Mindful Relations

How Much Is Enough?

link@msu.edu (MSU Office of Campus Sustainability) — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 14:11:00 +0000

"Occurring in such quantity, quality, or scope as to fully satisfy demands or needs". So reads the definition of "enough" in my Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. But I can't help wondering if our culture (American and University) sees any limits to "enough". We seem to be "un"satisfied with the amount of income, paper, energy, computer speed, etc. we get. As the university passed a new budget yesterday that raises tuition by more than 5% we must ask ourselves if maybe we have enough students, enough, faculty, enough income, enough computers, yes, even enough books in our library. This is a finite planet. There is only so much land and water. There is a growing population, most of whom do not have anywhere near what we feel we "need" to live a good life here. The math of the Ecological Footprint is pretty simple - there is not enough usable land for everyone to live our North American lifestyle. To do so would require a couple more planets, and obviously we don't have them in the neighborhood.

As we're beginning to see with oil, the resource wars are almost upon us. If we want to live in a world without constant war, we need a more equitable way of sharing the limited resources of the earth. As a first step, we in the privileged developed world, and especially the U.S. must rethink what enough is, or what we leave for our children will be a future with little hope.

Gandhi, violence, and making change

link@msu.edu (MSU Office of Campus Sustainability) — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 15:29:00 +0000

I just read Arne Naess’s Gandhi and Group Conflict (1974). It’s one of those books I would like to read again and again. Naess studied Gandhi’s own writings and public utterances as well as what philosophers, psychologists, and other social scientists, who had studied Gandhi and his approach (Satyagraha) to changing the status quo, have written. Satyagraha can be translated roughly as “truth seeking”. Gandhi believed that we were all seeking truth, but that we could never know the whole truth. This he argued required us to be humble in that pursuit of truth. Given our fallibility then, he offered that it was immoral to use violence against another who sees the truth differently.

Gandhi was a doer, not simply a thinker. But he was incredibly reflective and critical of his own fallibility and weaknesses. While some might revere Gandhi as a saint (Mahatma is a title bestowed on him which means “great soul”), to me he is one of many teachers we can use from which to view our own lives and actions. Having viewed just the other night the compelling film “Why We Fight” I struggle with my own involvement in ending violence that is practiced by our own government in our name. Should I shrug my shoulders and say I can’t do anything? Is writing a blog, a letter to the editor, or waving a peace flag sufficient?

For readers of this, both of you, there is likely some compelling issue that troubles you. The question for us humans then is,“what ought we to do”? Gandhi believed in the ‘means’ being justified in themselves because we can never know for sure that the desired ‘ends’ will follow. Thus his struggle with finding truth and speaking it and acting it with as much integrity, transparency, and self-reflection as possible.

If there is something we wish to change in this community, how ought we to proceed? Speaking our truth is surely a first step, followed by listening to others’ truth and then reflecting and building on that new whole. We have much work to do. Let’s get talking and listening!!

Welcome to the Mindful Relations Blog...

link@msu.edu (MSU Office of Campus Sustainability) — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 16:04:00 +0000

As we prepare for the upcoming 2006-2007 academic year, the MSU Office of Campus Sustainability is excited to announce the launch of our new blog! The Mindful Relations blog has been created as an online forum for discussing issues of campus sustainability within the MSU community. We hope that you will not only return to this site frequently, but that you will add our RSS feed to your live bookmarks so that you can always remain up-to-date.

Please feel free to take an active part in this blog -- after all, we created it for you! If you are interested in becoming a member of this blog, with posting privileges, please send us an e-mail so that we can add you to our team! Thanks, and we're looking forward to working with you to create a more sustainable community at Michigan State!

What's in a name?

link@msu.edu (MSU Office of Campus Sustainability) — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 17:20:00 +0000

I had the hardest darn time trying to find a title for this blog that conveys the sense of sustainability without using the darn ‘S’ word. Hopefully this title gets to that - that we exist in a nest of relationships of which we are mostly ignorant. So we want to encourage respectful and soulful conversation around how we make choices given an understanding that we are all in this together. The local affects the global, the economic affects the environmental, the social affects the spiritual and each in turn affects the other in a complex web of relationships. Besides the growing evidence from emerging science that we are all connected, we must also face the fact, that as physicist and cosmologist Brian Swimme suggests, we are now in a world remarkably different from that of Plato, Newton, or Darwin or other earlier intellects. In the world that they were pondering, humans were one of many species and the natural world was pretty much out there, separate and distinct from humans. As a species we are now both so numerous and so powerful with our increasing technologies, that we are capable of, and in fact are, changing the natural systems upon which we rely for life.

This incontrovertible truth requires us to think differently about our choices today and the legacy and impacts they have for those who inherit what we have sown. This space will thus be used to glimpse relationships in a complex web of life that we are part of. None of us alone are smart enough to know the answers but we hope by raising the possibilities that arise out of recognizing relationships we may collectively learn to make choices that might grow justice, health, peace, and true prosperity for all present and future generations in balance with all that we share this spinning green sphere. That’s our intent. What do you think?

What Resources Are Available?

nick@nemiller.com (N. E. Miller) — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 02:35:00 +0000

I think you make an excellent point about climate change -- that we need to look at tackling the issue in a more 'connected' way. You give an example of thinking more conscientiously about our purchases, taking into account where the products come from and who profits. Unfortunately, most of us don't put that much time, energy, or research into our purchase decisions. Where does one go to find out more information on making sustainable buying choices?

Climate Change PLUS

link@msu.edu (MSU Office of Campus Sustainability) — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 15:03:00 +0000

So thanks to Al Gore more people are interested in our response to climate change. As The Inconvenient Truth hits the Lansing area next week (fundraiser at Celebration Cinema on the 29th, show opens to the public on the 30th) as folks leave the theater with hopefully a better understanding of what we know and don't know, how will we respond?

My fear is that we will run forward to latch on to the latest technical fixes. Hopefully more people will buy compact flurorescent lights (cfl's) and install them for example. This is a good thing as electricity use will be cut 75% by a switch from incandescent bulbs which use 90% of their energy to give off heat, not light. But I want to suggest that we strive to think about climate change in more connected ways. and not as some disconnected challenge from all the others we face. So perhaps one better question to address is how do we use less energy while simultaneously diminishing the gulf between rich and the poor. For we can surely do this in a way where we keep helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. One consideration therefore might be, where do we buy the bulbs? If we can get them cheaper at Home Depot or WalMart is that the best deal for our community? Remember much of the profit from those global giants does not remain in our community but leaves immediately to corporate headquarters and into the hands of some of the wealthiest people on the planet - not all stakeholders share in the wealth.

This isn't the only connection we should try to make as we rush to slow the climate disruptions we know we are causing. Sustainability, if it does anything, should help us consider how things are connected - local to global, economic-to-social-environmental, personal-to-community. present-to-future. We need each other to help us think about what costs we externalize when we propose a solution. If we can think of the reverberations of those choices across a wide array of connections we are more like to minimalize unintended consequences and grow in our communities what we truly value.

Footprints Newsletter...

link@msu.edu (MSU Office of Campus Sustainability) — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 16:10:00 +0000

If you haven't seen it already, please check out the May 2006 edition of our newsletter, Footprints. You can view the newsletter online at:

http://www.ecofoot.msu.edu/newsletters/footprints.newsletter.05.06.pdf

We will be coming out with another edition of the newsletter shortly, with plenty of information on events and speakers coming up at the start of the new academic year. To be notified about the newsletter and other events related to campus sustainability, please join our mailing list:

http://mailman.lib.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/msugreen