Title: Interpretive Studies in Sustainable Development

Milena Klimek

Class of 2005

Advisor: Sheri Breen

Description:

This Major provides a skilled and experienced view of sustainable development focusing on comparative and interpretive approaches, studying global, national, regional and local levels of sustainability and sustainable systems. An emphasis on hands-on experiences will be stressed, enabling a dialogue and comparison with various communities worldwide. Sustainable development can be a vague and ambiguous term. However, in my interdisciplinary studies and specific case studies, I plan to define a sustainable system as a system that works towards using resources available while keeping in mind the ideas of Aldo Leopold's "Land Ethic" which "changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land." In implementing this ethic, sustainable systems would then successfully promote the maintenance of balanced social (containing spirituality, family and community), biological (which includes ecological aspects), and economic environments. Sustainability is not a concrete point, but a direction in the simultaneous consideration of the ever-changing social, biological, economic and political developmental processes and activities.

A universal set of criteria may be used in analyzing various sustainable systems, but this framework will not take shape and form solely with scientific statistics and data. Instead, my analytical framework will include comparative and interpretive approaches. Using this type of structure for analysis will allow me to examine global, national, and regional sustainable systems, with a focus on local systems, while considering social, biological, economic and political arrangements. It is important for me to understand various local meanings and customs of sustainable development and then place those meanings within their regional, national and international contexts. Put more simply, instead of being interested in a universal set of rules in evaluating sustainable development, I am attracted to the assessments of how local knowledge can provide varying understandings within sustainable systems.

In helping explore various ways of sustainable living and the development of sustainable practices worldwide, this major will also focus on the agricultural aspects of sustainable living. I have a personal attachment and dedication to sustainable agriculture, and favor this sustainable system over any other because of the impacts food production has on the natural environment, as well as how necessary of a system it is. Therefore I will always include the agricultural food system in my analyses. But I will attempt to never overlook the interconnectedness and importance of other systems in sustainability.

Personal Description:

"We must believe that it is the darkness before the dawn of a beautiful new world; we will see it when we believe it." -Saul Alinsky

Ever since I was young, I always believed nature and wilderness to be my church, my religion. Not finding sanctuary or community in an organized religion, I found feelings of peace and place in the middle of a forest, or in mountains. Over time I established a partnership with my natural surroundings, a dance of harmony through each season. Nature, the environment, and people, have always been the prevailing influences on my life. When I think of my life goals, I think of my love to help other people realize the different kinds of partnerships they can have with our earth and the rewarding outcomes of such mutual relationships. How do I want to achieve this? By personally living sustainably, by becoming an example, by issuing a call to action for others to also realize their impacts on the earth and other humans.

As long as I can remember, I have always had an environmentally attuned mind. My mother first introduced me to the idea of an environmental ethic. As a child, I remember my mother wearing a large floppy hat and mismatched gardening gloves, bending down over her garden to talk with her plants in the shining sun. She has been an influential motivator, supporter, and role model for me. We would often take trips to parks and up to my grandparents' farm to ride my horses. And we would develop our senses by painting pictures of the flowers in her beloved backyard gardens. All of these experiences in my life have basically enhanced my conscience to be constantly aware and appreciative of my actions toward my surroundings.

Not only would my mom make sure I was able to venture outside to appreciate the world, but she also reminded me of little conservation tips such as turning lights off and buying items with the least amount of packaging. I remember having to be one of the only kids who brought their lunch to school in re-usable containers using wax paper bags. Shaking her head at my pleading to be normal, my mother would constantly remind me that those bags, as opposed to my friends plastic baggies would biodegrade faster. I would almost always blush, sitting at the lunch table, which defines your social status in middle school, trying to hide my environmentally conscious lunch. But looking back, each of those conservation tips helped to feed my future environmental ethic.

The next push towards my environmentalism occurred in high school, at the School of Environmental Studies (SES), located in Apple Valley, Minnesota, next to the Minnesota Zoo. SES is a junior/senior high school, focusing on field studies, community involvement and environmentalism. I chose to go to SES because it initiates hands-on, tangible activities. For me, SES was not only an amazing community of different people sharing an environmental ethic; it also was a place where I learned how to take my education a step further, by acting on what I learned. For example, we were encouraged to be self-motivated by creating research projects that applied both to our studies and our personal interests. Whether these research projects were our pond projects, air quality, or winter survival experiences, they always incorporated the surrounding community of cities and citizens, making us realize the wide range of impacts we students had on our environment. SES created a wonderful base of experience, knowledge, terminology and contacts, essential for my growth in the movement.

