Sustainability education

As a student, I thought this month’s APLS blog carnival topic about education would be right up my alley—more so than the other carnival topics that I haven’t participated in. And I should participate—after all, it was partly my input that turned into the APLS blog! Since I’m encapsulated in education, day in and day out, I thought this would be easy.

Um, wow. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I started out by trying to write a synopsis of what I had experienced last weekend at a panel on development, one that raised many ideas in my regarding the sustainability movement. Then I realized that I felt like I was writing a paper, not a blog entry. You guys don’t want to read my papers (though if you would like to learn about the panel last weekend, I can send you my ten-page paper on it), and I didn’t want to think in academia-ese anymore (another thing you don’t want to read on a blog).

So, I’m back to the basics: The questions asked by Abbie when she put out the blog topic. How do you educate yourself about sustainable living? How do you pass that knowledge on to others? Do you educate your family members and friends? Are you a member of environmental organizations? Do you do volunteer work?

Well, those are good questions in and of themselves, without trying to put a paper into them. (No but really—I was FASCINATED by the idea of imposing vernacular language onto every culture in order to try to make it universal—if you’d like to get an idea of what I’m talking about, please! e-mail me. My e-mail should be in the sidebar somewhere.)

Actually, there’s a lot I don’t know. I keep telling myself to seek out information about various things, but I just don’t. My favorite method of learning is through blogs; and, barring that, through chatty, sympathetic books. When you read dry textbooks all day long, you really don’t want to go read dry articles at 9pm when you’re trying to unwind. So most of my information comes through blogs, and while I’ll be critiquing the rampant use of George Monbiot’s statistics throughout the sustainability blogosphere, I’ll also take a lot of what’s said at face value. (I’m taking a class that preaches to treat all statistics with a critical eye, and reading George Monbiot’s Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning in another.)

But here are the things I know a good amount about:

• Buy local. (Sustainable, organic, used. Or don’t buy at all. Of course, there’s also the line at the end of Rebee’s take on buying, You’re allowed to have hobbies! You’re allowed to keep things you use. THANK YOU.)
• Food: local, organic. Also, these foods just taste that much better.
• Plastic: in everything. Try to limit use of it. Try to limit use of disposables.

And I don’t know how but somehow I began to share these ideas with my family. My mom signed up for a food delivery service the other day that’s made up of food from local, organic farms, and delivers it once a week. She’s going to try new local foods and see what she thinks of it. Over the summer we put up an umbrella-style laundry hanger in the back and I hung the laundry there to dry. Yet I’m not entirely sure how I pass what I read onto them. I certainly haven’t passed much on to others at school. But I have made a difference in the way my family goes about their lives. And they’re certain to continue to come up with more ideas and pass it on to others.

So, how DO we educate ourselves about the world and all its complexities? Just through blogs? Newspapers? Wikipedia? The library? There is such a huge world of things to know and sometimes I feel like my brain is too small for it all. Maybe there’s a point in that: we all have to work together to share knowledge and responsibilities, and form one green generation. Who knows?