In a time when the fabric of my own family had come undone, a book of four simple principles became our phoneix. The Four Agreements, was a simple, tiny book with wisdom I still haven’t grasped. Be impeccable with your word. Always do your best. Don’t take things personally. Don’t make assumptions.The last two were always the hardest to fulfill.

Ever since I was a young kid these agreements have become a sort of muscle memory. Just as I have grown, these terms have expanded and stretched to meet the various challenges presented by the growing pains of the perpetually evolving and changing world environments where I have found myself. My current perception of sustainability grows out of these agreements; it begins inwards and moves outwards. We leave our fingerprints on many things throughout our lifetime  but all we have total control over are the, impossibly beautiful, resilient, 60 trillion cells that make our body. Sustainability means recognizing that within your own insignificance, the spec you make up in the vast world we live in, is infinite possibility to be a catalyst for union and progress. Sustainability is connectivity. It’s taking care of ourselves so we can take care of others and move beyond our own individual journey. This is not a selfish pursuit; sustainability means nothing without recognizing that our own individual pursuit is tied to a collective call for action, to sustain to life. For me, understanding sustainability has meant understanding myself and my own place in the chaos of our time.

Often those around us are challenged if their actions are guided by ambiguous principles: morals, values and philosophies rather than facts, proof, evidence. I challenge this ideology. To me sustainability takes roots in the nexus of science, social justice and morality... and U.K.s. We can’t untangle the unquantifiable social and moral implications from the raw data of the issues. My mom used to yell two things to me as a ran to the bus, burnt toast in one hand and a dream to be an artist in the other, “be the best kid you can be and do a U.K.!” An Unconditional act of Kindness. This meant doing something for someone just because it was the right thing to do, because it was meaningful for the person on the other end and more importantly, because it had a ripple effect. Usually a U.K. meant sitting at snack time with “the cursing girl” and the rest of the students who had various social and emotional challenges. I quickly realized that although they experienced a social isolation from the class as the hawk-eyed teacher’s aid supervised their every interaction, they weren’t all that different. My mom’s U.K. mantra has led me to see the connections where lines of separation had been drawn. To address and understand issues of sustainability we must learn to live in the borderlands of disciplines and cast away pride or conceptions about academic purity. Interdisciplinarity is a microcosm of life. As we begin to expect rather than be surprised by the connections to be drawn between disparate problems, real impactful solutions can be made. In my experience, work towards sustainability efforts require collaboration across the lines we often use to divide ourselves.

My relationship with sustainability has been a winding one. My first year I was a signed and sealed Biology major. A piece of me still however, held on to the dream of being an artist and an even bigger part of me yearned to be in a Sociology classroom.  After long reflection fortified by academic experiences, I decided that neither path would give me a comprehensive understanding of what I had become passionate about. I didn’t want to just know the physiology and cell mechanics of the human body; I wanted to understand the “pathologies of power” as Dr. Paul Farmer puts it, that cause such unequal and grotesque disparities in health. I wanted to deconstruct the understanding that health was somehow universally understood rather than a complex and vibrant cultural, social and political product of our societies. I eventually self-developed my own major, Integrated Community & Global Health, which has allowed me to gain a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary approach to health-related topics. My academic experience through the self-developed major curriculum has enriched and widened my perspective of sustainability; it has added to the constellation of mentors and events that have shaped my conception of what it means in both theoretical and practical terms.

Don’t make assumptions. One of the hardest agreements rang in my head as I listened to the man rattle on about forestry development in this tiny, rundown town in Southern Chile. He was fervently criticising the movement of one of Chile’s indigenous people, the Mapuche, to sabotage  forestry operations in their area, which he felt to be their only economic option as one of the poorest regions in the area. Their town lay at one of these borderlands of sustainability: environment, human rights and economics. The Mapuche have faced years of brutal political and social discrimination that has left them with only a fraction of the native lands they once possessed. This encounter took place last spring when I studied abroad in Chile. It put me at the forefront of the complexities of sustainability. While it had been a moral, philosophical, and scientific discussion I had taken part in many times at Dickinson, it was a question of livelihood and cultural right for this community. “Bringing all the voices to the table” came to life in this moment. I was challenged to listen. I was challenged to use my words to communicate rather than fight. Language is a powerful tool that we have often mastered when articulating shared beliefs; however, in this moment I had to be impeccable with my word where clashing lines of politics and culture had been drawn.
During a recent visit from Dean Joyce Bylander to our Baird class she reminded us that our generation is one of new challenges. We most likely not be “better off” than our parents. Perhaps this means that we will have to retool how we understand success. Echoing this sentiment, Dean Bylander quoted David Orr, we’ll instead have to move ‘outward’ rather than upwards. How we have defined success thus far does not coincide with the challenges of sustainability that face us.

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Based upon the understanding I have gained through experience and academics, we will need to ask different questions. We collectively grapple with the many dimensions of sustainability on ecological and personal levels. In a meeting today with Dean Bylander she posed a question, “what sustains you?” Our answers to this question will most likely not have a price tag or be quantifiable. Instead they lie in our relationships, our sense of community and the multitude of people, places and feelings that support us. Sustainability inherently asks us a question of values. What do we value and what is worth preserving?  If we can understand our place in that endless question we can begin to make meaningful action. The stakes are high and the implications of issues like climate change and sustainability sit precariously above our generation. Recognizing the perverse ripple effects our actions have, whether the dismal conditions of those who created the  purchases we are able to make, the faraway point source of the dirty energy used to heat our homes, or direct impacts of my actions towards family and friends, has allowed me to recognize that although I am one person, my decisions are far reaching. As a swahili saying goes, “mtu ni wato,” a  person is people: this means recognizing that although we are individuals, our actions have implications for invisible and visible people and places in the world. As I come to understand these ideas, somewhere along my personal and academic journey I threw away the self-inflicted boundaries of what I thought to be sustainability and instead asked myself, “what do I want the world to look like and what will be my story of 60 trillion cells be within it?”