Sustainability: Can it last?

The following is a work in progress (when it works, that's progress)

What is sustainability? In a broad sense it is the preservation of existing resources for future generations, but what exactly does that entail? There are issues of climate, water, and soil, which then contribute to food and health. In addition, it is possible that in the future issues of light and sound pollution may become of growing concern. All of this also involves the sustainable use of the end products, how we can use our natural resources efficiently to make consumer products but also do so in a “cradle-to-cradle” approach. After all, there’s a reason trash bins are labeled “waste.”

At the same time, there is a notable distinction between being in a sustainable state and developing in a sustainable manner. Assuming a closed cycle with a set reservoir for inputs (which, minus space dust, is what Earth is, or at least until we can synthesize sunlight into mass), a steady state implies a constant rate of inputs and outputs where the outputs are used to regenerate the inputs. In a state of sustainable development, the same situation exists, however in order to ensure that the reservoir is not depleted, the rate of removal of resources from that reservoir must decline over time so that the system can eventually enter a steady state before the reservoir is depleted. In a system of growing population, this requires decreasing the resource load each individual places on the system over time.

So then, what will Sustainability@MIT’s role be in this? Will we focus on specific issues pertaining to sustainability-the climate, water-or focus on societal concepts of sustainability versus sustainable development? And once we decide what our focus will be, how will we approach that? What tools are available to us to address the topics we choose?

True worth, shared trauma, up in the air

So aside from [im]material things, my life has been pretty mundane over the past week, and I haven’t had much to say. But then listening to NPR yesterday, one of the hosts said “Top Kill, Blast Guard (or something like that), what’s with all these macho names?” And another host asked retorted jovially, “So you think if we were more sensitive to the oil spills feelings it would stop?” She responded flatly, “Well I just wanted to point out that we’re using all these macho names for things that don’t work.”

So off I go to my summer internship at Arcadis, an international environmental engineering firm, to do some remediation work. HR told me I might be doing work with BP (oh? What remediation work could they possibly need done?) But my boss said I actually don’t have any set projects yet, and also said I didn’t need to do any advance reading before getting to San Francisco. Gotta love environmental engineers.

What I’ve really been thinking about (aside from the dream I had last night where I won an iMac, or whatever Apple’s desktop is right now-I don’t care Apple, I don’t think you’re more valuable than Microsoft.) is the fact that we are all heading in different directions for the summer, but this is what it’ll be like at graduation, just permanent. I have bonded with the people I have met at MIT in different ways than I have bonded with other people I’ve met along the way. It’s sorta like the bond the victims of a trauma share, like those survivors of Oceanic Flight 815. We’re all in our parallel universes but for a moment they all intersected. Unlike people brought together by circumstance, the people I’ve met at MIT arrived at MIT by-and-large for specific reasons, landing at this crazy institute for specific interests and values. So that is something we all share. But in a year (or so, to be explained) I’ll be leaving it, and so will most of the rest of my closest friends. Some of my friends are leaving it as I write this. I just can’t see myself coming home to a quiet, empty apartment (which is what I’ll be doing this summer). Yes, ultimately I will marry and have kids, but until that happens, what? My current 6 (7 if you include that I have 1 more year as an undergrad) is to stick around for my master’s degree at MIT, work for two years, then go to law school. But what kind of work do I want to do for those two years? Paralegal? Consulting? Those two years are the ones I need to think about more. Any suggestions? This isn’t a didactic or expository post, this is just one of me spilling out my thoughts.

I’m writing this on an airplane. Was Matt Damon wearing eyeliner in that South Africa movie? I also really don’t enjoy flying. The flight time is what is keeping me from going back to Asia.

Another funny comment they made (you have to love the tongue-in-cheek NPR hosts): if we plug up the oil leak, won’t the Earth swell up and explode?”

Rated R

No matter what happens, I find myself relating more to and also more appreciative of Rihanna's music than Lady Gaga. Regardless of how production-processed either artist is, Rihanna's music comes across far more genuine and personal than Lady Gaga's always-fun-but-non-committal beats. Rihanna, on the other hand, has had to suffer through public embarrassment and is so much more human in her music, whether she wrote it or did not.

