The Blind Men and the Elephant

A couple posts today, to catch up on everything I have been learning and finding out.  First of all, in my Industrial Ecology class today, we had a guest speaker, Professor Leslie Paul Thiele, who teaches in the Political Science field, as well as a course called Facets of Sustainability which is an intro class into sustainability, for those thinking about applying for the major or minor at the University of Florida. Anyway, there was one part of his lecture that I would like to repeat.  And that is the way that he defined the term 'sustainability'.  He compared the test of defining 'sustainability' to the old Indian legend, The Blind Men and the Elephant, where each blind man approaches the elephant from a different side and each comes away with a different version of what the elephant is.  I definitely suggest reading the version above.  And here is the image that goes with that version...

Professor Thiele talked about how sustainability means something different to us than it would to someone in Africa who is just trying to sustain their family one day at a time.  He also spoke about sustainability in different dimensions of time, and this is what sparked my interest most of all.  Sustainability could be sustaining our culture and land for the generations in our graspable future, in which case with help, we definitely can sustain.  However, if we think of cosmological time, the Earth cannot be sustained, since in a few billion years, the sun will have expanded enough to swallow the first three planets, and Earth will be a cease to exist as we know it, or as it has ever been. Each person has the opportunity to view sustainability in their own way and it really can mean something different to each person.


So here begins my search to find out what exactly sustainability means to me...