Sustainability Assessment

~Gabrielle Reese briefly lets you into how the class has the students merging the theory and practices of sustainability to actually assess their experiences and the operations of places they've visited over the last few weeks.

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This week in Jamaica has been a change of pace from our usual on-the-go routine. The past three days have been spent at Durga’s Den, following the departure of the 14 incoming freshmen. We began Monday afternoon collaborating with and learning from Spud Marshall via Skype. Spud works with New Leaf Initiative, an organization stationed in State College. Pennsylvania that works on sustainability projects. He has previously worked to create sustainability assessment reports for various companies, so he shared with us some of his knowledge on how to go about creating one of these reports. 

We then began to brainstorm how we would create these sustainability reports for two of the places we have stayed in Jamaica - Crystal Ripple Beach Lodge and Durga’s Den. The next two days were spent brainstorming what would be included in these documents. We contemplated questions like

What is our shared understanding of sustainability, as it would relate to the companies we are analyzing?

How can we effectively offer suggestions to these companies?

We eventually decided that instead of focusing on sustainability as a whole within these companies, we would focus on food and water sustainability. We then narrowed it down further and decided that our concentration would be on Durga’s Den, to create a sort of brochure as a marketing tool for them.

The rest of our days were spent working on other upcoming assignments. These focus on various readings we were assigned in the weeks preceding our departure for Jamaica, as well as the Natural Step sustainability framework, which we use frequently in our studies. One for example, has us focusing on a reading of David W. Orr who is a pioneer in theoretical/philosophical approaches to sustainability. Keeping with his explanations of various problems causing unsustainability, we are to assess whether or not we have seen these issues playing out in Jamaica based on our experiences.

The next 4 days will be spent in Kingston, Jamaica’s capitol. I will update to share what we experience in this famous city. 

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Orr's book Ecological Literacy is a major work in the field of sustainability studies and environmental/sustainability education. Today, we face ecocidal crises which include the rapid accumulation of greenhouse gases causing climate change, massive soil erosion, deforestation, mass extinctions, ocean acidification, and the growing gulf between the human haves and have nots are caused. These are caused by any or a combination of five things that people do, believe, or are. In order, they are:

1. Social traps like the tragedy of the commons (read Garret Hardin's article here) and keeping up with the Joneses.

2. Unchecked economic growth. Nothing can grow forever on a finite planet. As Edward Abbey famously said, "Growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." If we live on a giant petri dish, it is possible that we could eat our way through the whole thing if we don't let it regenerate. See James Gustav Speth's book Bridge at the Edge of the World.

3. The human desire or will to dominate nature. The ideologies and systems of belief humans have created lead us to dominate and exploit nature. The Old Testament's "dominion" notion can lead the faithful to believe it is their holy duty to subjugate non-human nature (see Genesis 1:28). And since Francis Bacon, science, scientists, engineers, and other technologists have sought to fully exploit nature to unsustainable degrees.

4. Perhaps humans have taken an evolutionary wrong turn. Our big brains and all that we can do them have made us into another creature that could drive itself to extinction because even if we are clever, we have not become wise.

5. Human nature is just flawed. Whatever human nature might be, we people are simply restless creatures that can't stop ourselves from tinkering with everything even to our peril. We can't help it.

These summaries are oversimplified to some degree. However, I hope you can get an inkling as to how you can think about them in your experiences and how Gabrielle and the other students have used these as heuristics to examine the way that these five causes are at play in Jamaica and their lives here.

Which do you see at work most in America today?