In this issue:
-The emotional side of sustainability
-The ecology of...everything

::THE EMOTIONAL SIDE OF SUSTAINABILITY::

One morning this week, I pulled into my driveway to find two stray cats attacking a squirrel. One had it by the tail, and I don't want to imagine what the other was about to do before I interfered. There wasn't any thought to it; I saw it, I felt bad, and I wanted it to stop. I spent five long minutes struggling to keep the cats' teeth and claws off the squirrel long enough to watch it climb slowly and painfully up a tree.

So here's the dilemma: Should I have saved the squirrel? While standing eye to eye with it clinging to the trunk, unable to go up any further and breathing heavily, I started wondering if I'd made a mistake. Maybe I was too late, and because of my actions the squirrel would suffer a slow death from its injuries...

There were all sorts of emotions going on. A part of me felt terrible. Another part of me was angry at the cats. And yet another part of me wanted to take it in and nurture it back to health.

In the midst of this, I realized how sensitive I am to seeing animals in pain of any kind. I don't think I'm alone in this. Animal activist organizations know that when they show you the rabbit in the lab with bleeding eyes, or a turtle on its back being butchered alive, that your emotions will say "No! Make it stop!" and spur us to act, even if what we're doing doesn't make things better, or might even make things worse. The emotion persists, whether the experiment on that rabbit is saving thousands of human lives, or the man with the knife is trying to feed his family because the government in his country can't get it together.

You see, in my mind I know that predation is a fact of life, and that with predation comes pain and suffering. But I'd still have a hard time killing my own food. That's because somewhere in me is the belief that "nature" doesn't include pain, and the animals in it are innocent and pure, like some kind of "Garden of Eden."

The perfect example would be our tendency to idolize indigenous people as "noble savages" who live "as one with nature." I know that running away with natives is a fantasy that's crossed my mind more than once. But it's not realistic. This is one of the first things I realized when I started reading works by Daniel Quinn---and it was a pretty tough pill to swallow.

People who live sustainably are human just like us. They make mistakes. They can be selfish, greedy, possessive, violent, and destructive. What makes them sustainable is their way of life, which has proved to be sustainable for 3 million years. We can go on doing most the things we do, so long as we do them in sustainable ways--that is, without rendering our environment so inhospitable that we can't go on living in it.

The belief that a sustainable world is a perfect world is just as damaging as the belief that a sustainable life is a self-sacrificing, bare-bones struggle to survive. Both prevent us from working towards sustainability, but in different ways. We all know people who think living sustainably means no more cars, no more movie theaters, no more designer shoes, and we know why they're not interested in changing things. But, much more subtly, there are those of us who think sustainability is about spiritual transcendence, altruism, or world peace, and who wait for everyone to get on the boat before we can travel to this magical place called "sustainability."

I'm not aiming for a utopia. I'm hoping live in a world that can go about its business without jeopardizing itself. That doesn't mean squirrels won't get eaten by cats, and zebras won't get eaten by lions, or that I won't feel bad when they do. It does mean, hopefully, that I won't have this nagging feeling that something's terribly wrong with the way we're doing things, and I won't have to worry whether my grandchildren will get to enjoy the same things I do.

::THE ECOLOGY OF....EVERYTHING::

As many of you know, I've got quite a number of projects on my plate right now. On top of stressing out every time I see an animal get hurt and dealing with ignorant pizza guys (see Newsletter #6), I'm going to school full-time and working. But, I count myself fortunate in that I feel my time spent at school and work is not wasted...what I'm working towards is a life where the animal kingdom is not so disturbing and thought-provoking, and where all the pizza guys in the world read Ishmael and/or vote.

That's why I'm sitting in front of my laptop right now, half-asleep, trying to shell out a high-quality newsletter before a self-enforced deadline. I realized this past month that this website keeps me grounded in my passion for sustainability. Without that, my work and my studies would be pretty unfulfilling.

--Not that either are my cup of tea. That last article I published was about the pitfalls (and possibilities) of work (www.sustainableways.com/articles/work.html). This month, I'm proud to present somewhat of a prequel to that: The Ecology of College (www.sustainableways.com/articles/college.html). As always, based on my own personal experiences, to make for an interesting (perhaps mind-opening?) view of what it means to go to college....and challenge the system.

Don't think you shouldn't read it just because you're not college-age. Those of you who've read my stuff know that I somehow turn EVERYTHING into a learning experience about sustainability. And for those of you've just joined the list, the ever-growing list that I'm so happy to see for more reasons than one, there's MUCH more to come....

Till next month,
Krystle C.

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