When we first launched SFU’s new Sustainability Office and its website, we spoke of how the language we use and the stories we tell to illustrate what a sustainable life might look like are essential to making sustainability accessible and meaningful to the individuals and communities from whom change must come.
We knew that an important part of our work would entail exploring "sustainability's" many meanings and seeking ways to talk about new—or perhaps old—ways of life that offer positive alternatives to the path down which our consumer culture and the myth of endless growth continue to send us. It’s taken us a bit longer to get started than we expected, but here we go!
In celebration of Earth Day 2013, today we launch our Talking Sustainability Initiative. Through Talking Sustainability we will introduce, explore with you and reflect on ideas, events and relationships we believe are central to understanding “sustainability” as a concept, as a movement and as a way of life.
Over the coming months we (i.e., the denizens of SFU’s comfy Sustainability Office) and our “guest bloggers” will attempt to tease out what this complex and frustrating term “sustainability” means and why the values and behaviours it represents are so essential to our lives. We will look into the complex and sometimes obscure relationships that exist among ecological, economic and social sustainability and why we believe these ideas are fundamentally interrelated and inseparable in practice.
We also will consider how some of our dominant cultural motifs, such as consumerism, make living sustainable lives difficult if not impossible. Worse, the behaviours driven by these motifs don’t really lead to personal happiness or even satisfaction. What, then, we will consider, is the Good Life and how might we live it?
And, through narratives and images, we will invite members of the SFU community to explore with us what a “sustainable culture,” especially here in Canada, might be and look like.
We hope to be back every week with new blogs and hope (we’re just full of hope around here!) you’ll join us in Talking Sustainability.
