Sustainability a personal responsibility

By Mishal Thadani     5/16/10 7:00pm

Recently I was interviewing for a job position involving renewable energy when my interviewer asked me a question I've never really been asked before: "What does sustainability mean to you?" To be honest, I tanked this question. I thought about all the times any professor, lecturer or die-hard environmentalist spoke of sustainability, without providing a clear-cut definition for it. I spattered about leaving carbon footprints and how being wasteful was contaminating the environment, but knew I was skirting around the core of the birthing of sustainability.

For years I've devoured information on the importance of sustainability and various strategies to promote it, but I've never even taken the time to establish a definition for it. I then realized that if I (as somebody who considers sustainability to be a large part of his life) never gave much thought to it, then surely neither have those who don't even consider sustainability to be a large part of their lives. After the interview, I was so utterly disappointed in myself that I was determined to figure it out on my own. No research. No friendly help.

Through careful consideration, I came to the following conclusion: Sustainability can be broken down to sustain-ability, obviously leading us to believe that we are trying to sustain something. Now, normally I'm not so dramatic, but I realized that life itself is what we are trying to sustain. Excluding any renewable, recyclable and reusable efforts, we live in a finite world. Energy, fresh water, land and food all have a limited supply, whether their lifetime is a hundred years or a million years from now. Every time you leave your room without turning off the lights for one hour, the lifetime of that energy becomes one hour shorter.

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In short, the goal of sustainability is to prolong life.

Take cockroaches, for instance. As opposed to dinosaurs that dropped dead due to adaptive failure or the first sight of an asteroid, cockroaches are hypothesized to have been in existence for nearly 300 million years. Their physiology can even allow them to survive nuclear radiation. This, folks, is a prime example of a sustainable creature.

We all have responsibilities that help sustain our lives, whether it's paying bills, studying all night for an orgo test or keeping our bodies healthy. Similarly, we have the responsibility to sustain our homes. If you treat your house like I treat my dorm room, your house will likely grow mold or fail structurally.

However, in our grand environment we don't immediately see the repercussions of slacking off on our responsibilities of sustaining it, which is why motivation for doing so gets blasted. Recognizing this responsibility is the first step toward creating a more sustainable atmosphere.

The Rice Endowment for Sustainable Energy Technology (RESET) is a program at Rice that allows us to live up to the responsibility as a community of being as sustainable as we can be. Rice - with its own power plant, police station, food options, and so on - prides itself in its ability to exist self-sufficiently in the middle of a metropolitan area. Through our pride we must also see the responsibility to further the quality of our university by being more sustainable.

RESET is currently asking for students, staff and faculty to engage in their own sustainability projects for Rice.

If you need assistance or more information on the RESET proposal process, please send an e-mail to mkt1@rice.edu.

Mishal Thadani is a Sid Richardson College senior.

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