My Message

OK, here is where I climb on the soapbox and dish out the talking points. The core message I hope to pass on to students, teachers, parents and supporters will revolve around what I call the two S’s; Stewardship and Sustainability. Indulge me the opportunity to briefly elaborate.

Stewardship means understanding the responsibility we all have, as humans living on Earth, to take care of our home, simple as that. Our home is a finite resource, vast as it may seem to some, and we must start treating it as such. The 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, with the incredible photographs of our Earth rising over the Moon’s barren horizon, once again gave humanity a chilling picture of just how small our home is compared to the vastness of space. Think of Earth as a lifeboat upon which we all must survive until time and technology allows us to reach some distant shore. Until then this is all we have, therefore we need to take care of Earth and her resources as efficiently as possible. We only get one shot at it. There is no mulligan. David Brower, founder of the Sierra Club, was pitching his ‘Sermon’ long before Al Gore discovered Powerpoint, and it best illustrates this concept. I encourage you all to read it in its entirety (Healing Time on Earth) but in a nutshell, if one looks at the history of the Earth in perspective to man’s activity upon it, we have managed to mess things up in the fraction of the fraction that our time here represents, and yet we still act as if we had all the time in the world and all the space in the universe to get things right. We don’t, but we do have options that will help and here is where sustainability comes into play.

Sustainability is often defined as a system’s capacity to endure. However when discussed in human context, addressing our ongoing development and requisite need for resources, it means not only meeting our current needs but also allowing for the needs of those in the future, in essence, for humanity to endure. In the past sustainability was measured in terms of capacity in a closed system. “How long will this be sustainable?” one would ask. Knowing what we know now, that our system, the Earth, is closed and finite, we must ask ourselves not how long can this last, but rather, what can we do to make this last longer? The old way was to build a bigger gas tank, the new way must be to get better mileage.

Lets look at this in terms of manufacturing, a process that provides us with everything in our hierarchy of needs. The term Cradle to Grave first started appearing when companies began to consider stewardship and take responsibility for their actions. If they produced a product (cradle) they would take it or components of it back for ‘proper’ disposal when its utility had been depleted (grave). This was a vast improvement over the past, but still a flawed solution for perpetual sustainability. In order to truly achieve that, we cannot perpetually dispose, rather, we must start to re-use, we must think in terms of Cradle to Cradle.

Cradle to Cradle sustainability is the only way we can truly endure in a closed system. It means approaching the manufacturing process from a viewpoint that as many inputs as possible be reused when the whole of an item is no longer viable. That way, we are not constantly drawing on new resources, but finding ways to get additional use out of those already extracted, and planning for this in the process.

So how do we move closer to cradle to cradle sustainability, as an individual? First, we must think in terms of the total inputs to any given product and try to reduce those as much as possible, we need to think of our daily actions each in some way like a manufacturing process that consumes finite resources. Eat local, recycle and re-use, walk a short distance instead of driving, take public transportation when possible or use a bike. These are all good starts, but in the long run, to endure, we must choose our inputs based on their long term sustainability, and create more opportunities for cradles than graves.