What is Sustainability? What is Spirituality?

If I were to answer these questions before I began my class and done any reading, I would have said this: A person who practices sustainability is being energy and environment conscious, thinking “green” and actively working to conserve, reuse, and recycle and encouraging others to do so as well. I would have said that spirituality is believing that there is something bigger than us humans out there that guides us on our life journey and whose presence can be felt when we engage in spiritual activities such as meditation, yoga, or a calming nature walk. Moreover, I barely even thought of these two concepts as being connected at all.

I read the first couple of chapters of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and really took in what she has to say about man's war against nature. There is a certain pace at which nature works its course and man's tampering with the atom has sped up that pace. The pollution that humankind is expelling into nature is deteriorating the environment at a pace that is too rapid for nature to catch up and find balance. Humankind is so fast paced and economy-focused that we do not take the time to care about what is happening to the world around us. We are destroying our home bit by bit and we can't seem to take the time to slow down and address the problem because we are too caught up with making money and too selfish to think about future generations and the well-being of the earth.

We, as humans, have a tendency to control the world around us. It's like a drug addiction that never seems to be satisfied and we keep going back for more. One of those instances is of course the attempt to control our environment. Humans have been developing hundreds of new chemicals each year to create insecticides and pesticides to control the population of insects, weeds and rodents on farms, in our homes, or any place else in which we feel there is a “pest problem”. (By the way, there is no 'pest problem'; WE are the problem!) We are driving out these living beings that resided here before us and we are taking over their home and expecting them to go silently. It makes me think of early America when the Native Americans made their homes on this land and respectfully shared the earth with all living creatures. Of course early Americans came along thinking that the Native Americans' way of life was absurd and that the natives were naive and feebleminded. So what did they do? Early Americans attempted to control the natives. They claimed the land as their own and formed colonies, pushing the natives out of their own communities.

Throughout this entry I used the words “we” and “us” to include myself in the group of people who negatively impact the earth without thinking twice about it. I had not necessarily thought about my “carbon footprint” on this earth and did not work to actively conserve energy or other resources. Now that I have the motivation of learning and reflecting on these concepts, I'm hoping my attitudes and behaviors about sustainability will change over the course of my journey.