Perhaps the greatest personal take away for me in this Dutch adventure is this awareness of living a sustainable life. This is interesting for me on multiple levels in that I have been extremely critical of the term "sustainable" for many years and here I am embracing it for my personal and professional lives. It is also interesting for me in that I get a sort of comfort from it, and I am excited by it. Almost that it feels like I'm finally doing something that I felt like I should have done all along. As a kid growing up in the 90's, I feel like there was a much different view of the environment and saving the world by following the mantra "reduce, reuse, recycle". I was one of those wanna-be enviro-warriors that wanted to save the world, and all the animals. I put the soda cans in the recycle bin and cut the plastic rings on the 6-pack holder, and tried to conserve water by not running the water while I brushed my teeth. I loved my dog-eared copy of 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do To Save the Earth.
As a 90's kid, pre-internet and personal phones, I was also an avid reader. Nothing of extreme quality - I just liked to consume information. And food - lots of food, but that's a topic for a different, heartfelt post. When Trevor returned home from The Netherlands for a few weeks, he told my Mom that he and I had started playing basketball in the park here in Utrecht. My Mom laughed and said I must be "so good" since I would get in trouble for reading my books during basketball practice - instead of well, practicing basketball (no wonder I used to get hit in the head with the ball all the time). Anyway, as happens with young people growing into high school and then finding new life missions and motivations in college, my pursuit of saving the environment, and reading books I'm embarrassed to say, were pushed to an almost forgotten place.
One of my earliest decisions in working on my inquiry project for my Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching was to include Education for Sustainable Development as a key design element for my hypothetical Dutch-American hybrid school. It was not on my radar, and it was never a consideration in my adult life. Seeing the collective effort in Utrecht, however, has awakened that forgotten desire within me to give a damn about the Earth. Understanding what it means to be environmentally conscious is very different 20+ years later, but the warm (gezellig?), comforting, self-satisfying feeling I get when I do something sustainable is familiar and welcome. I can't put a word to the feeling I get when I remember that kind of satisfaction - so I give you a bunch of words to try to describe it.
So then what's my beef with sustainable? I claim to be a critic, and yet I just waxed poetic for two paragraphs about the warm fuzzy feels I get when I recycle some paper. Sustainable has become this hot and sexy word on the ag scene, especially in the Northeastern US, where most farmers cannot afford to just be farmers. Everyone has their own explanation of what it means to be sustainable; economically sustainable? environmentally sustainable? Organically sustainable? I cannot help but be skeptical when when everyone's version of sustainable is right. If everyone's right, then no one is right. Right?
But then in my pursuit of understanding sustainability in The Netherlands, and reading about Education for Sustainable Development, I read the following:
"[We] agree that the term suffers from a want of meaning, but argues that the persistent hunt for a definition—i.e., a fixed generic description—produces rather than resolves this deficit. What sustainable development means is context and time dependent and is therefore necessarily ambiguous, open-ended and dynamic. Hence, the success of ESD depends on the paradoxical imperative of reducing vagueness while at the same time maintaining ambiguity." (Eernstman 2013)
Oh. I can get behind that. The ambiguity is essential to sustainability being what it actually is. I liken it to the concept of "saving" a specie. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when America was decimating the population of the American Bison, a theory of conservation was to kill the last of the few bison so that they could be preserved - via taxidermy - for generations to see on display in museums. One hundred years later, we understand conservation as protection and helping threatened animal populations to reproduce. Both approaches had the same goal - to save something for future generations to experience. The means to the end, however, changed over time. By giving sustainability this ambiguity, we allow for the spirit of sustainability to remain intact, the means of being sustainable may shift over time.
For me, implementing Education for Sustainable Development is best described in the following quote from Arjen Wals and Lisa Schwarzin (2012):
a sustainable organization does not refer to an organization that succeeds in keeping itself going by maintaining, for instance profitability, but rather to one that, given what we know today, successfully balances people, profitability and planet by searching for a dynamic equilibrium between these 3 P's.
Learning this in The Netherlands has been critical for my own understanding and consequent acceptance and promotion of Education for Sustainable Development. The Netherlands appears to me as a continuous, contiguous intertwining of humans and nature. Agriculture and the natural world are able to coexist with the urbanized environment - and most everything around here is urbanized with 17 million people living on the same land area as Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. Utrecht is my prime example - parks, educational gardens and small farms are dotted between buildings for work and home.
