Most people, if asked, would easily be able to define the
word “life”. The Webster Dictionary describes the word as, “the general or
universal condition of human existence. And so I pose the question, how do we
sustain this state we refer to as “living”? Again, the question is relatively
simple, human survival is simple in its most basic form. To sustain life, a
human being must have food, water, and shelter. The world started off in this
way. At the beginning of human existence the biggest issues to overcome
involved finding something to safe to eat and discovering a secure place to
sleep at night. However, the world has changed a great deal since those early
beginnings and although some may still be focused on solving the world’s most
basic issues, most have created new ones that now need to be tackled.
With the advancements of the human race come bigger, perhaps more cumbersome problems that need to be dealt with. The big issue I am referring to is something called sustainability. We now are faced with sustaining life in our country as well as all over the world. If this concept seems cumbersome, don’t worry because I am about to break it down into its most basic elements.
What I really mean when I am referring to this abstract concept, “sustainability”, is preserving and bettering all of the systems we have put in place to improve the lives of human beings. You see, we have come a long way from fighting to survive and now we are working to make human existence much more enjoyable. In doing this, we focus mainly on the three aspects of sustainability: the economic aspect, the social aspect, and the environmental aspect. Technically everything we do should potentially benefit one of these aspects of sustainability and not take away from the others. However, this is quite often not the case. In fact, we often focus too much on one aspect and completely neglect the others.
In the United States, the rejection of any form of socialism creates the opportunity to neglect the social and environmental aspects of sustainability and focus solely on the economic aspects. People in the United States have begun to value money over everything else. But is there anything wrong with that? Well, this question is hard to answer quite honestly. It’s a matter of opinion obviously, however using the concept of sustainability, we can pull out some simple facts: maintaining an equilibrium between a focus on the economy, social issues, and environmental issues promotes sustainability. If we look at it this way, then technically focusing too heavily on economics may be partially sustainable for a short amount of time, however in the long run this system will not support human life.
The reason why I am so interested in this topic and therefore the reason that I would like to share it with all of you, is that this concept is applicable to almost every part of life, past and present and understanding this concept can help us to make people’s lives better. For example, in studying the indigenous tribes of the New World, I learned that the respect they held for nature allowed them to build entire empires with very little damage to the world around them. They were constantly aware of the impact that their lives had on the environment and tried their best to keep any negative impacts to a minimum. These practices can be studied and learned from today and although, we have advanced quite a bit since these times, many of these old concepts could be used to improve society today.
Hopefully, I have given you all the basic idea of sustainability and its inherent importance in life. I believe that the three aspects of sustainability are the basis of all of the issues surrounding “life” and in discussing this particular concept I hope to have given you all a little bit of background information to fully understand issues that I would like to discuss in the future. Thanks for reading!
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/category/sustainability/?_r=0
