Without argument, I think most people will agree that our world is changing. Both our social and physical environments are under constant pressure, and even in 170 CE, the Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius noted "all these things you see will change almost as you look at them ... The universe is change: life is judgment" (Meditations 5.3.4). So while everything is changing, what's up for debate is our history and how we move forward from here: our judgment.
What we do have is our histories, our "facts," and our values. When I sat down to write a "sustainability blog," I juggled these categories and asked myself "which of these is the most important?" I could write about the history of sustainability, essentially collating facts and photos digitally. I could draw from my data management experience and visualize the "facts" and "stats." Or I could comment on cultural values, highlighting why certain ideas are unsustainable.
And then I realized that that's not enough. Like the environments we live in, all of these factors are in-play at the same time; so my job (as I see it, and you're welcome to contest that if you're looking for something different) is to bring everything into perspective to understand how and why we are where we are: with huge continents of garbage the size of Texas in the Pacific and North Atlantic, large migrations of rural populations to dense, urban centers with the appearance of renewed urban poverty, and with substantially increased risks of dust bowls and greater depressions due to the changing climate.
To introduce how we got where we are (ecologically) and what we can do, I want to introduce the Principles of Sustainability, which will in large part be an organizing theme of my research and also of this blog. Those principles are that 1) we can't diminish our natural capital, and 2) we can't diminish opportunities for others to experience nature. These principles lead us to consider a "sustainability triangle" that is the combination of "environmentally sound decisions ... economically viable decisions ... and socially equitable decisions" which together lead to sustainable development (Hassenzahl, Hager, and Berg Fig. 2.1).
So in this increasingly globalized world, what we need is to make information accessible so we can understand our situations and make sustainable choices. So that's what I'm doing, here: curating. With all this information in mind, we can begin to understand what we can do about these issues, together.
In the next post, I'll follow up with the history of how industries and cities have developed unsustainably.
Works Cited
Aurelius, Marcus Antoninus Augustus. Meditations. Trans. Martin Hammond. London: Penguin Classics, 2006. Print.
de Loutherbourg, Philip James. Coalbrookdale by Night. 1801. Oil on canvas. Science Museum, London. Source
Hassenzahl, David M., Mary Catherine Hager, and Linda R. Berg. Visualizing Environmental Science. 4th ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2011. Print.