A country of people that all work together to be sustainable - this "cohab collab" is the outcome. It's a matter of quality over quantity. People have smaller homes, generate less waste, and carry - or at least demonstrate to me - a sense of self responsibility in service of the greater good. My friend and colleague, Martin Olea, described this to me as a polder mentality. If we don't all work together, we all will suffer - we are working together against the water that could sweep us all away if we are not diligent and think about the future.
Utrecht, and other Dutch cities, have community recycling sites - not giant centers to which you need to pay an admission fee. If you have recycling, bring to to this cross street and put it in the appropriate bins. Beyond simple, and when I do it, I get that warm fuzzy, familiar feeling I was trying to define a few paragraphs ago.
This sustainable society is already a part of this culture's future because sustainability, or perhaps polder mentality, is integral to how people learn and grown. Teaching and learning isn't put "in its place", behind four walls, from 7:30-2:00 M-F. Learning about being sustainable is everywhere, and its fun. There are countless community locations, Natuurlijk Utrecht for example, where people can go for informal education about where food comes from. Natuurlijk Utrecht is a network of 9 educational farms throughout the city of Utrecht. Some have livestock, all have gardens and are education centers for field trips and informal education. Petting cows and sheep is a lot of fun, and drop a few bits of actual education in there, and the population isn't quite so removed from agriculture and understanding how food and fiber are grown. Games and toys in stores, books for children, all show nature and farming and teach young people about working together. Parents have reduced work schedules so that they are available to facilitate this learning. I cannot say enough about how valuable it is for sustainability to be a consistent conversation in and out of the home.
And of course, any visitor could talk extensively about the role of the bicycle in Dutch culture. It's a sustainable form of transportation that thrives because the country is small and flat. It's so easy, why not bike? It also thrives because it's cheap, keeps people from being too sedentary, and we all feel better when we can move our bodies and get some air, and feel a little bit closer and "in" the world. Robert Pirsig talks about this idea of being "in" the world on a bike in his classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He's on a motorcycle, I'm on a bicylce, but the idea is the same. Behind a windshield, you're removed from the world that you're attempting to experience as you travel. I agree that one is more connected to the world - and the environment - when it's just you and bike.
Speaking of Pirsig, and my goal to live sustainably, and since there is probably no one that will read my blog, let alone this post all the way to the end, I need to get back to my own realizations about sustainability and the affect The Netherlands and this polder mentality has had on my life. This is the most free time I've had in the last decade, and I'm a much different woman at 34 than I was in my teens and early twenties. I'm much more confident and sure of myself and I've been able to put that crippling fear of being alone forever away because, well, I'm not alone anymore. And now that I have a husband and a career and all the trappings that come with that, I'm more aware of wanting to make my world a better place. Please note that I use "my", not because I'm ultra-possessive and think that I'm the queen of the universe, but rather the world as I experience it. And in the hopes of making things better, I get to hang out with ten year old me and be reminded of how good it felt to read books about saving the world, and trying to act on those lessons. I'm reminded of how good it felt just to read books, and I've been lucky enough to read several while on this sort-of sabbatical. These books are helping me to reimagine and reset the course of my life to live more fully - to live a life of quality and not quantity.
With that desire for a life of quality and not quantity, I want a smaller life. The books I've been reading? Several about the new minimalist movement, and how to implement that in my own world. It's a step towards a sustainable life, and I'm itching to make it. Am I going to be a minimalist? Heavens no. But I can borrow from that mentality to create sustainability for my world - my home and my community. I want a home and a family that is aware of, and works towards bettering the 3 P's. I like the idea of this new definition of life that I create being called sustainable. I think that word is just ambiguous enough to fit.
Works cited:
Arjen E.J. Wals, Lisa Schwarzin, (2012) "Fostering organizational sustainability through dialogic interaction", The Learning Organization, Vol. 19 Issue: 1, pp.11-27, https:// doi.org/10.1108/09696471211190338
Eernstman N., Arjen E.J. Wals, (2013) "Locative meaning-making: An arts-based approach to Learning for Sustainable Development" Open Access Sustainability,
www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability