“Empowered, aware and engaged human beings will make sustainable decisions.”
Andy Gaertner
Sustainable Humans: Sustaining Ourselves
by Chris Koszalka
Begun August 2008, appreciating the beauty of many late night skies.
Finished January 2010, under a stunning full moon.
The natural world is where reality is.
The world where everything begins and will end.
Change
Every day at work I like nothing better than to create a lush, living canvass of beautiful produce. Tweak it and fuss over it until it’s just right. Every day, with every fruit and vegetable that I touch, I am very conscious of where it has come from, how far it has travelled, how it was raised and who else has also touched it on its long journey here, to us. Every day I think of ways that our entire food system can be modified, overhauled and made to be sustainable. Every day I come to the same conclusion.
Everything has to change.
Change is hard. Or not. It depends on the individual. Change in nature just is. It would be easier for most people if change could just be change. But it’s not.
Truth
A sub-atomic particle can be in two places at once. Two sub-atomic particles can be interconnected even though they are not inhabiting the same space or in the line of sight with each other. If one of these particles reacts to stimulus, so does the other one. These two seeming impossibilities are proven quantum phenomena.
Truth is a hard nut to swallow. It usually goes down with rough edges and gets stuck in our throats, having to be coughed out and beaten down with a mallet in order to get it soft enough to go down. Sometimes it has to be masticated by an expert in order for us to consider it palatable for swallowing. Such is our fate if we abdicate being an expert on a subject so someone else can tell us what is true.
Western industrial culture looks with derision at other cultures who believe the supposed impossible. Out of body travel, healing with plant spirits, communicating through dreams. Industrial Western culture calls these beliefs primitive and superstitious. Is the seemingly impossible, possible?
The truth is not universal.
Sustainability is Perpetual Motion
The Earth keeps on spinning. The various species on the planet keep on living. They are all governed by their environments, both extended and immediate. Within the last 10,000 years or so, humans have modified their environments so as to have a greater control over their personal existences. This is inexplicably linked to spiritual beliefs as well as culture. It is linked to systems of power such as governments and religions. At some point industrialized people lost sight of their actual role on this perpetually spinning earth. They have forgotten that it will continue to spin with or without them.
People’s actions directly affect their immediate environments. Industrialized people understand this because they modify their environments constantly. But, what they tend not to see are the far reaching effects of what they do right outside their homes. Everything we do affects something else and travels along a chain of consequences until the energy of our action dissipates. The more intense the action, the farther reaching are the consequences.
Dropping a Pebble Into a Pond VS Building a Nuclear Reactor
A pebble will create ripples on the surface of a pond and land on the bottom. Stirring up silt, it will disturb the critters that live there. Eventually the ripples subside, the silt settles, the pebble is buried in the silt and the critters go about their daily lives. A nuclear reactor will produce waste that could potentially poison the land for up to fifty thousand years. The benefit of - mining uranium, producing radioactive pollution through the mining process, constructing the reactor, maintaining it for a potential 40 year life span while it constantly produces radioactive waste so it can heat water to produce steam to turn a generator turbine - needs to be rethought.
Footprints
Some prints may be deeper than others but ultimately are worn away by the earth without too much effort. Others may be made of concrete but the earth can make short work of that in its own time. Can you leave no lasting footprint after you have walked? Can you put back what you take from the land base where you live? The only way for anything to be sustainable is for this to happen.
What will end up happening in the future will not be easy. It will be easier to live, however, if we change ourselves now.
Yesterday.
Twenty years ago.
Fifty years ago.
