Change.

According to G. Tyler Miller and Scott E. Spoolman, sustainability is “the capacity of the earth’s natural systems that support life and human social systems to survive or adapt to changing environmental conditions indefinitely”. They identify three scientific principles as being the key reasons why this planet has been able to sustain life: dependence on solar energy for the production of nutrients, enough biological diversity to keep populations from becoming too large and to help life adapt to environmental conditions, and the recycling of chemicals through inter-species interactions. While I recognize that these three principles “play key roles in the long-term sustainability of the planet’s life” and also understand that key does not mean only, I still want to advocate for their inclusion of a fourth principle: gravity! Gravity makes the rain fall down, gravity makes the seeds from trees fall down, etc. The gravitational forces between the celestial bodies in the Milky Way must not be overlooked, especially given how seemingly rare our planet’s life-producing/sustaining ability is! We are unfathomably lucky to be in our location in the galaxy, to have our particular orbit, and that our planetary neighbors have their particular orbits — and for these factors to have been the case for over 3.8 billion years — so, I think that is worth mentioning in a lesson about how this planet became and continues to be Living Earth.

In addition to their three scientific principles, Miller and Spoolman suggest three other principles of sustainability that stem from economics, politics, and ethics rather than from science. The principle stemming from economics is the idea of full-cost pricing. To elaborate, these authors call for “the harmful environmental and health costs” of goods and services to be reflected in their prices as a means of increasing consumer awareness of such problems. The next principle, coming from a political science standpoint, is the “win-win solutions” principle. With this principle they suggest that environmental problems can be solved by humans cooperating and compromising with each other to determine solutions that “will benefit the largest number of people as well as the environment”. Their final principle, stemming from ethics, is feeling a sense of responsibility to leave “the planet’s life-support systems in a condition that is as good as or better than it is now” for future generations of humans. I take issue with these three principles because of how human-centric their language is and how little imagination they are using! I think that instead of imagining a future where pollution is taken into account when pricing goods, we should be striving towards creating and using goods and services that do not require our emitting of pollutants. I do not think that when listing principles of sustainability and proposing solutions to our mass level of environmental degradation all across the planet I should be seeing the words ‘the environment’ being processed by the words ‘as well as’ — it should be the primary focus (for once!), and not separated conceptually from ‘people’ because in reality there is no separation. Miller and Spoolman claimed to have named the textbook Living in the Environment to emphasize this last point, but then immediately contradict it in their first chapter! Also, why must be feel a sense of responsibility to future generations of people in order to want to stop destroying habitats? What about proposing instead that we feel a sense of connection to the other life forms on this planet that already actively trying to live and are already actively being hurt by our actions? In my opinion, no matter how much human society changes, the change will not be enough if the voices of ‘sustainability’ and the people who claim to care about the planet continue to think that the universe revolves around our own species. We must recognize our animality and develop a greater, much deeper compassion for our fellow beings on this unique and beautiful and immensely fragile, tiny space rock.In the following section of the chapter, Miller and Spoolman discuss how our ecological footprints are affecting the planet. Almost every person on Earth has an ecological footprint, or, in other words, plays a role in harming the environment by contributing to the pollution of air, land, and water during their everyday activities. One attempt at calculating this human harm is the Impact Model in which Impact equals Population times Affluence times Technology because the amount that one pollutes is very strongly correlated to the amount of wealth one has and how much they participate in the oftentimes-polluting activities of the wealthy lifestyle. Rich people consume more meat, consume more packaged and processed items, buy more clothing and gadgets, travel around in cars and airplanes, and live in houses that take up the most space and use the most energy. To make matters worse, the wealthy people of the world also are the beings that are the farthest removed from feeling the negative effects of climate change and the farthest away (usually) from the sources of pollution (for example, there are no million-dollar mansions sitting right next to a toxin-spewing factory, usually low-income housing is next to that instead). The people living in the United States of America are some of the worst polluters in the world and have the highest ecological footprint. The online ecological footprint calculator states that if everybody lived like middle to upper class Americans, we would need five more Earths to support our species! I find this sickening, but not surprising because I have lived here my whole life and know how much shopping for fun is done in the country and how meat and produce is shipped all around the world for us to eat almost every single meal. When I calculated my ecological footprint, I needed 1.4 Earths to support my own lifestyle. I am now on a mission to get myself down to one Earth, because truly that is all I and anyone else has. I want to reduce the amount of packaged and processed food I consume upon learning that ‘food’ was the section that contributed the most to my own footprint, even though I am a vegetarian. For example, I plan to no longer by frozen vegetables that come in a bag but rather I will buy fresh vegetables from my grocery store that are not in any packaging and during the spring and summer I will go to the farmer’s markets around me more to make sure I am consuming locally-grown food. This is just one example of a small change that I can make for the sake of the planet. Word Count: 1101