As an English major, I am overly fascinated by language. I am interested in the ways in which words confine ideas, change ideas, and creates new ideas; and, when it comes to the word “sustainability”, I have seen a plethora of these shifts. When I was younger, sustainability didn’t exist to me in the same way that it does today. Of course, I knew about recycling, I learned about social inequity, and I had an inkling that money had something to do with all these things, but there wasn’t a concept that branched out over all of these “ideas”. It wasn’t until my freshman year in college that I learned about sustainability and its true implications.
After learning about the triple bottom line, how sustainability is the inexorable combination of social, financial, and environmental factors, I was overwhelmed with the intricacy of justice. Likewise, I was amazed to see how interconnected everything really was: I started to see the world as a series of actions and links that all had relationships with one another. This was an incredibly crucial lesson for me—I learned to think about the bigger picture and thought about the rippling effect of my actions and the action of those around me. It was in my earlier years of college that I was the most hopeful and excited to get on board with “changing the world”. Likewise, I was determined that my personal efforts could make the biggest difference but I was also naïve.
After a while, the “true” colors of sustainability started to show. I quickly learned that many instances of injustice were not merely overlooked instances that needed some help; injustice is systemically and strategically enforced. Likewise, I learned that all the relationships between social, environmental, and financial injustices did not make the problems easier to solve; in fact, they created tangled layers and vicious knots. During this time, many of my friends were happening upon the same realizations. Our conversations would circle and circle around individual responsibility versus cooperate control, racial justice versus governmental power, and a variety of other dead ends. After talking for a while, all the conversations would end the same: In a gust of environmental dread and the looming feeling that there is nothing we could personally do about it.
With these two drastically different feelings towards sustainability, I began to feel bifurcated and a little stagnant. I wondered: Does living sustainably mean having complete optimism for the future or does it mean living pessimistically with the understanding that many “green” initiatives must do the impossible? Standing between these two opposing mindsets, I found myself in a metaphorical ecotone. An ecotone is a transition from one biological zone to another; ecotones are places where two opposite things become one. So, in a sense, my naïve optimism and unrelenting pessimism were coming together and creating something new. What I find so beautiful about ecotones is that they are the places where the most biodiversity and life exist; and, that is where I now currently stand with sustainability.
Sustainability cannot exist if we are completely optimistic about its prevalence—we would be overlooking many of the formidable challenges that come along with fighting for an equitable and regenerative world. By acknowledging these challenges, we can have a better understanding of how they work and how they can be solved. Or, in other words, we cannot remove what binds us if we do not accept that we are bound in the first place. Sustainability also cannot exist if we are completely pessimistic—we would fall into a sense of fatalism and act as if nothing is worth our efforts. Instead, we must hold onto both mentalities tightly and realize that fighting for sustainability may be attempting the impossible, but it is the only option. We must have hope in people, unconditional and unyielding hope that we can further evolve with the tool of rationality and creativity that evolution has already given us.
As I continue my journey in sustainability, I have decided to make my own definitions. To me, sustainability means humanity. It means all the things that make us the species that we are: our rationality, our creativity, our empathy, and our dreaming. I do acknowledge that many of these qualities have made humans quite skilled in destruction, but I believe that our sheer capacity to destroy proves that we are well-equipped to also destroy old habits and rebuild new ones.