Reflections

What is the meaning of the word ‘sustain’? According to my computer’s Thesaurus it means:

Sustain: Maintain, nourish, continue, carry on, keep up, keep going, uphold, prolong, protract (Antonym: quit).


What does sustainability mean for me personally?

For me sustainability means: Living a life which does as little damage as possible to the planet, others and myself and if possible nourishes and enhances the quality of Life in all these areas.

What has childhood got to do with awareness for sustainability?

Down memory lane:

I thought about: Where did I first learn about caring for the environment, about where food comes from and about 'how much do I truly need' to be able to survive physically and about 'having more of this and that' is not truly essential to my well-being? 

Because of 'pondering about this question', I decided to write up a 'personal exert from my childhood'. I realized that how I was brought up created a base to my habits, attitudes, believes and lifestyle, essentially contributing towards a big part of the person I am today, how I live and the choices I make. 

I then also thought about of 'how do other children grow up' in a similar circumstance and society, comparing that with my personal upbringing, and how this might affect their awareness of sustainability. 

So here we go, a condensed version of my upbringing in the context of sustainability:

I grew up in Switzerland in the 1960’s. I had an older brother and my father worked as an electrician. My mother was a stay-at-home mum. I went to a public school and there weren’t any subjects taught about sustainability. 

What did encourage my awareness for sustainability was growing up with parents who had to be inventive due to financial hardship.

1. Growing food and the awareness of Nature:
We had a garden, which supplied us with vegetables, herbs and berries. It was cheaper than buying them. There was no money for artificial fertilisers so we used compost (made from kitchen scraps etc) for the nourishment of the plants. Weeding had to be done regularly by hand, which at the time was a nuisance in my opinion, predominantly because there were all sorts of ‘critters’ hiding in the weeds, which made the experience a bit scary. I did learn what was a weed and what was a vegetable plant and developed awareness about the influence of the fours seasons on plant growth.
My father also kept some rabbits, which were bred-to-be-eaten (that fact was well disguised from me when I was little). He went fishing in a close by river for trout. Weekend walks in the mountains further encouraged my relationship to nature. I still remember how a sunrise can turn the mountains into a visual feast of pink, gold and orange when we stayed in a mountain hut hayloft over night.


What has this to do with sustainability? 
Planting food is sustainable – it has been practices for thousands of years and will probably continue to be a major fact in food production.
I have passed on these skills to my daughters who hopefully then will pass it on to their children, just like my father passed the knowledge on to me.  This kind of lifestyle also taught me to respect the amount of time it took for a plant to grow from a seed, to a plant, to ripen into a fruit and finally to produce a seed again. An apple became precious and very special, something to be appreciated. I realised that there was effort needed to grow food and also water, sunshine and sometimes cold/frost to ‘make it all happen’.

2. Transport and bees:
As a child, if I wanted to go anywhere, the predominant mode of transport was ‘using my legs’. The daily walk to and from school was rather long. It led through some garden plots. On these walks I developed a fondness for bees. Some of them used to drop off the flowering bushes, which were planted next to the water troughs. Once the bees fell off the flowers and landed in the water, they got stuck there and inevitably drowned; so every school day, I used to fish them out of the water and put them back on a flower further away from the water trough.
We didn’t own a car or even a bicycle and public transport was too expensive, so we used it very rarely.

Walking a lot gave me an appreciation of how long it took to get from A to B and what effort was involved.  Walking does not need anything else but functional legs and does not cause any pollution. Walking is a natural, realistic option of transport (except for people with a disability).

3. Playing:
Our family couldn’t afford a TV. My brother and me would keep busy with whatever we found in nature. Some examples: climbing trees, making bow and arrows out of sticks, exploring beetles and bugs etc. learning quite a few helpful lessons in the process, such as: if I climb a tree, I have to be able to climb down it again – not just up; the arrow is the bit to let go off – not the bow; beetles and bugs poo, which isn’t nice if it lands on my bare leg. The list could go on.

4. Material personal possessions:
 I owned one stuffed toy rabbit; my brother one stuffed toy dog. Christmas presents predominantly contained practical items, like a pair of new shoes, which were needed to replace the old, worn out pair.

                              

A purely observational story of an other family’s lifestyle:

I like to start by clearly stating that the following story is purely from an observational, comparative viewpoint in the context of how individual family life can be very different from one family to the next and affect the awareness of sustainability in children growing up in them. It is not meant as a judgement of ‘one lifestyle is better than the other’. 


This particular family had two parents (mum and dad), two daughters and their grandparents visiting often. They all lived on an apple orchard, which was managed by the father. The mother was a full time kindergarten teacher.

1. Food and the awareness of Nature:
There was no vegetable garden. All food was purchased in the supermarket. Lunchboxes for the girls were filled with predominantly processed food but it did contain a fruit. Both girls were obese, which was not due to any physiological, medical condition.  By living on an apple orchard, both girls would have had an awareness of how apples grow, which would create a connection to the four seasons and nature.

