I hope there are another few habitable planets out there

Today I went to my internship, as I do every Thursday.  I really didn’t want to go to work today.  I felt like sleeping in and informing my supervisor that my car battery had died, but I’m a poor liar – the guilt eats away at me.  So I dragged my body out of bed, threw on the clothing I had worn the day before (it was business casual), brushed my teeth and drove to work only to discover that my supervisor wasn’t coming in today.  The other employees did not know what busy work to give me, so I sat in front of my computer and calculated my ecological and carbon footprint multiple times. 

Averaging the results from the many different sites I used to calculate my footprints, we would need 4 worlds to support the human population if everyone on Earth lived as I do (my ecological footprint) and I emitted around 7 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere this past year.  These results are quite horrible and so I decided to see what would happen if I changed certain aspects of my life.  My eating habits are the worst (I don’t eat fresh or locally grown produce – I don’t really it produce at all.  So I entered the data pretending that I did it locally and organically.  My ecological footprint shrunk but not by much.  I then decided to try lowering the impact of my other activities.  Soon enough I had made myself a vegan that grows her own produce or buys it at the farmer’s market.  All the waste I create was composted in my hypothetical bin and I recycled the few goods I bought.  I no longer owned a car, took any form of public transportation, or traveled further than I could bike.  My footprint was still too large for 6 billion people to live as I do.  So then I decided to change my living situation.  Instead of living in a duplex with 4 people, I upped the residents to 7 (the maximum choice).  I pretended that 100% of the energy was renewable and that my electricity and gas bills were only $5 a month (the lowest option).  I pressed calculate once again.  My ecological footprint was still over 2 worlds.  I was shocked.  I had chosen the most ecologically friendly option for every question.  Yet, there are too many people for everyone to live as I “would” (without transportation, meat, and fossil fuels).  All I have left to do is hope the calculator was broken and attempt to live as sustainably as possible. 

(On a positive note, through a different site I was actually able to lower my footprint to only 1.7 worlds by living a life I felt is attainable and fulfilling.)

Big Impact Man

This past we watched the movie No Impact Man.  The documentary got me thinking about all the ways the “Man’s” family impacted the environment and society.  The “Man” actively avoided wasteful modes of living and replaced them with more sustainable options when necessary.  But even more than the small and major changes that he made to his lifestyle were the changes he made to his perception of “really want” and the message he relayed to other people.  One man can have an immense impact on our world because the actions of one man affect his family and his community and onward.  Realize that whether or not you change, you still have an impact.  People notice what others do/don’t do. 

Besides, there really is no such thing as a no impact man.  Human beings are a part of their ecosystems.  We interact with our environment and other organisms.  When it comes to our ecological impact though, we have a choice.  We can make a positive impact or a negative one.  We can keep our resources and waste products at a local, small, manageable level or we can lose ourselves in the unnecessary (yet very shiny) resources so easily accessible (yet untraceable) and disregard our waste that disappears at a global, large, and unmanageable level.  The choice is ours. 

If each of us was to choose one aspect of our lives and make it more sustainable, perhaps our peers would pick up the good habit as well.  Every person’s individual miniscule action may have no impact when viewed alone, but if all these actions are combined the positive impact can be immense. 

What will you change?

Wild about Animal Life

A healthy ecosystem is considered sustainable.  But there are so many ways one can define healthy and ecosystem and sustainable.  I feel as though most of my blog entries have been attempts at defining a widely used ecological term.  And I’m sick of it!  I could write about how I define sustainable but I think my definition of the term is still evolving and I am unready to put into words.  Beyond the actual definition for sustainable, there are so many parameters needed to clarify the boundaries of what is considered sustainable.  What is the time frame being considered when deciding if a system is sustainable? What size area is considered part of the same ecosystem? And… (more).  Instead I want this week’s blog to be more laid back.  I study ecology because the world around me fascinates me.  Nature, our environment, is breathtaking.  I hope to understand as much about life as possible and I wish to enjoy it.  I want to live, feel, and experience it.

So this week I was walking home from a speech with a friend when I thought about how many verbs are also animal names.  I figure it’ll be fun to write a whole bunch of those sorts of sentences. 

When someone throws a projectile at your head, duck!

Many insecure children buffalo their peers so as to feel better about themselves.

My purse was such a mess it was difficult to ferret out my cell phone when it rang.

Don’t chicken out from fear of failure.

See what you can come up with.

