WSCA and the sustainability challenge

I HOPE AND TRUST that everyone has been enjoying the 75th WSCA conference. Presumably, you've all been widening your circles, renewing old relationships, and making new ones. This year's conference has more attendees than any WSCA except one, thanks to Myron Lustig and Ken Frandsen, Christina Sanchez, and Rachel Dwiggins Buele's planning. We are fortunate to have so many undergraduate scholars with us this year due to the first undergraduate honors conference organized by Mary Jane Collier and in part, funded by WSCA's Executive's Club. As most of you probably know, WSCA is widely known as the best of the regionals because of our leadership in scholarship, strong management of the organization, and our conference is the best, thanks to our members who contribute so generously. Today, I want to spend a few minutes brainstorming ways we might extend our range of leadership to a new arena: the sustainability challenge. When Dennis Alexander asked me to run for an office in WSCA, like most people I said "no." But Dennis didn't accept no. He instead reminded me that he had started a conversation in WSCA that needed to be continued. He had set ecology as the theme for the conference he planned in Vancouver. He had enlisted Dennis Jaehne and me to facilitate a pre-conference on "Greening the Discipline." And he had appointed a small committee to consider greening WSCA. Dennis was right, this effort needed to continue. And I agreed to run. Last year, the conference theme was "Communicating for Sustainability" to reflect the trend toward understanding social and ecological issues as inseparable. The pre-conference, facilitated by Jennifer Peeples and George Cheney, focused on sustainability and communication. Lois Gibbs told us how she communicated sustainability to change Love Canal's history. Today, I want to consider how the sustainability challenge pertains to WSCA. What Is the Sustainability Challenge? The UN-commissioned Bruntland report on sustainable development published in 1987 encourages us to ask, How can we, living in the present, meet our needs without compromising the ability of others in the present and of future generations to meet their needs? Without repeating the sobering and uncomfortable details of the litany of social and environmental problems that are threatening the well-being of ecological systems including humans in the present, and particularly in the future, I think we all can agree that human well-being is in jeopardy. (Whether this should be of concern or whether this anthropocentric interest is the problem is a discussion for another time. Here I assume that we are interested in human well being.) We face a massive sustainability crisis. Too many people today, especially in the developing world--but also in many of our communities, do not have access to safe air to breathe, safe water to drink, and safe soil and sunshine to nourish. At least a billion of the earth's population live at the margin of life without ample clean water, air, food. We know that basic soil, water, air, natural systems are being depleted and polluted so that future generations will be at vastly greater risk of inadequate social, economic, and natural systems to meet their basic needs. The sustainability challenge suggests that we have a responsibility to examine ways in which we can live differently. Although it would be difficult to disagree with those who insist that all major institutions need to change and that a fundamental spiritual change may be the most important challenge (Orr, 2002), I focus today on more mundane and relatively simple prospects and trust that small, feasible activities are related to larger systems. How Does the Sustainability Challenge Matter to Us, to WSCA? Tarla Peterson (1997) has pointed out that the ambiguity of the term provides a multitude of opportunities for innovating, interpreting, negotiating varied, locally adaptable meanings and practices. …