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What
Would Grandma Do?
Even
without understanding the larger issues involved,
Grandma Slone was a model for “sustainable
development.”
by
Dan Slone
A
now departed friend, Ed Cohen-Rosenthal, defined
“sustainability” as what your grandmother used
to do – avoiding waste by saving and reusing as
much as possible. Ed, a professor at
Cornell
University, was one of the country’s leading
advocates of achieving sustainability through
eco-industrial design.
I
wonder if my grandmother would have recognized
herself in the more common definitions of
sustainability tossed around today. The term is
overused and stretched to the point of losing all
but the kernel of any agreed-upon meaning.
Theorists
believe that “sustainability” has three
components -- economic, social and environmental
-- all of which must remain in balance, each of
which must be in place for an institution, a town,
a project or a person to be called
“sustainable.” Environmental sustainability
means preserving the natural systems that support
life. Economic sustainability avoids loading huge
debts on future generations. Social sustainability
entails a sufficiently fair distribution of
resources among the population to avoid social
upheaval.
These
definitions would seem uncontroversial to most
people. But each term has been festooned with
additional meanings and causes. Social
sustainability, for instance, has come to include
the preservation of cultural heritage through
empowerment of indigenous people, recovery of
archaeological sites, and the resistance of brand
globalization. Maybe on another day, with a lot
more thought, I might discern my grandmother in
such a thicket of trendy causes. More likely, she
would have seen her way of life reflected in the
common definition of “sustainable
development.”
Although
considered an oxymoron by some -- akin to
“logging to save the owls” -- sustainable
development was defined in a 1987 United Nations
commissioned report as that which “meets the
needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own
needs.” Similarly,
in The Ecology of Commerce, Paul Hawken
defined it as “an economic state where the
demands placed upon the environment by people and
commerce can be met without reducing the capacity
of the environment to provide for future
generations.”
By
those
definitions, my grandparents lived
“sustainable” lives, though their frugality
was born of necessity, not ideology. My
grandfather grew up as one of seven children in a
poor family in Appalachia. He and my grandmother
lived on a schoolteacher’s salary, raising their
children in the Depression and then the scarcity
of World War II.
My
grandmother threw out nothing that could be
reused. She saved newspapers to start fires in the
fireplace. Jars, boxes, Christmas paper, plastic
bread wrappers, twist ties, plastic milk jugs –
all of these she stored around the house for
reuse. She had one TV, one stereo and one bathroom
(even though three families shared the house at
Christmas). She and my grandfather never owned
more than one car. She walked to church, to the
funeral home and to the beautician. She drove to
the grocery store, though for many years she
raised her own vegetables and chickens and had a
milk cow behind her house on
Main Street
. I read the comic books that my father read as a
boy because she’d never thrown them away.
When
I contrast her joy in simplicity and abhorrence of
waste with my own lifestyle I see how
unsustainable my generation has become. We
squander finite resources. We bury tons of trash.
We tolerate rising levels of background pollution.
We build inefficiencies into our production
processes.
Repeatedly,
companies, government agencies and individuals who
seek to make their practices more sustainable find
that they save money. It did not occur to my
grandmother that her frugal choices improved, in
small ways, the quality of life of future
generations: She did not recycle aluminum with the
thought of keeping another bauxite mine from being
built in the rain forest. Yet such choices, made
at the individual, corporate and governmental
levels, cumulatively define sustainable
development. As our knowledge of the world and its
inter-related, interdependent systems increases,
we have become more aware that some of the
resources key to our lifestyles and economics are
finite. Wasteful use of resources has adverse
consequences. If we use up a species, a place or a
resource, as Buckminster Fuller, argued, there is
nowhere on “spaceship earth” to go to replace
it.
The
notion of sustainable development has applications
at every social level. Across the
United States
, individuals are working to reduce their
“environmental footprint” -- the physical
amount of land required to support a lifestyle,
taking into account food production, roads,
manufacturing and all other aspects of daily
consumption. Cities such as
Chattanooga
,
Tenn.
, and
Santa Monica
,
Calif.
, have committed their public policies to
sustainable development. Sustainable practices are
advancing in agriculture and silvaculture, in
schools and in some of the country’s top
restaurants. Corporations such as Dupont, Bayer
and Interface Carpets have made sustainable
development a key part of their corporate
policies.
The
environmental summit just completed in
Johannesburg was the “World Summit on
Sustainable Development.”
Internationally, discussions about
sustainability focus on issues such as global
warming, deterioration of the ozone layer,
exhaustion of fishing grounds, increasing water
scarcity, the loss of global biodiversity, the
absence of waste water treatment in many parts of
the world and the environmental impacts of war and
poverty. The
Johannesburg
conference brought together world leaders to
discuss these issues. Many Non-Governmental
Organizations participated, as well as
international corporations such as Alcoa,
AT&T, Chevron Texaco, General Motors, Procter
and Gamble and Weyerhauser. Participants struggled
to balance economic, social and environmental
sustainability against a backdrop of widely
disparate circumstances from one nation to the
next.
I
doubt my grandmother would have followed much of
this. Making an egg salad sandwich, she would have
saved the leftover salad in a recycled jar. But
she loved birds, and if she’d understood that
diminished global biodiversity meant that her
songbirds would disappear, she would have wanted
to know what she could do about that.
Ed
Cohen-Rosenthal was right about reusing and
recycling as much as possible. We can better
understand the pathway to sustainability by
studying my grandmother and her peers. Many of
their practices were unsustainable: Their
wood-burning fireplaces and coal-fed stoves were
pollution machines. But they endured the crisis of
scarcity and knew the real value of so much of
what is now discarded.
--
Sept. 16, 2002
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