Planting Trees on Your Holiday The Beginnings of the Students for Sustainability Working Group
Recent years have highlighted the imperative to move towards sustainable practice. From Covid-19 bringing all levels of movement to a stand-still, to the Extinction Rebellion movement declaring a Climate Emergency, Bob Dylan’s lines “the times they are a-changin’” have a new and ringing truth. The speed at which these times are a-changing and the fresh delivery of anxiety inducing events into your palm has created new mental health conditions such as ‘news fatigue’. We are now having to manage our mental bandwidth to just be able to get through the week. We are constantly re-adjusting how we do relationships and work online. What was once an abstract idea, sustainability is now part of our everyday lives. Admittedly, sustainability is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot. Prominent indigenous scholar, Tyson Yunkaporta, is critical of the term as it can be employed to greenwash just about anything from ‘sustainable’ economic growth to ‘sustainable’ mining. Is it ‘sustainable’ to offset your flight’s carbon emissions by, at ticket purchase, ticking the box that sends $2 to a tree-planting company; or more so to simply not take the flight; or further still, to instead spend your holiday volunteering with an organisation to help plant trees yourself? As little as five years ago these questions would be ridiculed as those two most offensive of post-modern insults - naïve and idealistic.
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WORDS BY Tim Boyle
But these are a-changin’ times. In my job interview for the SIPS program at the start of 2020 I was asked something like ‘what does sustainability mean to you?’ or ‘what does the term sustainability mean?’ or maybe it was simply ‘what is sustainability?’. I don’t recall exactly how it went. I do recall, however, answering something sensible and individualistic, like, “while sustainability is commonly understood as replacing regular consumer habits with sustainable consumer habits (i.e., Keep Cups, metal straws, etc and the whole shebang of a new virtue signalling industry (I didn’t say this)) but the deeper and wider-reaching definition of sustainability to me is about a way of life. It’s about living intentionally and wholesomely in all areas of life, not just in consumption habits. It’s seeing the bounds of society and the system and the environment and continuously practicing and learning how to live within those bounds”. Like the donut analogy in Kate Raworth’s book Doughnut Economics, Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, she argues that there is a lower boundary of keeping needs met (the inner line of a donut) and an upper boundary of planetary resource limitations (the outer line of a donut). Rather than the haveyour-cake-and-eat-it-too understanding of the past, sustainability is really about the ongoing process of living within the donut. (If this is too difficult to picture just go out and buy the book, it’s worth it).
TOGATUS
