Cinco de Mayo: Initial Thoughts

Sustainable design attempts to solve problems that have recently surfaced and become known to the general public. These are problems that stem from our inability to continue living in the current manner without dealing with future & current problems arising from our past/present/future way of life. Solutions are being sought to salvage, preserve, and prevent these problems from continuing and surfacing from now on it seems, but the adoption of this style of thought surrounding sustainability is far from fully accepted throughout the general public. Sustainability has become a known, recent problem because I think the general public has realized the damage we are doing to our environment and is just starting to see the dialectic relationships between these problems and their direct prevention or hinder on being able to continue our current lifestyles. It's really difficult to pinpoint, generalize, or even categorize the problems that sustainable design attempts to solve. Surely, I can point to a gas guzzling Hummer or an extremely inefficient factory and label them contributors to the problems of climate change, waste accumulation, etc. that sustainability attempts to solve, but without putting a context, scale, result, value on these inefficiencies, they really don't seem like legitimate or specific problems. These problems thought are global and can really be lumped into a general category of "non-sustainable design decisions," and I suppose the best thing we can do is identify the most affective way to tackle these endless problems.

Sustainability is an important topic simply looking at life on earth. Theoretically, we could be a very short time away from not being able to sustain the current lifestyle we as Americans or even humans on this earth enjoy, should we keep exploiting resources without foreseeing or worrying about the consequences that result. Maybe at first this means something as simple as scaling back in certain expenditures of our life. This though, may not be so simple, feasible, let alone wanted by some people. Let's face it, sudden changes that initially seem for the worse generally don't seem very appealing to the people that are directly affected. Take for example how must citizens handle tax increases, even if this means better roads, schools, visually appealing communities later on. With this, I don't think we will ever know when we've achieved sustainability and nor is there such thing. Full satisfaction is something hard to come by especially to meticulous, perfectionist people that will forever be finding new technologies and ways to improve on current means.