Some thoughts

So I have had somewhat of an eye opening experience this week thanks to an amazing professor his name is Erin Silva he teaches my site planning class. He grew up in East LA and has some pretty incredible stories especially about how he got out of the slums. This week we have been talking about sustainability and basically if I don't get this out of my system I think I will explode.

We as Americans are some of the most selfish stupid people on the face of the planet. The more educated I become the more I realize how backwards our society is; especially when it comes to sustainability. Since the conception of this country we have basically done everything wrong. We practically took land and said it was given to us by God, forced people off of it and began to squander it. We have exploited this idea of the sprawling suburbs because it was everyone's 'right' to own a piece of the American dream.

The suburb is basically what killed it for us. We became decentralized from our daily needs. It makes no sense to travel far distances anytime you need to go somewhere if we were smart everything we needed would be within a quarter of a mile and so we could bike or walk and have a car for special circumstances. Nope. We grow corn to burn so that we can drive our suv's to soccer practice. We are turning farms into shopping malls. Does it make any sense to not be able to grow enough food to feed all our people? That's called ecological debt. We just rely on 2 billion starving people in the world to supply all our selfish needs. If everyone lived with our standard of living it would take 5.4 planets to support everyone. We claim our forests here in America are stronger now more than ever...well yeah they are because we import everything. Our land is way more important than theirs (because it was given to us by God) so we will just exploit the land that we have no contact with because who cares, if we don't see it then it isn't happening. The ethics of this whole thing just kills me. Do we feel ok with how we are treating this planet? We have to come to a realization that there is a biological/ecological carrying capacity of our world and we just can't keep taking and taking. Pretty much the whole American society is so turned around I mean I have heard a lot from my teachers most of whom have lived in other countries that we claim we value land but really we lack any sort of ceremonial space. We live in the geography of nowhere. Every American street looks the same with plastic lit up signs. Look what God gave us and we don't even respect it.

There I got it out. I thought I was just coming to school to pursue a passion of making the world beautiful but my eye opening experience is that I was meant to do this and I cant ethically turn back from what I know. The most beautiful thing in the world is something that is honest and well we just aren't living honestly. We need smart people to fix this problem and everyone else to support them and freakin make some sacrifices. This really is a moral issue and to be honest we are just living in denial. School is hard its a huge sacrifice I work all sorts of crazy hours but now I am more motivated then ever because I want to help solve some of these problems and every person that can contribute adds a different perspective and well I will offer an LDS woman's perspective. Enough I am blue in the face.