2. Transport:
The girls’ mother drove to and from school every day. Their school was a similar distance away to what my school used to be. After school the mother would drive them to the various out of school activities like sports and music lessons. When they finally stayed home, they would sit and watch TV, eat dinner then do homework.

3 & 4. Playing and material possessions: I remember toys being everywhere. The mother at some stage bought a type of hammock, which she attached to the ceiling to put some of the toys in to create space. Every week when I saw them there were at least one or two new toys. Older ones were not being played with anymore. I never saw the girls play outside and seldom playing together. Their celebration of Christmas included a huge Christmas tree with a mountain of presents under it.

What have these two different childhood stories got to do with sustainability?

Generally speaking, looking at western society in this particular context of basic awareness of sustainability: walking used as a means of transport is sustainable (except for people with disabilities) whereas driving everywhere with a car is not sustainable (creates pollution, carbon dioxide exhaust fumes; using - production of - petrol as fuel, manufacturing of cars and so on).
Gardens to grow some vegetables are available in most western geographical locations. Keeping small animals (rabbits/chickens) as a source of food was and is (mostly) possible in a lot of places in the world, whereas commercial animal farming has it’s own problems for the environment and the animals (clearing of trees to create grazing, rearing and keeping chickens in cages, pigs kept in small pens and so on).

The point which I am trying to illustrate with these two, very basic childhood stories is, that the habits and lifestyles a child grows up with will often form a knowledge basis for the rest of their lifes. A child believes that how their parents live is the way it is meant to be, at least before they turn into teenagers and some go through a stage, where everything parents do is – well – wrong and they will experiment with the ‘opposite’ of what they knew so far.
In my own experience, even so I had my own experimental phase as a teenager, I came full circle once I had my own children. My two girls grew up with the vegetable garden, chickens (for eggs not meat, as I was a vegetarian at the time and my older daughter still is a vegetarian by choice at the age of 26); they had to recycle and hear the phrase: no we won’t buy this, as it is not organically or biodynamic grown over and over again. Also – we don’t need this so we wont get it was an other popular one.
I chose to live in slightly rural areas, made a lot of clothing with natural (often recycled) fibres (wool/cotton) and choose homeopathic remedies for ailments (and so on). When both my daughters turned teenagers and started to earn some of their own money, their lifestyle changed to experimenting with drinks like Red Bull, eating chunk food and choosing antibiotics to fix their physical ailments (just a few examples). After a few years of this kind of lifestyle, my older daughter turned full circle and is now telling me what I am doing wrong in the recycling department, (different plastics) or my garden as she herself has a small vegetable plot now in the middle of town where she is renting a flat. She buys organic produce whenever possible and is mindful to use natural remedies before going for the chemical options. I don’t think my younger daughter is quite there yet (20), but hearing the odd mention of ‘when I have children they will have fruit trees and a garden, live on a farm and play outside etc’, there is hope that her children will grow up with an awareness of the environment (sustainability).

Some thoughts on urban upbringing:

What could happen when children who grow up in the middle of a city who might not have the opportunity to experience practically where their food comes from?  

An example: over 30 years ago, when I was still living in Switzerland, I remember listening to a radio program, where a child was asked where milk came from. This child answered: “from the milk carton in the supermarket”. That moment ‘stuck in my memory’. I personally couldn’t comprehend how this child didn’t know that milk comes from cows.

Food is a daily essential need. Not having been educated about basic food growing could cause a disconnection from a certain essential reality, like: the milk we drink comes from a cow or the apple we eat takes months to become an apple and so on. 

This can potentially cause a lack of appreciation (which shows a certain attitude of indifference) of the effort a person puts into growing food, the food itself or towards the cow producing the milk etc. 

This again displays a disconnection from an essential reality, which in my view is not sustainable.

How food is grown, how long it takes to 'be food' is one thing, but once it 'is food and we eat it, what happens then? 

I have seen children who will bite into an apple (for example - this could be any kind of food), they find it a little sour or whatever and because of that, will carelessly throw it away (anywhere).  There seems to be no thought of putting it – for example - into a compost bucket. Saying that, those children might not have ever seen a compost bucket and as a consequence, are not aware that this might be an option. Their apple (or whatever food) probably ‘magically’ appeared in their fruit bowl at home too.

This track of thought could be taken further as to what could potentially happen to the awareness of sustainability – or the lack of it - of children growing up without a basic education for sustainability, when this is not taught at home, kindergarten or school.

Growing and picking vegetables from one’s garden is as straightforward as it can get to create a connection to one’s food and to nature. 

I gather that the environment, lifestyle, attitudes and believes children grow up in/with can be helpful to either acquiring an awareness of a sustainable lifestyle or to develop a lack of awareness in that direction. 

Isabella Bannerman, Cartoonist, Image retrieved from Google, Feb 2013