Challenge with a Capital “C”

After two months of our urban sustainability challenge, I’m not sure how to rate myself. For every small waste-saving victory, there were several waste-producing slip-ups. For each celebrated purchase of locally grown food, there were countless bites of “place-less” products whose origins I could only guess at. And for every apple core and egg shell I reverently laid in my new vermicomposting box, there were handfuls of other food scraps I guiltily dumped in the trash.

It sounds depressing to put it like this, but I’ve come to recognize that having an interest in living sustainably in a city includes cycles of ups and downs. Both practically—with stretches of responsible behavior interrupted by sustainability blunders—and emotionally—with periods of optimism broken by dark nights of despair. More than anything else, these weeks of hyperawareness have hammered home this point: carving out a low-impact, light-on-the-earth urban existence is not an easy undertaking. It requires not just a commitment to personal transformation, but a willingness to circumvent the system. That means making the personal public, saying no when everyone else is saying yes, making decisions that are the very opposite of convenient, spending money with extreme care and purposefulness, never letting down your guard.

Reading about some of the people who have truly transformed their lives to be more sustainable, I realize that I’m not even close to that point. And if it’s this hard for me, I can imagine how impossible it seems for all the regular Joes out there. Most people aren’t going to be willing or able to put in the work to change themselves within a structure that makes it downright difficult. As urban environmental leaders, we need to think beyond what we can do on our own toward how we can make it more convenient (not just trendier) for others. After reading Cradle to Cradle, I’ve started questioning the idea that saving the earth requires a major sacrifice on the part of spoiled first world citizens. Maybe that is the real challenge for UELs within our cohort and beyond—to create a society where healing, preserving, and nurturing the environment coincides with the easy choice for everyone.