Who's Afraid?

Last Friday, I was lucky enough to be able to attend a talk on Sustainability at the Royal Welsh College in Cardiff. I and about ten other students, left the college at 1700 to make it in time for the 1830 show. Many of the students who went were members of the environmental faculty or the sustainability council. However, it was open to all students, which is why though I am not part of either of those two groups, I went along. I must admit that I was a little hesitant about going, because I found out that my house was having a house BBQ on the same day! However, by then there was no turning back, having paid for my ticket. 

I returned from the show, extremely satisfied and I definitely think it was on par with having gone for the house BBQ, which was apparently awesome as well! I had thought it was going to be a stand-up show, perhaps some cynical Welsh man ranting about the prevention of global warming, which I would have enjoyed as well. But instead, it was really more like a one-man show. 

Defining what I saw is going to be extremely difficult. This was truly a unique and thought provoking presentation. Some sections were hilarious, some dead serious. He kept us on the edge of our seats by constantly changing the format of presentation. One minute it could be a speech, then it would be a poem, followed by a video presentation before an anecdote. It was 50 full minutes of 'non-stop action'. 

I left with a very tired mind, not being able to fully grasp all I had seen. I felt like I really needed some sugar afterwards, there had been so much information that had to be contemplated. He truly had a remarkable skill for simplifying and conveying little seeds that grew in the light of all his knowledge in a short period of time.

Though I did not agree with everything he said, I definitely realised that my understanding of sustainability was not an understanding at all. It was merely the first layer of gift wrapper of a 'pass-the-parcel'. There is so much more to sustainability and how it is linked to our lives. 

The idea of sustainability is not just about recycling and making things last. It's more about the need to ensure that we understand the fragility of the situation we have put ourselves in. That the earth is not indestructible and that saving it does more than just make sure future generations can see live polar bears. The earth is the very thing that links us to our past, our present and our future. It is the paper we constantly scribble our history down on. With each footstep, a new word is added to this amazing encyclopedia.

After going for the talk I realised that global warming, forest preservation, communal showers, they're just the leaf on a huge maple tree. The idea of sustainability is so much bigger than that, so much more important than that, so much more powerful than that. 

So that was my little paragraph about the epiphany I had due to that talk. As they say, it's so much easier to say something than to do it. Well, I'm only human, and so I found myself on a shopping spree at ASDA (another grocery store... I LOVE THEM), a MNC right after that talk. Oh well, they had great bargains; waste not, want not!

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed.” - Mahatma Ghandi