Sustainability II

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How does one act in a sustainable way? 
It is all about asking questions and making decisions based on those answers. To ask the right questions, however, there are six key ideas to keep in mind.

1. Almost everything around you is designed. From the tiniest iPod, to crops, economies, infrastructure, houses, and cities are all designed and shaped by people's decisions. Anything can be changed, and you have incredible power in your decision making.
2. Everything has a life-cycle. Food is grown, cities are built and razed, the iPod purchased from BestBuy gets tossed in a few years. What resources went into that thing? How much energy did it take to make it? Where did it come from and where will it go?
3. Sustainability stems from behavior. If you drive a Prius to work every day, it's less sustainable than driving a SUV to work once a week. How a thing is used, and how often, are key to understanding somethings sustainability. Work your way up to sustainability by baby steps if you need to, but what will have the greatest effect on sustainability is the major decisions you will make. Where you live and work, how you choose to live; forget the aluminum water bottle and fair trade hemp bag. Lifestyle determines sustainability. 
4. Everything in the natural and man-made world is deeply and tightly interconnected. As a human being, we are part of countless cycles, both man-made and natural. The ecosystems of the world link together and connect to the various economic, political, and social system. Fertilizer used to enhance a crop cycle which ties into an economic cycle washes into the oceans via the water cycle and alters the biochemistry of the local ocean ecosystem, which kills the shrimp, which decimates the local economy, ad infinitum. Our small world is tightly bound. Nothing is autonomous, which brings me to
5. Every decision has a cost. There's a cartoon from the 90's about an ecologically minded person who has goes crazy when asked "paper or plastic" at the grocery store*. Making sustainable decisions is difficult because many complex factors are in play. It is really up to the individual to decide which has the least impact on the future environment. Recycled paint or low VOC. Tough call.

Making sustainable decisions, especially the ones that count the most, is tough, and few people living in first world conditions can really claim to be truly sustainable in the zero-impact way. However, I think it is important to make these decisions now from both an ethical and a pragmatic point of view. There's an old Calvin and Hobbes comic that shows Calvin sneaking up on Hobbes with a water balloon. Without turning around, Hobbes asks Calvin what he would do if it was his last day on Earth. Without waiting for a response, Hobbes follows up with the question to the effect of, by doing something different, it might not be Calvin's last day on Earth. Calvin ditches the water balloon. 

*So, paper or plastic? Paper comes from trees, a renewable resource. Plastic comes from oil, a non-renewable resource. It probably takes less energy to make paper than to refine and process oil into plastic. Paper will decompose a lot more quickly than a plastic bag, but then I usually throw paper bags away after getting my groceries home, although I could recycle them. Plastic bags on the other hand, I use them for trash bags, AND they keep me from using even more plastic in the form of the plastic trash bag they're replacing. It's a hard call. I might switch to paper if they could design a paper bag that had the grocery-carrying strength of a plastic bag and handles.