Part of what I find appealing in music is not just that I like the music itself, but that I like the artist behind the music and feel that I can somehow relate to that artist in some way. Now, why I would relate to Rihanna in any way is not something I myself will make public, but suffice it to say that I connect much more to Russian Roulette than Telephone. At the same time, the fact that an artist is popular in itself will make me admire them more, because what they do is popular. Rihanna, for example, came back from what happened to her and turned her experience into something meaningful that she could share with others in spite of what happened. Lady Gaga, on the other hand, is a packaged and processed post-Madonna (mixed with Ace of Base) machine. Quite talented for a pop artist yes, and extremely popular I'll give her that, but she is impossible to relate to on a human level in any way. A friend of mine criticized her for capitalizing on her experience (hey there Sun!) but I actually admire her specifically for that. The best way to take advantage of a bad situation is to profit off it and the very fact that she chose to do so (or at least listened to her production managers) is something I admire.

Rated R is one of my favorite albums of the past year. Song for song, it's loaded with a song for almost every emotion someone could possibly have after going through what she did. Vengeance, anger, hurt, regret, remorse, spite, sexual curiosity and ultimately emotional catharsis. There's also subtle musical continuity-"Firebomb" plays like the devastating fallout from telling your boyfriend to shut up and drive.

The reason I'm writing an entry about pop music is that I find myself appreciating pop music intrinsically for being popular. Done right, pop music can have much more positive impact than a concerto simply because it can affect a greater number of people because it is reachable to these people. Pop music-pop culture-simply reaches more people and is an amazingly powerful tool that can be harnessed. Lady Gaga knows this, and she certainly is more influential in this respect than Rihanna. She's much better for listening with friends, but I admire Rihanna more for taking greater risks in her music while Lady Gaga has me feeling almost blasé at this point.

Update: It should be noted that both Lady Gaga and Rihanna surround themselves with men in their videos. However, Rihanna chooses to surround herself with traditional, masculine men, despite her experiences with that type of person. Lady Gaga goes the opposite route, favoring effeminate, flamboyant, or homosexual men. Again, I find Rihanna's approach far more intriguing.

It's a Win-Learn Situation

This post is in response to two of my previous posts-first, I hope this can help my friends and second, it takes advantage of that perspective I have on the world, in that I love spite.

Over the past few months, perhaps due to the increasing amount of stock I put on fate or greater meaning (which contrasts with me previous existential-everything-is-nothing crisis), I've come to the conclusion that there is no losing, only learning.

The best way to take advantage of a bad situation is to profit off it. For example, returning to the theme of an earlier post of mine, spite. When you've been hurt by someone, don't try to exact revenge upon that individual. Then you lower yourself to his/her level. Instead, take what happened and improve yourself in spite of it. For every person who looks down upon you, or patronizes your beliefs, take that situation and try to understand what it means about who the other person is, and who you are. You don't need them anyway-prove it to yourself that you can be better off without them. That you are better off. Last fall I had the best semester of my life. I stayed on top of my work, managed Sustainability@MIT, and represented MIT at Copenhagen for COP15, even though I had just lost one of my best friends, I'll call this individual "friend X." I was so hurt and angry that, as the cliche goes, I poured myself into my work. But at the same time, I put my heart into everything I did. No longer was I worried about getting the approval of friend X, whom I admired and respected so greatly. I was concerned about living for myself and figuring out what it was that I wanted and how I would achieve it. At the same time, I continued to think about what had happened and reflected on it as much as I could. What had been different with this friend than other friends? My most loyal friends stuck by me and wouldn't leave my side, and thanks to my friend X I now appreciated them so much more and stopped taking them for granted. It was largely my fault that we stopped speaking, and I wanted to apologize but I didn't know how. If I could go back, are there things I would change? Yes. But it doesn't mean that there aren't good reasons for things to have happened like they did.

What does this have to do with putting too much stock in fate? Two years ago I got a foam dinosaur from my employer, Arcadis, at the career fair. I wanted to give it to my brother, however friend X accidentally ripped the head off ( ha ha ha). Two years late, friend X and I no longer speak, and I end up working for this company the summer after we stop speaking. I'm crazy, yes I know.

Back to the central point. Opportunity in crisis. Phoenix from the ashes. Lemonade. Call it what you want, but just give it some thought. When someone hurts you, think about why it happened. What is the relationship you share with that person, and how does that relationship reflect a microcosm of the human condition? Learn from it. Profit from it. Take it and run with it. Fight-but don't fight back. Eat some modern chicken noodle soup. Most of all, know that your friends are there for you and that sometimes you have to ask because they might not figure it out for themselves. All you need is one.

Plenty of people have learned this lesson before, and plenty of people have preached it. I'm sharing it now because maybe, just maybe, it'll help someone. That's all that counts.

