Dear Sustainability Club,
How can I tell the difference
(and the relationship) between
sustaining sustainability as
opposed to sustaining un-
sustain-abilities that look
& feel like sustain-abilities
all this time because that’s
how I was raised and
educated?
Aside (not to be confused with)
the symptoms of my dismay: what
is the root source of my current
sustainability crisis that might urge me
to de-sustain abilities I am sustaining
as sustainable all this time and continue
to sustain unsustainably because how
would I know?
How could I know any better?
Wouldn’t it be my ways-of- knowing,
my ways-of-thinking that got me to where
I am now—between a hot and a warm
place? I feel the heat but that’s nothing
new.
I’m just asking.
Do you think it’s a good question?
Can a conscious system self-correct
without demoralization, bottoming-out
(aporia) & re-moralization, or is it a matter
of trying harder: sustaining re-cycling efforts,
greening of
communities protecting wild-life, encouraging
more home- schooling, turning up rigor in
classrooms, saluting small as beautiful….
upping service project hours, more required
composition maybe, tutoring & study-habit
time management instruction, better care
& tracking for first year students, clarifying
our general ed requirements and taking
back the night?
You could improve my question, maybe:
the terms & images: it’s the spirit of the
concern I’m trying to conjure for our
common conversation. The token samples
are mere surrogates. Pathetic embodimental
manifestation, is all. The devil in the details.
Hit reply or replay to all.
It takes a village.
To act is so easy.
To think is so hard.
Goethe
For those not in love,
there’s LAW
to rule
to regulate
to rectify.
Wm Gass
To live and think on the boundary,
as Tillich once aptly noted, is never
an easy task, for it subjects one
always to misunderstanding.
John Carey,
Warren Wilson’s 3 president.
How can [my] knowledge protect
[my] desire for truth from illusion?
W.H.Auden
How can [I] remember well [my]
ignorance—which my growth
requires—who has so often to
use my knowledge? Thoreau.
xxxooo, EngMajor kind-of-talk
(not to be collapsed, conflated,
or confused with the ways them
other majors talk. There’s a
DIFFERENCE! You may not
like it but you can hear it. )
Illusion vs. real: sustainable sustainability vs. sustain unsustainability. Do you know what are you talking about? What? Can you be CLEAR? Or is it something (so to speak) that our words and vocabulary are ill fitted to represent? to Stand For, as you say, assuming of course that there is something out there to be represented and that our language is a system by which we represent the world to ourselves and others? Is this a correct asssumption? Do we come up with artificial problems, forgetting the really important ones? t
ReplyDeleteDavid, I'm trying to raise the possibility for consideration
ReplyDeletethat our Sustainability Club
(those on campus dedicated to sustainability) might unknowingly
be sustaining unsustainability--
that our cure is part of the problem.
The difference between fixing symptoms and root cause: between tending the ongoing flood in the living room and fixing the holes in the roof: (it's too wet on the
roof and when the sun shines there's no problem)
I'm not doing justice here.
If our ways of knowing and thinking got us to this point of unsustainability, why would our
solutions be any more enlightened?
I'm just asking.
SS