A conversation on sustainability in and out of your bubble
A conversation on sustainability in and out of your bubble
Part 1: Balancing care & action while unpacking the stereotypes in complex social histories
One of the great things about writing on Substack is meeting other writers. After Ryan Lark of For the Love of Nature came across Rachel Beth Egenhoefer’s Regenerative Conversations, the two began exchanging ideas and conversations about sustainability, the environment, and what it’s like to live and work in two very different but adjacent spaces (both geographically and thematically). Below is part one of a conversation meant to help create other bridges for people working across disciplines and state lines.
Rachel Beth Egenhoefer: Ryan, tell my readers who you are and why you write on Substack.
Ryan Lark: My name is Ryan Lark. I have the Substack For the Love of Nature. Back when I was in undergrad, I was really involved in environmental activism, and I studied sustainability for my degree. Since graduating, I've gone on to work in sustainable agriculture at University of Kentucky, but I've always had this looming doom from the constant uphill battle of sustainability, which makes me feel burnt out and depressed about it a lot of the time. I started For the Love of Nature as a way to keep myself and other people who are reading it positive about sustainability. What about you?
RBE: My name is Rachel Beth Egenhoefer and I write Regenerative Conversations. I'm a professor of design at the University of San Francisco, and I'm very passionate about sustainable design. Working in academia can sometimes feel like a bubble - people researching and publishing about really great ideas but only talking with those inside academia. And likewise there’s a lot of people outside of academia who are interested in sustainability but not understanding some bigger picture ideas. So I started writing on Substack to try to bridge the gap between academics, professional designers, and people who are interested in sustainable and regenerative design.
RBE: Ryan, you mentioned part of your goal for writing your Substack is to remain positive and get away from the gloom and doom of sustainability; how do you stay positive about sustainability?
RL: To be honest, it is very difficult. I feel like the news/ media especially has a lot of “oh my gosh, this horrible thing happened next” or “scientists just discovered this awful thing is actually going to happen sooner than we thought,” so it really takes a lot of proactive focus and reflection. Reflecting on where we used to be, even just generally in the public, especially conversationally. We used to not even talk about sustainability. It used to just be about climate change, and now it's about so much more than climate change. It's about plastics, it's about water usage, it's about everything—social responsibility, things like that. Just the fact that people are talking about sustainability and realizing how much more people care about it now. Even though you could argue the conversation is more polarized rather than what used to be more of a general conversation, I think that it's definitely come a long way. Also focusing on how companies are starting to become more active in sustainability. They're moving away from having social responsibility departments to having sustainability departments, because it's not just about social responsibility. It's about corporations being sustainable within the government, economy, and environment.
How do you stay positive?
RBE: For me, I don't see any other choice. We can sit around and say, “the world is ending and everything sucks” or we can do something about it. I agree it can sometimes be hard to stay positive, but I just feel like this is the choice we have. We have to stay positive because we have to believe that there's a better future. And if you don't believe that, well then what's the point?
RL: We both live and work in different bubbles. I live in Lexington, Kentucky and you live in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. They're both liberal cities. My state is not, but the city is. Living in a liberal city could be a good or bad thing. How do you think about your relationship with where you live compared to the rest of your state, the country, or the world?
RBE: There's a lot of layers to that question. In many ways. I feel very fortunate to live in the Bay Area in California. I'm very proud of how environmentally forward our state is in comparison to others. It's really exciting to live in a place where you can literally see change happen. I've seen laws start on the city or county level, move to the state level and then move to changing the way things are made or built on a larger scale. It’s exciting to be a part of that. There's definitely times when I’d like to put my blinders on and think that this is the way the whole world works, and then there’s times when it’s really important to take those blinders off.
As designers, I think there’s kind of this gut reaction to say “let’s just design everything to be recyclable” or “make it compostable and that solves the problem. But in reality, even though we have mandatory composting here in the Bay Area, most of the US does not. So if you're designing all of these different packaging containers to be compostable and they don't end up in a commercial grade compost, they're just going to the landfill where they won’t actually compost. That's just one example of how you need to consider the world beyond just your bubble.
This is why a lot of the work that I'm interested in doing goes even further than just changing a package design. But how do we change behavior, change culture to think about these things in a different way? I think about how we could possibly design a new paradigm, one that is regenerative and not one that is depleting our natural resources. That takes a lot of work to think about how people live, what their beliefs are, how they interact with the world, what they're being told, and then of course to design a way to change that.
RL: So you mentioned blinders - when to take them off and when to put them on. Is that more for self-care? How do you know when to do that and when not to?
RBE: I don't know if I have one answer for that. When I'm working with design students, a lot of times that question comes up when we think about issues of scale. If you design something for your direct community, and it works in your community, that's great, but what if you wanted to be able to replicate it in other cities? That's a time when we need to look at well, how do other people do this? How do other people think? How do other people interact?
But there’s other layers to your question too. I know for me personally, there’s a bit of back and forth and some of it does have to do exactly with self care. There's definitely been times in the last month where I've just said, “I'm not reading the news, I'm thankful to live in California and I'm going to focus on what we're doing here”. Because I need that for my own self care. And then there’s also times when I know, okay, I need to be educated and informed about what's happening because there are going to be repercussions of things that happen throughout the country and the throught the world that will impact us in California and in the Bay Area. Our bubble isn’t strong enough to keep all the toxins out.
