My Head is Full. May I Be Excused?

These past two days at the "This Way to Sustainability III" conference have opened my eyes to a lot of new ideas. I didn't realize there was so much information to learn about sustainability. Literally, you could spend your entire life educating yourself in this area and you'd still only graze the surface. It's almost overwhelming, because you start realizing that sustainability forces you to evaluate every decision that you make...no matter how big or how small...and understand how it impacts the world around you. Coming out of a conference like this, you start yearning for a time in your life when ignorance was bliss...which would have been last Wednesday for me. Oh, if I could only go back to Wednesday...

But, as many of the people at this conference have alluded to, it's important not to get overwhelmed by sustainability. None of us are perfect, and we can't expect ourselves to change our entire lives overnight and become environmental superheroes. Sustainability is a goal to keep striving towards, and as long as we keep working towards that goal a little bit at a time, we are doing our part.

At some of the seminars I sat in upon, I gained some more knowledge on how to conduct environmental audits in both the workplace and at home. Many utility companies have instructions on their websites on how you can perform your own energy audit, and many will offer you rebates if you go through the process. It's crazy how easy it is to save on your energy costs around the home. The students from Humboldt State University created a fun little video called The Phantom Hunter that shows you some simple ways that you can save energy now. It's worth checking out when you have some time (and energy) to kill.

I also heard from a program at Santa Monica College called Sustainable Works that is using a "service learning" approach to promote environmentalism among the students and local residents. Their program uses accountability groups (similar to what you'd find in church discipleship groups or AA meetings) to keep students and residents motivated to become better stewards. Their program is extremely successful at teaching people about sustainability. It was quite possibly the most encouraging thing that I saw at this entire conference, and I will definitely use their program as a model for my future work in developing curriculum and training.

Along with the happy, feel-good presentations, I also had my share of the Armageddon lectures. One professor from the University of Oregon named John Bellamy Foster gave an interesting lecture on how capitalism works against the entire notion of sustainability. Since capitalism is based upon the foundation of continuous growth to make a profit, it's impossible for businesses to slow down their use of natural resources. Foster believes that only a socialist state as originally envisioned by Marx can achieve sustainable harmony with nature, and if our nation doesn't begin a move towards that direction, then we are doomed.

I also heard from Werner Fornos, president of Global Population Education, Inc., who discussed world population problems and what must be done to solve them. In a nutshell, the human population should have peaked at 2 billion in order to be sustainable. Currently, the population stands at 6.6 billion. Once the population exceeds 8 billion, our world is in for some serious problems. Fornos states that if every woman in the world achieved at least the level of an 8th grade education, then women would be more knowledgeable about birth control and family planning, and it would be possible for our population to plateau at 8 billion.

Despite some of the gloomy predictions for our planet that I heard about this week, I'm glad I was able to attend this conference. I felt like it woke me up from "The Matrix" that we surround ourselves with every day in our superficial society, and made me understand what's really important. From this conference alone, I've got enough topics to write an entire year's worth of blog entries. As I stated earlier, it's impossible to know everything there is to know about sustainability. But if we work towards it a little bit each day, it makes a difference, and that's something to be proud of.