Making Sense of Sustainability

I am not sure if all people enjoy life's random happenings, but for me it is the random moments in a day that usually have the most to offer us. It seemed this week I was constantly turning the corner to run into another random adventure. Between a young boy bringing a lost puppy to the village office and then trying to see if it would respond to any of the registered village dog names, to reading a copy of the original Hay Lakes by-law book (which by the way had an original cost of $6.00, and noted that all council meetings shall be held at the village hotel) the week was full of fun adventures in Hay Lakes. Needless to say though the puppy found a good home, and that put me back to work on my sustainability endeavor.

 After completing a sustainabilty assessment last week, I knew that this week I had my hands full in taking the data from this assessment and turning it into a report for administration and council. The assessment was part of a tool-kit put out by the AUMA and covered eight broad topic areas.  In these topic areas questions were addressed in an attempt to help paint a picture of where your municipality is at with its sustainability initiatives. After finishing the assessment I took the data and coded it in a way that indicated how much of a priority that topic could have (e.g. things that may pose a challenge when assessing sustainability were coded red and things that were going really well in the village and pose no threat to sustainability were coded green and a few in between were coded yellow, which meant they have the potential to pose a problem). Once coded I used the data to generate a report and outlined a brief explanation about why I coded things the way I did.

Now that I have the report almost complete the real question becomes what to do with it, and why does it matter? These are two questions that I have been reflecting on this week. I would be lying if I said I knew the answers to either of them. I believe that there is value in completing the assessment for the village, and if nothing else the report will cross the table at the next council meeting and the councilors will be aware of the information found, and will most likely have a conversation around it. There is a part of me that believes bringing awareness and creating a report that generates conversation around sustainability means that value has been found in this project. Why does it matter? I had a professor tell me once that a mark of a good paper is being able to really find the heart of the topic, and begin to answer the so what? It is great to find the information and present it, but if we aren't able to answer the so what and who cares then perhaps we shouldn't be writing about it in the first place.

I know the obvious reasons as to why assessments and questions around sustainability matter; we want thriving communities and a healthy environment, we want our future generations to know what it is like to be apart of a community and have the ability to enjoy the beautiful world we live in. These are the responses that perhaps are always below the surface. They linger because without them work like this has the potential to lose all meaning. If I look below the obvious reasoning I find a new set of questions being asked around why this matters. Something I am learning is that our rural Albertan communities cannot be understood using the same lens we use to view our urban centers. These communities are not only working with completely different resources and parameters but they are acheiving the same daily tasks that an urban town office would have to, except instead of 25 people on staff they have one or two.

If I look deeper, below the obvious values that perpetuate our pursuit for sustainability, and allow myself to use a different set of lenses, I see that what I thought I 'knew' about sustainability doesn't always apply to rural Alberta. In these smaller communities the pursuit for sustainability can revolve around checking the government mandated boxes, addressing resident concerns on a daily basis, taking on the extra workload during tax season and ensuring that the funding and plans are in place for the maintaince of services in the village. In this sense sustainability revolves more around achieving the tasks needed to ensure the village residents stay happy and the village stays functioning well.

This week has brought new insight to me, and allowed me to explore new questions around sustainability. It has taught me to broaden my scope, and learn the importance of context. What is sustainable for one place doesn't always mean it is the same for another.