By: Isabel Sullivan

The readings for this week were The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis, by Ruth DeFries1, an excerpt from Our Common Future, produced by The United Nations2, and “A safe operating space for humanity,” by Johan Rockström et al.3. Each of these readings discusses sustainability in some form and how complicated and interconnected environmental issues are.

While reading The Big Ratchet, a movie called The Prestige4 came to mind. The Prestige is a film set in the 19th century about rivaling magicians. This film is very intricate and complex, which is why I thought it was a good way to connect and explain all the readings. The opening of the film starts with a narrator saying:

“Are you watching closely? Every magic trick consists of three parts, or acts. The first part is called the pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird, or a man... The second act is called the turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary… making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back…the third act, the hardest part. The part we call the prestige.”4

Throughout the film, the two magicians are trying to top one another’s tricks to see who is the better magician. This creates a cycle where one magician seems to be the best but then the other tops him. When I was reading The Big Ratchet, I thought of The Prestige because of this cycle.

In The Big Ratchet , DeFries describes a cycle where the human population is ratcheted up and then some hatchet (e.g. disease) causes a steep population decline. After this decline, the people who survive figure out the cause and find a way to solve or avoid this cause. The ingenuity here can be sustainable or not for the environment. Ingenuity leads to a ratcheting up of population until the next hatchet; thus, a cycle forms1.

The ongoing cycle of human population change is similar to the consistent back and forth seen by the magicians in The Prestige. The magicians are learning from one another’s faults in order to regain fame. Additionally, the opening scene in The Prestige shows the cycle of a typical magic trick. When humans avoid a hatchet event, DeFries calls this "the pivot"1. In The Prestige, they call this "the turn"4. Each are moments where the unexpected happens; either humans engineer a way out of massive population declines by becoming sustainable or a seemingly ordinary object becomes extraordinary.

The film also goes through many unpredictable plot twists. These twists made the movie immensely complex and even after watching it many times and reading the book it was based on, I still cannot totally comprehend everything that happens. This aspect of the movie reminded me of the Rockström et al. article in which the authors discuss several planetary boundaries that should not be crossed in order to keep the environment balanced and retain sustainability. Rockström et al. note that some of the planetary boundaries, such as biodiversity loss and the Nitrogen cycle, have already been crossed and that we are dangerously close to breaching more boundaries3.

Each of the boundaries are complex and interconnected because the environment is so dynamic. Our Common Future also notes the dynamics seen in the environment. The authors at the United Nations talk about the importance of merging economic and environmental policies. They argue that people need to think of environmental problems as tied to economic problems and that environmental issues hinge on political action2. This is an additional complexity of sustainability on top of it all.

To discuss these readings and the meaning of “sustainability,” guest lecturer Dr. Xin Zhang led our class. Xin is a professor at UMCES Appalachian Laboratory who is working on biogeochemical cycles and applications of biochemicals to the agricultural community. She discussed the evolution of sustainability and asked us about our views of sustainability.

Xin started the lecture by showing us 5 ordinary objects: a line, a circle, a three-legged stool, a doughnut, and a chess board. She asked us to consider what all of the things have to do with sustainability. She was performing "the turn" in her own magic trick; turning ordinary objects into something extraordinary. Here is an account of her extraordinary transformation:

The line represents how sustainability was first described as seeking to maintain some level of resources. The Line starts at some point, then perturbation occurs (e.g. human impact) and then multiple things can happen in the future. Either the population goes back to its original levels, it declines and levels out, or it becomes extinct. This final fate of extinction is not sustainable as the resource is lost.

The circle represents the concept of planetary boundaries that Rockström et al. discuss in their article. This image provoked much discussion in class, and we talked about how the specific boundaries may be up for debate but that the image itself evokes strong emotions about the earth. The image shows us that we only have one earth and we need to be watching closely.

Xin's 3-legged stool illustration represents the 3 major components of sustainable development: economic, social, and environmental protection. These are interconnected and reinforce one another, like a stool.

A doughnut was used to explain the “safe and just space for humanity”.
Here, the outer circle is the environmental ceiling and the inner circle is the social foundation. Humans have to live within this doughnut of boundaries in order to be sustainable. It shows us that we are bound by earth’s resources and by our own social needs.

Finally, the chess board was used to show the complexity of sustainability. Xin asked us what we would define sustainability as and challenged us to draw our own interpretation. For me, I see sustainability as a puzzle piece.

Sustainability is a
puzzle that we are trying to piece together. We combine social, with
environmental, with economic theories. They all fit together but how they
connect isn’t always easy to decipher. The puzzle piece is also useful when
thinking of sustainability as a large issue that is connected to everything. We
may only understand the edges (or boundaries) of the puzzle (earth), but we are
working on figuring out the inside (human interactions with the environment).
We may find where two pieces go together in the middle, yet we still need to
connect them to the entire puzzle.

Overall, Xin was trying
to show us how the idea of sustainability evolved from a simple line into a
chess board. She magically turned everyday objects into pieces of this greater
sustainability puzzle. This extraordinary change explains how complex and intertwined
environmental issues are. Our readings this week explored the complexities of
the environment along with the complex interactions that humans have with the
environment. We all have different ideas of what specifically sustainability
means, but we all are on this planet, impacting it every day.

I challenge all of us to think about how we impact the environment on a daily basis. Do you buy local food? Do you use pesticides? Do you get plastic bags at the grocery store?

Are you paying attention to your impact? Are you
watching closely?

References:
1. DeFries, R. (2014). The big ratchet : How humanity thrives in the face of natural crisis : A biography of an ingenious species. New York, NY: Basic Books.
2. Brundtland, G. H. (1987). Our common future (Oxford paperbacks). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, A., Chapin, F., Lambin, E., ...Foley, J. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461(7263), 472-5. doi:10.1038/461472a.
4. Thomas, E. (Producer), & Nolan, C. (Director). (2006). The Prestige [Motion Picture]. United States: Warner Bros.