What Resources Are Available?

I think you make an excellent point about climate change -- that we need to look at tackling the issue in a more 'connected' way. You give an example of thinking more conscientiously about our purchases, taking into account where the products come from and who profits. Unfortunately, most of us don't put that much time, energy, or research into our purchase decisions. Where does one go to find out more information on making sustainable buying choices?

Climate Change PLUS

So thanks to Al Gore more people are interested in our response to climate change. As The Inconvenient Truth hits the Lansing area next week (fundraiser at Celebration Cinema on the 29th, show opens to the public on the 30th) as folks leave the theater with hopefully a better understanding of what we know and don't know, how will we respond?

My fear is that we will run forward to latch on to the latest technical fixes. Hopefully more people will buy compact flurorescent lights (cfl's) and install them for example. This is a good thing as electricity use will be cut 75% by a switch from incandescent bulbs which use 90% of their energy to give off heat, not light. But I want to suggest that we strive to think about climate change in more connected ways. and not as some disconnected challenge from all the others we face. So perhaps one better question to address is how do we use less energy while simultaneously diminishing the gulf between rich and the poor. For we can surely do this in a way where we keep helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. One consideration therefore might be, where do we buy the bulbs? If we can get them cheaper at Home Depot or WalMart is that the best deal for our community? Remember much of the profit from those global giants does not remain in our community but leaves immediately to corporate headquarters and into the hands of some of the wealthiest people on the planet - not all stakeholders share in the wealth.

This isn't the only connection we should try to make as we rush to slow the climate disruptions we know we are causing. Sustainability, if it does anything, should help us consider how things are connected - local to global, economic-to-social-environmental, personal-to-community. present-to-future. We need each other to help us think about what costs we externalize when we propose a solution. If we can think of the reverberations of those choices across a wide array of connections we are more like to minimalize unintended consequences and grow in our communities what we truly value.

What's in a name?

I had the hardest darn time trying to find a title for this blog that conveys the sense of sustainability without using the darn ‘S’ word. Hopefully this title gets to that - that we exist in a nest of relationships of which we are mostly ignorant. So we want to encourage respectful and soulful conversation around how we make choices given an understanding that we are all in this together. The local affects the global, the economic affects the environmental, the social affects the spiritual and each in turn affects the other in a complex web of relationships. Besides the growing evidence from emerging science that we are all connected, we must also face the fact, that as physicist and cosmologist Brian Swimme suggests, we are now in a world remarkably different from that of Plato, Newton, or Darwin or other earlier intellects. In the world that they were pondering, humans were one of many species and the natural world was pretty much out there, separate and distinct from humans. As a species we are now both so numerous and so powerful with our increasing technologies, that we are capable of, and in fact are, changing the natural systems upon which we rely for life.

This incontrovertible truth requires us to think differently about our choices today and the legacy and impacts they have for those who inherit what we have sown. This space will thus be used to glimpse relationships in a complex web of life that we are part of. None of us alone are smart enough to know the answers but we hope by raising the possibilities that arise out of recognizing relationships we may collectively learn to make choices that might grow justice, health, peace, and true prosperity for all present and future generations in balance with all that we share this spinning green sphere. That’s our intent. What do you think?

Footprints Newsletter...

If you haven't seen it already, please check out the May 2006 edition of our newsletter, Footprints. You can view the newsletter online at:

http://www.ecofoot.msu.edu/newsletters/footprints.newsletter.05.06.pdf

We will be coming out with another edition of the newsletter shortly, with plenty of information on events and speakers coming up at the start of the new academic year. To be notified about the newsletter and other events related to campus sustainability, please join our mailing list:

http://mailman.lib.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/msugreen

Welcome to the Mindful Relations Blog...

As we prepare for the upcoming 2006-2007 academic year, the MSU Office of Campus Sustainability is excited to announce the launch of our new blog! The Mindful Relations blog has been created as an online forum for discussing issues of campus sustainability within the MSU community. We hope that you will not only return to this site frequently, but that you will add our RSS feed to your live bookmarks so that you can always remain up-to-date.

Please feel free to take an active part in this blog -- after all, we created it for you! If you are interested in becoming a member of this blog, with posting privileges, please send us an e-mail so that we can add you to our team! Thanks, and we're looking forward to working with you to create a more sustainable community at Michigan State!