New Sustainability Studies Minor

By Broadside Contributor Andrew Wingfield

Sheila had several pairs of Ugg boots, in a rainbow of colors. Uggs were her favorite footwear until she enrolled in Sustainable World, the first of two core courses for George Mason University’s new minor in sustainability studies.

For a course project, Sheila studied the process that turned the skin of a sheep reared in an Australian pasture into the pair of cozy boots a FedEx driver dropped on her doorstep in Northern Virginia. She had always slipped on her Uggs with a feeling of pure pleasure. Through this project, those same boots became skeletons in her closet, telling a grim story of heavy fossil fuel consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, acid-polluted waterways and exploited Chinese workers. What Sheila learned about her Uggs’ outsize impact on other people and the planet changed her taste in shoes.

Sheila’s classmate, Anthony, learned through an ecological footprint exercise that if all six and a half billion people on Earth shared the standard of living he enjoys as a middle class American, 6.35 Earths would be required to supply the necessary resources. If, on the other hand, all six and a half billion of us lived at the standard common in Anthony’s father’s country of birth, Pakistan, three tenths of a single Earth would suffice.

The most common definition of a sustainable society is one that meets the basic needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. We are nowhere near sustainability in the United States, as Anthony’s numbers show. That is a big problem because our exceedingly unsustainable lifestyle is the one to which many people in less developed parts of the world aspire.

Experts project that the human population will top out at nine billion around the middle of this century. How are we to honor poorer countries’ desire for economic advancement, maintain a reasonable standard of living in the developed world and, at the same time, ensure that we do not exhaust the finite natural systems that sustain us all?­

To complete this minor, students must take Sustainable World (NCLC 275).
For more information, contact either faculty co-director Andrew Wingfield at awingfield@gmu.edu or Dann Sklarew at dsklarew@gmu.edu.