Story by Chelsea Nguyen Fleige and Briana Conte
In the heart of the metropolitan city of Los Angeles is a small self-landscaped and drought-tolerant garden cultivated by the hands of graphic designer Ginny Blades.
Tired of mowing and watering her ordinary green lawn, she wanted to transform her front yard into a garden filled with native-Californian plants to create a less physically and financially demanding home environment.
Blades said the small vegetable garden in her yard provides her family of four with delectable produce while also serving as an ecosystem for small creatures to prosper.
“If the world is waiting for an external fix, then when will we realize an internal fix is needed?” she said about her mission to promote sustainability.
Blades is part of a growing movement of Californians practicing sustainable or “zero-waste” living under shelter-in-place orders, which will continue until at least the end of May.
“One thing I’m noticing is I see more people getting outside, but also a lot of people are starting gardens,” said Kaitlyn Meyer during an April 15 Instagram Live presentation about sustainable living.
Meyer, garden operations and community engagement assistant for the San Jose State César E. Chávez Community Action Center, added that in times of crisis, people become more aware of how dependent they are on industrial systems.
“Sustainability is being more conscious of your actions and the choices you make the same way you would with different social justice issues – it’s the same with the environment,” Meyer said on the livestream. “With every action you are taking in your life, act like it is a way that is going to benefit the planet.”
During the presentation, Meyer and Diana Victa, the community action center’s department manager, informed students on how to change consumerism-based habits.
Cultivating gardens dominated the discussion and Meyer answered student questions ranging from the types of produce that can be planted now to how to build composting bins.
The increasing interest in sustainable living practices isn’t just a local trend.
In an article by The New York Times on March 27, science writer for Columbia University Meehan Crist makes an argument for continuing some of the habits people have been forced to adopt in quarantine.
“Personal consumption and travel habits are, in fact, changing, which has some people wondering if this might be the beginning of a meaningful shift,” Crist stated. “Maybe, as you hunker down with cabinets full of essentials, your sense of what consumer goods you need will shrink.”
The question hangs in the air: do individual choices for sustainable living make a difference?
Bruce Olszewski, an environmental studies lecturer at SJSU and director of the SJSU Center for the Development of Recycling, said individual sustainability alone could not make the “environmental conscious shift that the planet requires of humanity.”
Olszewski said awareness of the products people buy for fulfillment is vital to changing consumer culture.
“You have to understand that there are nearly 8 billion of us that are consumers and the actions of a single person, although important, are not nearly as influential as the actions taken by industry and government,” Olszewski said.
According to the World Economic Forum, an independent international organization, 50% of the world’s current greenhouse gas emissions result from the extraction and processing of natural resources, with demand for raw materials under a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario predicted to double by 2050.
“In the ’70s we started initiating more legislation, and effective legislation, to reduce air pollution and water pollution,” Olszewski said. “What we have not dealt with is all the mechanisms that create those pollutants, which is basically the production of goods and ultimately the discerning of goods.”
In 1970, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, giving the newly-formed Environmental Protection Agency the legal authority to regulate pollution from cars and other forms of transportation, according to the EPA website.
Olszewski said companies that mass produce goods have very little incentive to reduce the wastefulness of their products because of a lack of concern with where the products end up after being used.
“So here is why this is all important: we use a linear system of extraction, production, consumption and disposal. The environment always, always, always, works as a cycle,” said Olszewski.
In an open loop and linear economy, many consumer goods eventually become waste. Whereas in a closed loop and circular economy, goods can become resources again, he said.
According to a peer-reviewed journal article published by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, called “Circular Economy and Plastics: A Gap-Analysis in ASEAN Member States” by Lewis Akenji and Magnus Bengtsson, “[A circular economic approach] responds to the need for economic models, adapted to biophysical realities, aimed at enabling humans to thrive within planetary boundaries.”
As the founder of the SJSU Center for the Development of Recycling, an organization that trains college students for careers as environmental professionals, Olszewski said schools do not provide enough information to students about the critical component in environmentalism: closing loops in the economy.
“So as we educate more people about this and as more of our students become professionals, they begin to close open loops, they put the pressure on industry,” he said.
Companies that mass produce goods need to make significant efforts to reduce their ecological footprints, Olszewski said.
According to The World Wide Fund for Nature website, an ecological footprint is the amount of the environment needed to produce the goods and services necessary to support a particular lifestyle.
“It is much more efficient to have industry make less of a problem than manage a problem,” Olszewski said.
