According to Urban Dictionary, a website where you can find sassy and sarcastic definitions for almost any word you can think of, the word “sustainable” is an adjective that means “Concerned with trendy, liberal, or faddish causes, especially alarmist environmentalism and anti-capitalism. An activity or product is described as sustainable if it promotes a hippy agenda, regardless of whether the activity in question has any particular ability to be sustained over a long time period or not.”

Now I don’t know about you, but that’s not really what I think of when I hear “sustainable.” Usually, the first thing that comes to my mind is “WOO! I’m so happy they are taking interest in the well-being of our planet.” My second thought usually goes into wondering about the future implications and how they’re going to keep the project/program going.

Sustainability isn’t some trendy buzzword. It is a real, tangible and achievable goal! All too often sustainability is compared to other faddish trends like man-buns or socks and Birkenstocks. It’s also more than just a stereotype. All too often, especially at Messiah, I hear people say “We recycle, that’s really sustainable.” It’s sad that we’ve broken down sustainability to just mean recycling or composting. Those are great things that we do well on this campus, but we do so much more!

On Messiah’s campus we have…

1. Solar panels
2. Chickens
3. Community Garden

Our 3 hens in Grantham Community Garden

Over the next week or so I will be exploring these 3 things as well as continuing with the Sustain-a-Spotlights! Food for thought…

How do you define sustainable?

Source(s):

“Sustainable.” Urban Dictionary. Web. 01 Mar. 2016.

Posted on March 1st, 2016 by kw1380@messiah.edu
Filed under: Spring 2016