A bit of a rant

School is a structured, goal-oriented institution that teaches many subjects and facts.  Yet, school is a small part of one’s life.  Life is made up of experiences, trial and error.  Every day and every minute is another opportunity to learn something.  Knowledge is useless if it is not acted upon, though.  People must try to internalize their experiences and incorporate the lessons into their mindsets and interactions with the world. 

Ecology is an important subject for the general public to understand and thereby be able to change the way they relate to their environment.  School is a great place to introduce the science behind ecology, but experiences must be created outside of the classroom to ensure the students are passionate about ecology as well.  For many, school is an institution dedicated to removing all originality and creativity and teaching society exactly how to think.  Students work the “system” learning to spit back the information handed to them, but often do not try to incorporate the new ideas into their lives. 

                I don’t have an amazing, clever plan to inject passion for ecology into society.  But I do think I have some ideas of things that may be exacerbating the disinterest.  Society is becoming more and more urban and people are forgetting how interrelated our lives are with nature.  Technology is considered our savior; it doesn’t matter what mistakes we make now because an invention will rectify it.  Our senses are overwhelmed by virtual stimulants, distancing us from our senses.  (There are even virtual pets now! How can one cuddle with or walk a joystick?!)  Everything has a monetary value.  If something is cheap, people lose respect for it.  Society has taught us the blame game and removed responsibility from our shoulders.  We feel we deserve to take and use what we want as we please, without worrying about the consequences.  Our society has become individualistic and selfish. 

I realize I have just gone on rant of some of the wrongs in today’s society.  I apologize.  My point is that ecology is about how everything is connected and affects something else.  If people do not learn to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions because they do not experience the connectivity between action and reaction, then ecology is incomprehensible. 

If You're Happy And You Know It Clap Your Hands

If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.  Who among us can truly clap their hands?  What is happiness?  How does one know if he/she has achieved it?  Is a smile a portrayal of inner joy, or simply a facial expression to charm and disarm acquaintances?  Are wealth and material goods the key to happiness?  How much does one need to happy with his/her lot in life?  Is love all you need?  How can a government measure Gross National Happiness (G.N.H.)?  And does Gross National Happiness correlate with ecological stability in a given country?  In all honesty, I am quite uncertain of the answers to the questions I put forth, but uncertainty has never stopped me from trying.  So I will express my musings as to what happiness is and how it relates to ecology. 

Happiness is an emotion.  It is the way one feels when he/she is satisfied with the moment.  It is contentment.  Excitement is related to happiness, but they are not the same.  Excitement is a rush of adrenaline as one anticipates an outcome that should bring about a feeling of happiness (satisfaction and contentment).  A person can be happy with certain aspects of his/her life and be disappointed with others.  Material goods such as money can make a person happy, until the individual becomes dissatisfied with it. 

Gross National Happiness measures overall happiness, though, and not just how a citizen is feeling at the moment.  A person’s overall happiness/satisfaction with his/her life depends upon his/her expectations.  What does the individual feel he/she is entitled to?  If a person feels that he/she deserves more and more, they may always be in the pursuit of happiness but never achieve it.  On the other hand, achieving overall happiness (as opposed to feeling happy every so often) does not mean that a person is so satisfied as to have no wants.  So how is a nation’s happiness measured?  Perhaps by finding out how many aspects of their lives the country’s people are satisfied with. 

Now for how Happiness and Ecological stability could possibly relate.   Some people believe “the best way to increase G.N.H. is by increasing G.N.P. [Gross National Product].  But that is essentially an untested assertion, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it isn't necessarily true. Our sense of happiness is created by many things that are not easily measured in purely economic terms, including a sense of community and purpose, the amount and content of our leisure and even our sense of the environmental and ecological stability of the world around us” (NY Times, Net National Happiness, 2005).  A nation that considers development, money, and material goods as the foundation for happiness cannot obtain both ecological stability and happiness.  Yet a people that consider ecological stability as a means of obtaining happiness will ensure the protection of their natural environment.  Pursuit of happiness can be the pursuit of ecological stability, but it can also be the destruction of ecosystems.  In the end, it is all about perspective. 

Defining Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Traditional Ecological Knowledge is such a long drawn out term by the time I’m done spelling it out I have forgotten what I was in the midst of writing.  Yet the term defines an aspect of humanity’s interaction with the world, and therefore I want to fully grasp what Traditional Ecological Knowledge means to me.  In order to define the entire term for myself I defined each word individually.  According to Dictionary.com:

Traditional –  of or pertaining to tradition; handed down by tradition; in accordance with tradition.

Synonyms: conventional, widespread, customary, established.

