Grad School

For my class on sustainability I had to post a blog on what sustainability really means to me. I'm really happy with my response. Usually on blog posts you are lucky to get 1 comment, but after only about 12 hours I have gotten 3!
this is my post...

SHOULD SHE TAKE THE GARBAGE OUT?

When I was a little girl my mother used to read Shel Silverstein poems to me. My favorite poem was about a girl named Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout. This little girl adamantly refused to take the garbage out. This poem gave me dreams as a child that one day our garbage was going to take over our lives until we were swimming in it.


Image by Chelsea Carolyn
It’s scary images like this that inspire people to begin the process of reduce -reuse -recycle. Blue bins now line the streets on trash pick-up day, and recycle signs designate the appropriate can for your bottle around the office. Unfortunately, recycling paper and plastic isn’t all it’s going to take. In “The story of stuff”, Annie Leonard stated that, for every can of waste put on the curb, 70 cans of waste were made to produce the contents of that can. “So even if we could recycle 100 percent of the waste coming out of our households,” she said, ” it doesn’t get to the core of the problem.”

So what can we do? The answer is sustainability. Sustainability is to maintain and provide for. To keep the planet healthy, rather than make it worse for the wear. To conserve our resources, eliminate waste, develop clean air technologies, invest in waste-water solutions. The planet Earth is complex, and to sustain our planet it is going to take multiple efforts.

So what can Sylvia Stout do? What can one person do to help maintain the planet?

She can constantly educate herself to make the right choices based on what is best for the environment. She can recycle, choose to buy products without bulky packaging, use natural pesticides that are toxin free. She can refrain from buying the newest phone every six months and throwing away the old. She can change light bulbs to fluorescent to cut down on energy consumption, or ride a bike instead of driving. The possibilities are limitless, but the first step is making the commitment to consider the planet a top priority and provide for its health and safety.

-Jenni Brown


To view the blog go here and read what my classmates thought about the issue. :)