Since the dawn of time, the world has used and reused and reused and reused all of its resources from water, to nutrients, to air, and anything else you can name. The Law of Conservation of Mass still holds true in everything that we do today. Sustainability isn’t stopping some intergalactic cloud from exerting demonic and destructive influence on us, it’s about oiling the machine of deconstruction and reconstruction that is the earth and everything living on it instead of creating substances that will rust and get wedged between the gears. Plastic, styrofoam, and the production and disposal of such products that don’t decompose suffocate lives on earth—both literally and figuratively—that are the key to the cycle of renewal. If we do not maintain our planet and act now, our planet will not be the homeostatic oasis floating in space that it has been for billions of years.
We each take our role in preventing this future, and Durham Academy’s role is found in a group of students and teachers called the Upper School Sustainability Committee. The ways in which the DA Sustainability Committee combats waste and pollution are diverse and plentiful. One that I myself find very interesting is composting.
Composting is one of the most important ways we return vital resources to the earth. The most basic way we interact in the cycle of energy that exists on the earth is by eating.
Consuming food gives us energy to move, think, play, grow and live! But what happens to those scraps of food jam packed with nutrients that we just can’t consume?
Composting not only diverts this food waste from landfills, but it returns nutrients and microorganisms back to the plants that feed us, making them more nutritious, and even tastier in some cases!
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Today we share our home with 7.7 billion people. We tend to focus on troubles and conflicts, but the dominant story by far is cooperation and mutual support. That’s the only way the population can increase so much. We live in all kinds of circumstances including extremely dense and sparsely populated areas, and by and large we don’t kill each other–that’s how the population can increase. (By contrast, it has been noted that if you put 150 chimpanzees in an airplane and flew them across the ocean, only one or two would walk off alive). The fact that we have 7.7 billion people living in our “home” is an amazing achievement.