Sustainability interface.
- Aoyumi Jung
- Jan 11, 2020
- 3 min read
11.01.2020
What do you think about sustainability and how it relates to your life or your community?
Sustainability was originally the way people lived. The term “circular economy” has been widely spreaded” recently. For the prediction of a world coming to an end soon, people started to work and talk more about sustainability, among which there is circular economy. This concept is similar to the society in the primitive days when people ate what they produced. I wondered had people known about the scenario where the greed of humans has exploited the Earth to the extreme level, would they have remained the old ways of living then. Perhaps not, the greed grows when people have more assets. Consequently, sustainability becomes an ultimate goal to achieve of humankind for the sake of later generations. Lucky enough, developed countries have an earlier call for action to tackle sustainability issues. It is when they reach certain goals of economic achievement, they start to care about where this will lead people to.
Sustainability has been under discussion in both research paper and reality. Yet when it comes to practice, in developing countries, it seems to be less effective. I have emerged my life in different developing contexts but people have a common purpose which is to make money and live happily. What to expect from people’s behavior to tackle sustainability while what matters to them is how to make ends meet day by day, what to eat today and tomorrow. Literally, these poor people need a sustainable livelihood. Thus sustainability for many people facing climate change might be an sustainable environment with prosperous ecology, but for those who has little education and live by their physical strengths, sustainability is really a stable job.
A kid had to quit class since grade 5 in primary school as his family could not afford to pay for the education tuition fee. The reason was that his grandfather passed away due to influence of toxic pesticides and left a huge debt for his parents to pay, resulting in his parents' selling their family's farming land and switching livelihood into doing laborious work in factory. This job is both low-paid and physically demanding, for which he had to help his parents as his main responsibility of a 15 year old kid. His appearance is much younger than his real age, perhaps the living conditions are not enough for him to grow up as ordinary people. We were touched by his strong mind in trying to help his parents by all of his ability, while he should have lived a better life…
A case that has brought me into deep concern is an ongoing construction of a thermal power plant for 7 years in my hometown. This is a huge project of the government that forced the locals to leave their agriculture land. Though people received compensation, this amount will be used up, but they lost a life-long pillar – the land. They sought jobs in factories which require them to commute a lot daily. Over time, a bunch of services have appeared including restaurants, coffee shops, karaoke, hotels,… to serve Chinese workers who come to build the plant. The beneficiaries are only the owners of these services as they know the need of their customers. But where do the normal residents end up? They are ending up with air pollution, increasing living cost, transport accidents, dramatic migration. How can they hope for a life of sustainability as in the first place they were force their home, their land to seek uncertain livelihood.
Therefore, observing this situation along with my life journey, sustainability reminds me of where I will be in the future to take small action day by day. My community is going through a developmental process, however, education quality ironically remains the same. Since I realized the importance of self & social responsibility as well as education, I knew what drives me to try hard is to create a sustainable education environment for youths in my hometown. The major actors driving for sustainability change is youths worldwide because they witness the drastic socio-economic changes. The change led them to ask who they are and what they need to do in this world. Like me, I am aware what I need to learn, try and give values to society. But without certain exposure to the studies and experience of development, it is not that easy for youths to take actions. Doing social work in my community is something exceptional. I hope to empower youths here to discover their potential earlier, step closer to their dreams, and strive for sustainable ecosystem of education, environment and well-being.
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