04 Jan Mon 2010
The Idea of Sustainability Applied To Your Life
One of my readers asked this question. "How do you suggest working on sustainability if you own no land, and cannot work in primary production?"
The basic mantra of sustainability is Reduce, Reuse and Recycle (in that order). It is important to stop consuming so much and ramp down energy usage. Reusing what we already have is next in importance. There are already plenty of buildings. Do we really need to artificially inflate the construction industry by continuing to build new buildings? As Howard Odum has pointed out, there is a lot of stored/embodied energy lying about in cars, buildings, tools, etc. that are already built and that could be reused. Finally recycling has a lower entropy than mining new ore to make things.
Sustainability then, can be a goal to work towards in gardening on vacant lots, reclaiming nonfunctioning buildings and tools, and recycling the massive amounts of waste all around us. If a person already has a fulltime job, there are always weekend projects. The main change may be to start thinking along sustainability lines and then look around for what you can do. Each person is the best judge of what they can contribute.
Thanks for the answer Walter.
I feel like I'm at a point where there's not much more reduction I can do. I'm vegan, I recycle, I'm not really big into consumption culture in general but the way my life is structured there's certain things I can't avoid like driving a car everyday and using gas heat.
I suppose do what you can is a good mantra, as long as you do.
Keep doing what you do, I love the blog.