At St. Olaf I have taken various environmental classes, which have increased my knowledge of environmentalism, but I have also learned from extracurricular activities. My first year I dabbled in a few environmental actions, helping out Renew Northfield, a group advocating wind energy, and some small volunteer efforts concerning park restoration. I was interested in these activities, but I missed the community of SES. In volunteering in such an individual way, I felt lonely. Without having a support system the fun was almost sucked out of volunteering, making it nearly a chore.

Sophomore year was my activist and organizing year. I finally found the community of people I needed. I met other people with similar beliefs in Peace and Justice, Ecopledge, and the Greens. We met almost every night at 11 to have "solidarity time" with each other. Always met with smiles and caring hugs, I could feel the energy flowing from my friends, exuding tenderness, genuine care and hope. Solidarity time became essential in my everyday life, encouraging me to consciously drop my books and interact with my community, to discuss current events, campus revolution, or anything, which was on our minds. Solidarity time let us share our qualities and ideas with one another and learn from our growing friendships. Finding this sort of community of people encouraged and energized me. I learned so many useful skills of environmental grassroots organizing that year. I became familiar with different tactics or actions to build awareness and receive responses. I learned leadership tactics, how to run meetings, how to motivate people, how to write newspaper articles, how to participate in, how to run, and how to photograph a protest, march, and call-in. At the end of the year, I knew how to embody and express my beliefs.

The largest goal of that year was to reduce my impact on this earth and to be a living example of the lifestyle I embrace. When I realized the ridiculously large impact I have on this earth, I decided to learn how to live as sustainably as possible. My life goals now include learning how to make my own clothes, my own food, my own home, and my own energy.

This year I am still realizing my sustainable living goals. For me, this is the year to experiment and learn and read and experience. I am especially interested in sustainable agriculture. To grow my own vegetables, nourishing them to burst with bright, ripe color, to feel the soil carefully prepared for such gardening, and to establish my very own land ethic, is a joy to me. So I worked hard this past year to place myself in several hands-on learning experiences. I worked in Austria on a very small organic farm. I took an agroecology course through the University of Minnesota. I worked with a local Northfield farmer. I placed myself in Ecuador for my environmental field study, working on a sustainable farm. As a direct result of these experiences, I have developed high hopes to delightfully produce much of my own food in the future, and possibly supply enough for others as well.

I so desperately feel the need to give the earth, our home, the appreciation and respect that it deserves. I feel that so many people are so distant and disconnected from anything remotely natural, pristine, or raw. So few in our nation alone realize their impacts, realize where their food comes from, the processes taken to give them gasoline for their cars, or to put clothes in the endless department store malls. What a consumer culture that we live in, where everything is fake, from the chemically enhanced pine or rose smelled cosmetic products to genetically altered, resource requiring and preservative laden, over-packaged freezer meals. A large portion of our population doesn't think twice about such issues. To me this is sad. We are becoming less and less people of the earth and more and more people of machines and artificiality.

Personal sustainability is, I think, connected to global sustainability. We have environmental impacts all over the globe. I want to connect past thoughts such as wilderness preservation to modern ideas such as sustainability to understand a holistic perspective concerning the symbiotic relationship species have with one another and where humans should fit. I want to do this by promoting ecocentrism rather than anthropocentrism. I believe that once people experience nature, the level of appreciation and understanding of interconnectedness may significantly rise. This aids to widespread knowledge of the importance in protecting our natural sanctuaries, and global sustainability as a whole.

These past few years I have felt something changing in the thought of the population of this world. Either dire problems will appear, which can no longer be ignored, or the general thinking of the public will change and move towards a collective realization, possibly a revolution of the soul. And that is why I believe Saul Alinsky "that this is the darkness before the dawn of a beautiful new world." Our world cannot sustain our current destructive actions. Something must be done. And I need to be part of it.

Rationale:

".The care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope" ---Wendell Berry

With escalating consumption rates, natural resource depletion and other environmental problems, our world faces an uncertain future. Wanting to actively participate in the reduction of such negative impacts of life on this earth, which stray from the previously mentioned land ethic, it is important for me to strive to learn and carry out more sustainable ways of life.

To appropriately work with my passions, it is necessary for me to create a major, which both motivates me in a direction toward a sustainable lifestyle and incorporates a holistic view of sustainability and environmentalism.

This major will be conducive to my preferred experiential learning style by incorporating many field studies and independent studies with a variety of environmental courses offered at St. Olaf. In analyzing specific case studies in an interpretive way, I will receive more of a holistic viewpoint of sustainable development while receiving local knowledge, on a local level, understanding their specific relationships to regional, national and international systems. These case studies will provide a richness and variety in my studies as well as presenting a deeper meaning of sustainable development.

It is important for me to not only focus on sustainable practices but also to acknowledge and learn about the theories behind those practices and to understand the spirituality and beliefs and motivation of practicing individuals.