RL: Yeah, that's interesting because I always, I always struggle with at what point does self care become harmful to the outside community by not being involved? I think self care is important, but also you can't just live in a bubble constantly. You have to be involved at some point. And also there's a social responsibility to be involved.
RBE: I think there's a lot of different ways to think about what it means to care and how to get involved. I think it's really important to acknowledge that and to know where your place is. I remember a time right after Trump was elected, when almost everyone I knew was out in the streets protesting. And I said to one of my friends, “hey, you're going to the protest this weekend right?” fully expecting her to be like “yes! of course!” And she just said, “no that's not how I find fulfillment in my activism.” So different people get involved in different ways. For some people it might be packaging design, for some people it might be energy conservation, for some people it might be water, or waste, or systemic racism as it relates to climate change. I think there's so many different ways to be involved with sustainability that you have to where you are investing in creating change, and finding what will fulfill you in that way and not get so bogged down when you can't do everything because no one can do everything. Finding your place in it all I think is really important for self-care, but also we see that this is a really complex wicked problem that is going to take everyone from all these different angles to make changes. There is no single fix. It’s not just about recycling or just about replacing light bulbs, or just about any one thing, it’s a really complex problem that’s going to take a lot of work.
RL: Yeah, it's difficult because there's so many issues, obviously, even beyond sustainability. How do you balance? And I guess the answer is you need to just really know yourself and your limits to be able to know when you can participate in certain things as well as if you have the knowledge or if you should participate in those things. It takes a lot of self-awareness, which is a lot of work. Unfortunately, you have to make those decisions yourself and not let other people pressure you to do other stuff.
RBE: Tell us more about living in Lexington.
RL: So Lexington is interesting because Lexington is very liberal. I would say it's one of the two, if not very few, spots—tiny, tiny dots, really— in Kentucky that are blue. I mean, aside from Louisville, we're the second biggest city in Kentucky. We've had an openly gay mayor, we have the University of Kentucky (UK), which is the land grant and flagship university that has incredible sustainability initiatives, but also Kentucky obviously has a large coal influence in it. It's a coal state. We have Eastern Kentucky, that's only 45 minutes east of here, and even at UK there's a strong presence of coal. I mean, there's a whole building called the Wildcat Coal Lodge. It's wild. It's so liberal. I mean, there's literally rainbow roads, but then you'll walk five minutes and see the Wildcat Coal Lodge and cars that have “coal keeps the lights on” bumper stickers. So there's a really interesting and drastic juxtaposition of this liberal bubble inside like a hornet's nest of conservatism that seeps in a lot, but also we bleed out into the state as well.
It's difficult, though, because UK is a hotbed for college students across the state and beyond. We have a certain “good ol’ boy” stereotype, however you want to interpret that, but we also have a Student Sustainability Council has hundreds of thousands of dollars to give out. I don't even know if I would call Lexington a bubble, now that I’m thinking about it. It has more of a robust, mesh netting over it, but stuff can seep in very easily.
RBE: A lot of what you're bringing up ties sustainability with politics and that it's a “blue issue”. Do you think that's really true and are there other perceptions or misconceptions about sustainability in these bubbles?
RL: I think sustainability, stereotypically, is tied to liberal people or the liberal party, but I I don't believe that it's a political issue at all. I think years and years ago it was bipartisan and now it's kind of shifted to become a political issue as seemingly everything is nowadays.
As for misconceptions, there's a lot about the people in Kentucky. I’ll focus on Eastern Kentucky because that's where a lot of the issues are in Kentucky that people in sustainability focus on. Eastern Kentucky is a huge center of Appalachia, which is coal country, and the coal industry has throughout history tied itself, purposefully, to Appalachia, to become part of their culture. They had camps where their workers had to live on their properties. They used to not even pay them real money. They would pay them basically in monopoly money called scrip, um, which you could only spend at their stores to get groceries and stuff like that. So it's a totally vertically integrated system where they control everything. And they eventually became tied to the culture and self-worth of people because coal and coal mining is very hard work. I mean, black lung is very well known. It's a horrible disease, but these people aren't stupid. They know the dangers, but it's this really delicate balance of being tied to your culture, wanting to make good money, because mining makes very good money, and not wanting to hurt your family or home. Basically, by controlling so much, they've been able to manipulate and isolate these people for so long to where they're reliant on it. Coal has pressured them to feel like they need to be a part of it by isolating them, kind of like Detroit used to be with the car industry.
And the rest of the country has kind of ran with the idea that these people are just trying to destroy the world with coal or whatever. Or at least sustainable sustainability media portrays coal miners as these people who don't really care about the environment when they very much do care about the environment. I would argue sometimes more than the people criticizing them because they're living in the Hills of Appalachia, seeing their homes being destroyed, but they also don't really have an option for a viable income unless they want to leave. Then of course, the media makes these movies like Deliverance where they're just the hillbillies who don't know anything, which is not true. They're not uneducated. They have teeth, which is sad that I need to even say. It's just this horrible disconnect from what media and the coal industry want people to see. Lexington, I think, used to have that same view as the rest of the world, but have slowly grown to be able to see this. They’re starting to provide resources for people in Eastern Kentucky. They're starting to actually care about their issues rather than just point fingers at them. I'm by no means an expert, but I would say that's the main misconception in Kentucky.
You can read part two of this conversation on For the Love of Nature here, where Ryan and I get into understanding personal behaviors and social responsibilities while maintaining empathy.
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