Tuesday, April 21, 2009
It seems impossible for students to think about what our lives will be like tomorrow or a month from now, let alone 50 or 75 years from now. Maybe it’s this inability to see beyond breakfast that is preventing the student environmental movement from moving forward.
I attended the Potter Lake Unplugged Sustainability Festival on Sunday, and I’m greatly appreciative of the students and organizations that made this event a huge success, including many of my close friends, fellow students and organizations I’ve been involved with in the past.
But I don’t know whether this festival exemplified the changes that must be made for students and the University to be truly sustainable.
It’s time that we start thinking differently about sustainability. Environmentalists have attempted to go mainstream by tapping into the growing consumer movement.
Everywhere we look, including at Sunday’s Sustainability Festival, we see canvas bags, recycling and compact fluorescent light bulbs touted as the way to solve the climate crisis. We see the top 10 ways to go green and clichéd phrases about “going green to save green” in light of the economy. And, unfortunately, at the Sustainability Festival, we also saw disposable cups, bags and printed papers being handed out as well.
If this is what the environmental movement has become, I can’t call myself an environmentalist anymore. I’m tired of talking about light bulbs. I’m tired of giving people green tips so they can save green. I realize this is where many people enter the environmental conversation, but the concept of sustainability encompasses so much more than simply buying new stuff. Sustainability requires a gearshift inside each of us to change the way we live and the way we think about our environment.
The climate crisis is a challenge humanity can hardly fathom, so we must rethink every aspect of what we’re doing.
Earth Day is Wednesday, so I challenge you to take time to think about how we can live sustainably when the time comes that all of us already have canvas bags and energy-saving computers.
The Sustainability Festival, my fellow environmentally aware students and the numerous environmental organizations on campus are on the right track, but we must keep the conversation moving forward instead of stuck in our business-as-usual rut of consumption.
— Keith is a Wichita junior in journalism and environmental studies.
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