The assignment:

Sustainability as Practice in Our Lives as Community Members and as Student Affairs Professionals

The goal of this assignment is to understand how sustainability is present (or not) in your life – personal and professional. To do this find a mechanism where you can record what your notice, think and do about sustainability. If journaling or blogging works for you do that. If tweeting is something you like and you want to share that’s good, FB posts, Instagram – of course. Using a Notes or other app is fine and if you want to record and document via photos or voice recording do that. If other mechanisms are better for you use those. The point of this assignment is to think about, notice and document where and how sustainability shows up in your life both personally and professionally. There will be opportunities throughout the course to post these to the ELC site. During the last week of the course we will have a sustainability summit to discuss and analyze what we’ve learned.

Blog Post 1 for the Assignment: This Feels Very Meta

My initial reaction to reading the description of this assignment was a smile and reflection on my previous blog posts about sustainability. In 2016, my husband and I (and our dog, Emma) decided to move into a camper. We purchased a vintage Avion and completely remodeled it to live in for 6 months. Well, spoiler alert, we stayed in it fulltime for 2 years! We fell in love with tiny living. As I started a master’s program with a focus on sustainability, I had grand plans of keeping a blog to document our sustainable living project. Of course, I quickly realized how UNsustainable keeping a blog would be during grad school, so alas, the blog fizzled away as quickly as it had appeared. But when I read about this assignment, revisiting that blog from 4 years ago seems like the perfect place to start. So, you now find yourself reading a blog post for a sustainability class assignment within the blog that I started several years ago on sustainability. Talk about a way to recylce!

The name of the blog, The Rusty Rivet was used as that is the name we lovignly gave our camper that we remodled. We decided to move into an old camper because we loved the idea of repurposing something that already existed instead of using resources to build something new. We also liked the idea of using less energy and water for our small space. We took the adage “Reduce, reuse, recycle” very seriously, by reusing a camper as our residence, reducing our carbon footprint and resource use, and recycling as many things as we could. This project transformed how we viewed material objects. One side of this sentiment is you have to be pretty minimalist to live in a 300 square foot home, so everything you bring into the home must be functional and/or bring you great joy (which we later learned had massive impacts on our wellbeing in addition to sustainability). The other side is, we now continuously see material objects in multipurpose ways. You know the phrase, “One person’s junk is another person’s treasure”, well we have taken it to heart and ya’ll there is treasure everywhere! Food jars got turned into soup containers and served organizing needs, old pallets got turned into a comfy outdoor bed for lounging and studying (you have to understand that when you live in a camper, the outdoors are an extension of your home!). We were and continue to think about alternative uses of objects. The idea behind the Rusty Rivet blog was to help document these thought patterns and share ideas and resources. 

So, here I am, writing a blog entry about a blog, this is feeling very meta! I decided to begin this assignment with my previous short-lived blog, because I think it is the perfect starting place for helping me to articulate how I think about sustainability. I have been very interested in sustainability for as long as I can remember. My passion for sustainability and food led me to a master’s degree in Geography where I focused my work on sustainable and just food systems (which I am certain will be a blog entry on its own). I was also a writer and reviewer for the student run science blog at UGA, the Athens Science Observer. I contributed to sustainability topics. Sustainability is a common conversation topic that emerges with friends and in my marriage. At this point, I think it is evident that sustainability very much influences me and my decision making. 

The specific question of “How do I think about sustainability” still remains. I think based on my previous blog and excerpts from life, I conceptualize sustainability very much in the ways of the first tenets I learned from elementary school, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. To me, finding alternative ways to utilize items that we already have is foundational. I also tend to think about sustainability in terms of the macro and the micro, with a little more emphasis on the micro. It is important to me to live as sustainably as I can because it helps fulfill this sense of responsibility that I have to be a good steward of our planet and to our future generations. Do I believe that my actions will eradicate climate change? No, absolutely not. But I think that my actions observed by others in my community and circles have the capacity to change attitudes around climate change. I am a believer in the ripple effect and that starting small and local can shift the larger macrocosm.

So I hope that you enjoy flashing back a few years with me as we rediscover together my previous views around sustainability and how I am growing in that area. Please be kind as the previous blog posts were written years ago and I have only recently returned to this upon reading the assignment for this class! This blog just felt like the right home for this assignemnt to reflect, write, and discuss sustainability from my perspective. Here are a few more pics of our time in the Rusty Rivet and some pictures of a quarantine remodel we did for a client last year!

Last year we had the pleasure of assisting a client-turned-friend in purchasing a 1972 Airstream and remodeling it for her. We saved this camper that had been sitting in a junkyard for 10 years and gave it a new home and new life to enjoy for years to come. Here are some of the before and after pictures. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.