Radical Roots of Pitzer Part 2: Environmental Sustainability
The term “environmental sustainability” is often used in popular culture to suggest manageable actions with ambiguous results. So, what is environmental sustainability? Is it recycling plastic, glass and paper? Is it collecting rainwater and then using it in your garden? Is it working to restore land degraded by human exploits? Is it lobbying Congress for strict regulations on human activities that impact the environment?
According to John Morelli, writing for The Journal of Environmental Sustainability, it’s “a condition of balance, resilience, and interconnectedness that allows human society to satisfy its needs while neither exceeding the capacity of its supporting ecosystems … nor by our actions diminishing biological diversity.” Or it’s also more simply accep ed as the rates of renewable resource harvest, pollution creation, and non-renewable resource depletion that can be continued indefinitely. These explanations imply a far deeper—and much more nuanced—understanding of the potential and limitations of the individual as part of the collective of humanity, which is just one small but powerfully threatening piece of the earth’s ecosystem.
Encouraging and working towards environmental sustainability is a deeply aspirational goal, insofar as the fulfillment of the ultimate objective is contingent upon continents and therefore countries and therefore cities and therefore communities and therefore individuals. It’s an ever-tightening series of concentric circles in which you find yourself at the center. It is here, in developing an understanding of the self inextricably bound to the natural environment, that we find the seeds of Pitzer’s Environmental Sustainability Core Value.
Those seeds are the triumvirate of professors John Rodman, Carl Hertel and Paul Shepard; who, understanding the limitations of the individual while believing in the power of the collective, created environmentally and ecologically spiritual, idealistic and actual experiences, endeavors and courses that sing out across our campus today
Listen and heed their call.