Sustainability

When I gaze into my crystal ball to uncover the future and what it holds for not only myself but my family, my school, and my country, I see a image of sustainability. I see restaurant that in the front serves healthy, nutritional, organic products and in the back has a station where you can fill your car up with there oil waste for cooking, because in are new sustainable future nothing can go to waste. Although this future seems to be pretty ideal and almost utopias to truly see a sustainable future I need to define what sustainability is and how it plays a role in my culture and how my own ideas behind it have changed and how will it continue change.

When defining sustainability I feel it is necessary to examine several things that are not all just environment related. The first thing that needs to be addressed though is environment related, and that is the effect on the earth. To be truly sustainable a product cannot cause damage to our environment and if it does it has to be counter balanced somewhere else in the same process. Another factor that needs to be examined when discussing the topic of sustainability is the use of resources, because if a product or process is abusing resources it cannot be sustainable, but instead it needs to focus on using minimal non-renewable resources and more on the use resources at hand that can keep the process going by itself. Finally when defining sustainability the social aspect needs to be addressed. A product or process is not sustainable innless it is economically able to maintain itself and treats the employees or people involved in the process in a manner that allows them to economically and socially maintain themselves and there families. The definition of sustainability has so many aspects it’s easy to see why it may be hard to notice its role in our own cultures, but nonetheless it is present.

In my own personal culture I see sustainability playing its largest role in my education. I hold this to be true because first of all the initiatives being taken on our own Ohio University to move the entire school in a sustainable direction. This is evident in our composting system that uses food waste and converts it into reusable material, along with things like the baker center and it’s constant advertisement of how all product used in the cafeteria are recyclable. Along with the initiatives being taken by the university to move in a sustainable direction there is also the effect that the topic of sustainability is having on my every day classes. For example in majority of my science classes in the past there has always been a chapter or two on global warming and its affects along with prevention of it. Also this class is a great example of the effect of sustainability on my education, after all it is a class that is teaching writing and rhetoric through the education and discussion of sustainable issues. It is very evident in the areas where sustainability plays a role in my education and I believe it will continue to be evident.

Final over time and the course of the quarter my ideas behind sustainability have changed greatly. Before this quarter my idea of sustainability would not have involved a societal aspect of it. I actual would not have considered the idea of employees being able to maintain life standards on the wages provided by the sustainable product or process to be a important part of the idea of sustainability. In this sense my ideas behind sustainability have grown. I believe the idea behind sustainability will continue to change as we as society encounter different obstacles with the environment and mankind. For instance as we run out of limited resources such as fossil fuels the idea on how a sustainable product or idea should begin may change or differentiate.

Now lets return to the idea of sustainability in the future with keeping in mind my definition of sustainability being a product or idea that does not harm the environment, uses a limited amount of now reusable resources, creates a cycle that it can maintain itself, and finally is produced in a economically feasible manner that does not take advantage of the people involved in the product or idea. The future still holds a this idea of sustainability, but this time the restaurant is still serving organic food but in a building that is ran off of solar panels and wind turbines with employees that are not only treated fairly, but are given livable wages to support there families. As for the station in the back used to fuel your car with left over oil from the restaurant, that is all manned by humans through a pump system similar to a well. This may not be what the future actually holds, but anymore it may be the only solution if we continue to use and abuse are resources in the now.