Talk isn't cheap, talk is priceless.

Don't get me wrong-I'm not skitzo or anything, but sometimes I ask my friends for advice when they're not around. Ok, well there are only about three or four people with whom I can do that, and it's not always exactly right. But the approach is more one of "What would ______ say" rather than "What would ______ do?" So even when they're not there, I can still try to think as they would think, see as they would see.

This goes back to the one thing that I value most about my friends, the thing they offer me that I could never get myself-meaningful conversation and different perspectives on life. I will only ever truly see the world through my own eyes. Other people will never be able fully to prove to me that we see the same colors, or that we taste the same food, or that we hear the same tones. But it's when I'm talking to my friends and we can simple have meaningful discussions, the things that make us laugh or cry or angry or excited, our opinions on the world, on other people, that is when I feel the most alive, because we are sharing our lives. When I learn more about others, I learn more about myself.

To my friends, I can only hope I do the same for you.

For more about this topic, check out this article in the Times:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/talk-deeply-be-happy/

Pride and Prejudice

Pride is something that should be reserved for accomplishments, not birthrights. Taking pride in things that you were born as, whether is is your ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, the shape of your forehead, or whatever means you feel as though you have somehow helped to give rise to it, create it, or that you are somehow responsible for it. Parents should be proud of their children. Sometimes I am proud of my friends-other times I just admire and respect them greatly for what they've done.

Taking pride in one thing also means it is preferable to another thing. Is one ethnicity really preferable to another?

Poverty is not a virtue, nor is wealth. What one can be proud of is making the best use of the resources one has. In this situation, I'll use the adage, "Success is not where you end up, but how far you are from where you started."

It might be then that pride is a defense mechanism, used by those who feel discriminated against or told to feel shame to take it back and use it to the opposite effect. In this sense then, pride becomes a crutch, and ideally will no longer be necessary as the issue the pride is taken over enters the mainstream and becomes neutral.

There are so many things to be proud of beyond things that we have no control over. We can be proud of the things we work for, and proud if we overcome obstacles that may be tied to a birthright, perhaps in overcoming a learning disorder or historical discrimination. We should focus our pride on the things we achieve because of the choices we make-not the choices that were made for us.

Alright, you caught me. I've never read that book.

Spite: I don't care if you read this anyway

Between keeping my journal and little jots of rhymes and songs I've written here and there, I wasn't sure whether it made sense to write a blog. And who is going to read it? But, whatever. I decided to write it anyway. And herein lies the topic of my first post (well, the first of this current string of posts).

Spite. It's fascinating. We learn it early as children (I don't want my dinner anymore, I've been waiting too long!) and continue to reap the visceral titillation of it as adults (Just leave the lights on-we're paying enough for this hotel room as it is!). Yet those actions we take in spite are spiteful precisely because we don't derive any sort of quantifiable benefit from them. In the economics sense, we are deriving utility from non-utilitarian actions, actions that do not actually benefit us in a measurable way. Yet somehow we derive pleasure from them.

For many of us, myself included, spite just feels good. It's illogical, it's irrational. Or is it? Take a deeper look at it, and there are a couple of ways to rationalize it. First, perhaps the individual craves a sense of power or control. If the action taken in order to spite another person has its desired effect, that person, the perpetrator has successfully affected the well-being of that person. On some level, this can provide a morale boost, a confidence boost, in that the perpetrator has some level of power, and thus can take shelter in the notion that he can influence another human being and bend that individual, even if only slightly, to his will.

Another possibility is that we don't want to feel alone. If someone is feeling stressed, or angry, or frustrated, or whatever, he perhaps does not want to be alone in his state of being, and wants to share his state with others, especially those he may view as had having a role in his negative state of being. This and the explanation above can be equally applied to happiness and goodwill, but the difference with those is that such actions can win one friends, loyalty, and other benefits. Spite does no such thing!

Regardless of the underlying cause, spite is so intriguing because it represents one's abilities (not necessarily just humans-animals too who can be seen laughing at annoying other animals or humans) to empathize with the situation of another individual, to project oneself into the state of that entity and imagine-imagine!-what that individual is feeling. No man is an island. We build ourselves through the relationships we have with others, we are who we are because of others, or even a lack of others with whom to interact. Spite is just one particularly interesting trait, fascinatingly irrational, and-dare I say-fun in spite of this?

What do you think? Don't answer that. (hint hint)