It is necessary to not only receive sustainable living standpoints from local levels but also to understand national, international and community based levels in order to receive viewpoints from all different sources.

With this major, and the chosen case studies, I will be able to develop a comparative dialogue with various examples of sustainable development. This will develop increased awareness and understanding and appreciation for different cultures, beliefs and practices all within the context of sustainable development.

It is also important for me to be actively involved in such a practice in order to obtain the full feeling and understanding; to witness first hand, such a life-style on whatever level, to be a living and experiencing example of my passions and concerns.

There are many resources available in the St. Olaf area for such a comprehensive, holistic approach to this study. There are many professors with experience, passion and useful connections in such fields, as well as a very conscious, active surrounding Northfield grassroots oriented community. Both of these aspects create a conducive and motivating learning atmosphere for such a major.

At St. Olaf I have noticed a lack of interdisciplinary ecological education. My high school background at the School of Environmental Studies has severely influenced my learning habits and expectations for higher education. I would like to continue my ecological based education from my high school, which included working with my surrounding communities, being aware of international perspectives, as well as integrating hands-on, experiential and independent work ethics. Creating a CIS major including the disciplines, which I have found to aid me in my quest toward sustainable systems, seems simply perfect. In enabling myself to study what I feel very connected to and motivated in preserving allows me to attach feelings, emotions, and convictions, all quite personal tributes to my future endeavors in sustainability. I believe that there is not only a lack of ecological literacy in our educational institutions, but I also believe that there is a separation of emotional feeling as well. In the Words of David Orr "Often those who do comprehend our plight intellectually cannot feel it and hence are not moved to do much about it. This is not merely an intellectual failure to recognize our dependence on natural systems, which is fairly easy to come by. It is, rather, a deeper failure in the educational process to join intellect with affection and loyalty to the ecologies of particular places, which is to say a failure to bond minds and nature." With a CIS major I would be able to integrate both ecological literacy and feeling through trans-disciplinary learning. I am one who is strongly motivated when I am allowed to follow my passions and interests, and with this major I am able to do just that. Because of this, my studies will benefit with whole-hearted interest and dedication.

Initial Senior Project Proposal:

Ideally, I would love to have my senior project be a three-part project. I would like to first compile a sustainability reader containing various chapters or essays concerning sustainability on international and national levels. This reader would be edited by myself, complete with introductions to the different readings, explaining to the readers why the particular essay was chosen. This would be a literature review of sorts. It could eventually be an important resource and asset for both professors and students in the future who are interested in learning more about sustainability and sustainable communities.

I would secondly like to take a look at the history and possible future of sustainability in our Northfield community, taking advantage of the grassroots, close-knit community nearby. I believe it would be interesting to do an over-time approach of the sustainable development within Northfield. I would like to take a look at how Northfield has grown closer or further away from sustainability in the social, biological, and economic frameworks. I would like to see what possibilities the future might hold for sustainable growth in Northfield. I believe that it is important to be connected in the community that you live in, and to have a sense of place, because of this, learning more about the Northfield community and connecting with the citizens, rich with experience and knowledge, would be wonderful resources for this project. I am interested in evaluating and researching the sustainability of this community by using a different methodology than is predominantly used. I am interested in studying the specific case studies by using an interpretive approach, which is explained in the description of this major.

Lastly, I would like to ask and answer the question of "What sustains Milena." This question is very important to me because I believe that in the answer I will discover new thoughts and ideas and ethics that are important to me. I also believe that in delving into such a question, it will enable me to understand the process my life took in order to shape my beliefs and convictions, which I hold today. I believe this to be a deeply personal section, which I feel necessary because of my interest in personal connections with education. The question may be answered in photos, music, favorite poems, excerpts from books, and especially with essays written on stories or memories from my life.

This project will be split into the obvious two-semester schedule. The first semester will be planned to work with Jim Farrell on creating the reader and answering the question of "what sustains Milena". During this semester I will also have informal "check-ins" with my advisor, Sheri Breen to make sure I am keeping up with requirements, etc. Then, during the second semester I will work closely with Sheri Breen for the sustainability of my local community, Northfield.

Description of Web Portfolio:

The index of my web portfolio would include a personal description, a description of my major, links to certain projects and papers pertaining to my studies, links to various sustainable movements, and pictures from field studies and hands-on experiences that I have participated in.

This of course, will also hold the answer to the question of "What sustains Milena". What I think is a very appropriate question to ask in this particular major. This section will be a large portion of my web portfolio. In the third portion of my senior project I need to ask the question of what sustains myself, and the answer will fit perfectly into this portfolio, describing for myself and for others why I am the way I am, and why I needed a major that integrates many disciplines and is somewhat specific.