• Tradition - the handing down of statements, beliefs, legends, customs, information, etc., from generation to generation; something that is handed down; a long-established or inherited way of thinking or acting; a continuing pattern of culture beliefs or practices; a customary or characteristic method or manner.

Synonyms: custom, practice, habit, convention, usage.

Ecological – of or relating to ecology; (of a practice, policy, product, etc) tending to benefit or cause minimal damage to the environment.

Synonyms: green.

• Ecology - (scientific definition) - the scientific study of the relationships between living things and their environments; a system of such relationships within a particular environment.
• Ecology - (cultural definition) - the study of living things, their environment, and the relation between the two.

Synonyms: conservation, preservation.

Knowledge – acquaintance with facts, truths or principles, as from study or investigation; familiarity or conversance, as with a particular subject or branch of learning; acquaintance or familiarity gained by sight, experience, or report; the fact or state of knowing, the perception of fact or truth; awareness as a fact or circumstance; the body of truths or facts accumulated in the course of time.

Synonyms: comprehension, enlightenment, acquaintance, consciousness.

After obtaining the definitions of the three words that compile Traditional Ecological Knowledge, I tried looking up the meaning of the entire term.  It was not in the dictionary.  So it was back to me rereading the myriad of words in an attempt to comprehend what Traditional Ecological Knowledge encompasses.

Traditional, meaning that the ecological knowledge is passed down from previous generations.  A standard of understanding that is slow to change.

Ecological, this word can have two nuanced meanings.  One option is traditional knowledge pertaining to the “study of the relationships between living things and their environments”.  Another possible definition is traditional knowledge “tending to benefit or cause minimal damage to the environment”. 

Knowledge: (Although the dictionary definition for this word is long), I liked one’s “perception of fact or truth” AND “the body of truths or facts accumulated in the course of time”.

In the end, it seems as though all I accomplished in my attempt to define Traditional Ecological Knowledge was stretching a three word term into an even wordier mess.  So to end on a slightly more comprehendible note, I will simplify Traditional Ecological Knowledge as I have decided to view it.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge: An understanding of the interactions between elements of nature that enable manipulation of those elements in order to benefit humankind and the environment ,that has been passed down from previous generations with limited amendments, and pertaining to the local ecosystem in which the knowledge was been cultivated. 

 

And in the beginning God created… and it was good

I was raised in a Jewish home and I have always followed Jewish law, but until one particular lesson my observance had been by rote.  It was the 11^th grade and I was sitting in Bible class, when I decided I truly wanted to live my life according to the precepts of Judaism.  I had not been on a quest for answers or meaning; they simply found me.  My epiphany was not profound; if anything it was quite mundane and always seems quite lame when I spell it out for others.  The teacher was lecturing about some minute, hidden meaning of the Bible in a mixture of Hebrew and English that I simply could not keep straight.  Around me my friends were studiously taking notes, unaware of the orange and black butterfly fluttering just outside the window.  As I attempted to recreate the path the butterfly was flying upon the blank page of my notebook, I heard the teacher mention the biblical source for the law forbidding meat and milk to be eaten within the same meal.  My attention was redirected to class (where it should have been the entire time), even if only for a little while. 

“You shall not cook a tender young animal in its mother’s milk” (Exodus 23:19). Once again unaware of my teacher’s lesson, I wondered about the nuances in the wording of the commandment, its specific decree and the broad, overarching law (not to eat milk and meat together at all) the Rabbis learned from it.  Why would it matter whose milk a baby animal was cooked in?  So what?  Well, I thought to myself, if a mother and her child are killed on the same day then two generations are decimated at once.  In today’s society the notion that people must be careful to ensure the propagation of species is quite obvious (even if it is ignored).  More and more wildlife is becoming endangered and then extinct as people carelessly use nature to satiate their hunger for more.  Yet thousands of years ago when the bible was given to mankind (regardless of its source), our population was too small and our technological innovations too minor to cause any great impact on nature.  Only a divine, all-knowing source could know that humankind would one day be able to so easily impact nature.  So, there was a commandment warning us to carefully use the bounty around us.  If we take and take without giving nature enough time to replenish, than our lives will become unsustainable and destructive. 

 - - -

Religion has always played a huge part in my life; actually, religion affects every aspect of my life.  Science is a means of understanding God for me.  As a student of ecology, I want to learn about the intricate connections between “everything”.  I then want to use the knowledge gained to help steady the disrupted state nature is currently in.  It is not only my desire, but, I believe, also my duty to rectify the wrongs done to God’s beautiful creations.  I pray that in the near future we will properly care for our environment and in return nature will benefit us as God intended it to.