as the personal energy required to get those items. Vegetable starts for the garden, preparing the soil for the garden, garden tools, equipment and other sundries all present a cost.

The constraints of time and space have been most revealing through my attempts to adopt a walking and biking lifestyle.  Moving through urban and rural landscapes by bus, bicycle and on foot have also shown a different dimension to the character and experience of my environment, and of the experience of sustainability.

I'm currently in Texas, in the summer, and it is ridiculously hot here. My daily bicycle ride to the grocery store is often determined by the time of day. But no matter what, I show up to my commitments sweaty. I'm sorry, but that degree of discomfort is always factored in my decisions to go anywhere. I have to really want, or need something. But the climate also encourages me to linger about, to cool off and grab a drink of water. These moments provide opportunities to engage with my neighbors, meet new people, and develop social relations that would be otherwise difficult in my normal hustle and flow car life.


The presence of bike lanes also structures my route choices, as much as distance structures my choice of stores and coffee shops I choose to visit. Just like climate determines my decision to go at all, close proximity to speeding cars, and the smell of exhaust fumes are all things I want to avoid. And I often take less direct routes to avoid these discomforts. I look for routes with trees that provide shade, or bike trails that run through urban green-belt. I avoid steep hills, but find deep

enjoyment traveling along a creek bed enveloped by hills, and covered by woodland and forests.

The contrast between these routes as micro-environments contained within the broader urban landscape has prompted another interesting realization. There is a certain beauty and enjoyment that draws me to these spaces, as much as I'm drawn to avoid other spaces. This experience appears to be driven by rational avoidance of discomfort as much as by a more indescribable spiritual desire for some quiet, and some nature. Yet, it is difficult to fully embrace the idea that these behavior choices are the product of rational conscious decision-making. Rather the characteristic drivers of these behavior patterns were only recognized while reflecting in the very moment of the experience. Insight came down to attention with intention.


I believe this spiritual, or psychological dimension of place is as important, to other dimensions of sustainability, and can be cultivated, or diminished as we move through our environment to meet our needs and fulfill our aspirations. Places can encourage interaction with others (human and non-human), or block those opportunities. Places can provide opportunities to cultivate awareness and connection with nature, or crowd out nature altogether. Furthermore, the ways we get there and our purpose for being in a place can also shape the interactions we have with others in our community.

These interactions and their effects can reinforce negative, or ameliorative activities just as physical space structures movement through our environments. The paradox experience of increased opportunities for solitude and for social interaction resulting from change my primary means of transportation has been intriguing.

With the frustrations, and process of assimilation to new lifestyle choices, there are have been opportunities that strengthen the decisions I have made. Interacting and learning from others about their experience, gardening techniques, and their DIY approaches to conservation provide a sense of encouragement and validation. There is also a sense of community that is created through a shared sense of interests, common concerns and experience. There is a social, as well internal sense of positive feedback that strengthens the commitment. We help one another, and so do our places.

Together, we find ways to creatively overcome some of the constraints, or at least begin articulating those concerns as part of a creative process. The growth of community gardens, the urban green-belt movement, bike-to-work programs and so forth are largely the consequence of these interactions, personal and social awareness, and effort to create new connections and spaces for sustainability.

As we act socially and personally in new ways that attempt to accord with our ethical values, we can all reflect back on these experiences -- the phenomena of sustainability help understand and guide new and innovating ways that cultivate these new relationships with each other and our environment. Through action, reflection, and action we create a feedback of intelligent adaptation, as well transformation of ourselves and our environment. This follows a type of theory of action and learning - the double-loop.

I believe there is a rich opportunity for carrying out a phenomenologically based research, and a place for the inclusion of direct experience in the process of learning and change for creating sustainable societies.

phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. - Smith, David Woodruff, "Phenomenology", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

It is important that this also connects with other approaches so that we can consider these interactions and assess the impacts and direction of our efforts at multiple temporal and spatial scales.

My goal moving forward with this blog will be to look at these experiences, our relations to each other, and the human-nature relationships that constrain and support sustainable living. I also plan to look at some of the underlying philosophies that frame dominant thinking, while opening critiquing myself and my assumptions in the process.


References:
O'Connor, Daniel. 2003. "A Crisis of Vision: Toward a More Integral Economics." Integral Ventures, LLC. Accessed at: http://www.catallaxis.com/2005/02/a_crisis_of_vis_1.html

Smith, David Woodruff, "Phenomenology", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

UNCED. 1992. Agenda 21, Rio de Janerio, Brazil, 3 to 14 June. Accessed at: http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/Agenda21.pdf