Sustainability – What is it, and Why should YOU care?

 

Ciao lovelies! Today is the last day of Sustainability Month here on OFT, and to wrap things up, today’s post will be revisiting our first post of the month and touching on many of the points made by our interview guests, as well as addressing the question- Why should YOU care about sustainability?

Let’s begin in a similar fashion to the first post of this month, by defining Sustainability.

At the beginning of the month, my definition of Sustainability was “Being able to keep something going for a long time. In environmental terms, this means reduction of negative impact on the environment in order to maintain a self-sustaining Earth.”

Let’s see how others defined sustainability:

When I interviewed Georgi Tomisato, Founding President of Shenandoah Green, she defined sustainability in this way: “Sustainability on its own just means having the characteristics of being able keep something going. Environmental Sustainability means that something is not impacting the environment negatively and can be sustained without causing harm.”

When I interviewed Sam Stoner, Mary Baldwin University’s Sustainability Coordinator, he defined Sustainability as: “taking actions now with the future in mind,” and “when we make the choice to benefit the future instead of degrade it.”

When I interviewed Chris Cain, former director of the Staunton Innovation Hub, she had this to say regarding Sustainability: “Sustainability is a framework to make educated choices on how we make and spend our money.”

With these definitions and the knowledge I’ve gained through conducting interviews, doing research, and taking my sustainability in business class, my new definition for sustainability is this:

Sustainability is about maintaining things, even bettering things for future generations. This not only involves caring for our planet but also involves caring for people, fighting for human rights, and furthering scientific research. Sustainability means making conscious choices to improve the future for others, not just ourselves.

Whether it means reusable bags and metal straws, whether it means fighting for workers in countries worldwide to gain a sustainable wage, whether it means volunteering your time to make your community a better place- Sustainability exists on not only a global, but also a local scale. It can be impacted by even the smallest habit change.

There is a theory that even a small butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane across the world. Sometimes you must act as that butterfly in the world of change. You must make the small changes in your life that may spark larger scale changes later on.

If every person makes just one small change, we could change the world and all of our fates. We could change the tides in terms of humanity’s blatant abuse of the planet. We could together create a better world for others.

Think for a moment about the #trashtag challenge. It started with ONE PERSON cleaning up one patch of land, and it turned into a movement.

Those are my parting words to you on this last day of Sustainability month on OFT. I hope you’ll keep these concepts in mind moving forward. I felt compelled to use my voice, small though it may be, to try to inspire change, and I hope it has inspired at least one person reading this to make a change.

I will talk to you all again on Wednesday, as we jump back into OFT’s regular non-niche posting!

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Thanks again for reading, stay awesome, remember to love yourself, and I’ll see you in our next post!