1. Exploring Sustainability
It’s Easy Being Green
Exploring Sustainability

2. Questions to Consider:
1. List 5 current needs you have in your own life (use on regular basis)
Have you listed any needs that conflict with one another? For example, if you listed clean air to breathe, but also listed a car for transportation, your needs might conflict.
If within ourselves, we have conflicting needs, how much is that multiplied when we look at a city, country, the world?
2. How do we decide whose needs are met?
What happens when a company’s need for cheap labor conflicts with workers’ needs for livable wages?
What happens when individual families’ needs for firewood conflict with the need to prevent erosion & conserve topsoil?
What happens when one country’s need for electricity results in acid rain that damages another country’s lakes & rivers?
Do rich or poor people get better treatment? Why?
Should citizens or immigrants be considered in these situations?
What about people in the countryside vs. city?
Who decides if it is people in one country vs. another?

3. Questions continued
3. Who should take priority between the environment & the corporation? Explain
A. Is the current generation or the next a higher priority? Why?
When there has to be a trade-off, whose needs should go first?

4. Environmental Sustainability
4. What does it mean to be environmentally sustainable?
Sustainability is the ability to continue a defined behavior indefinitely. Thus, environmental sustainability is:
a. For renewable resources, the rate of harvest should not exceed the rate of regeneration (sustainable yield);
b. [For pollution] The rates of waste generation from projects should not exceed the assimilative capacity of the environment (sustainable waste disposal); and
c. For nonrenewable resources the depletion of the nonrenewable resources should require comparable development of renewable substitutes for that resource.
Is this realistic? What would it look like?

5. Consider the three types of sustainability: Social, Economic, and Environmental. What are some things to consider for each?
5. Socially, what do we need to consider?
6. Economically, what are some concerns?
7. Environmentally, what is our focus?

6. 9. Considering your list, which of the items we listed are essential?
8. How would your life be affected by a 24-hour blackout? (consider the electrical devices you rely on in your daily lives)
Share & list with the class
9. Considering your list, which of the items we listed are essential?
a. Which would need to remain plugged in to operate properly?
b. Which items are least necessary?
c. How might the desire for personal comfort influence your willingness to conserve energy at home?

7. 10. What item in your house do you think uses the most power?
Air conditioners are the biggest factor in energy increases. As the heat increases, more power is used
In 1978, 50% of American households had air conditioning. By 2001, it was 77% & increasing.
Since peak temperatures are increasing, air conditioners are being used more hours
Overall, people are building bigger houses so it requires more power to cool; in addition, all of the electronics in the house increase power usage
11. What might be long-term repercussions of increased energy demand?
12. Is it cheaper or more expensive to “go green?” think short-term vs. long-term
Consider “ready light” products like stereo, TV, DVR, game systems that are always plugged in cost $3 billion/year

8. 13. List suggestions that the families (try to) implement to reduce waste
14. What are some steps you & your family could realistically do to “go green?”

9. 15. Where does your trash go?
16. What is the impact of trash on the ocean?
20 year old invents device to clean ocean

10. Discuss Would you use this?
What would be some other inventions or ways we could conserve space, water, energy, etc.?
What have electric companies, appliance companies, cities, &/or the government done to encourage energy efficiency?
To what degree should individuals be responsible for conserving energy?
What role – if any – should the government play in enforcing conservation regulation for businesses?

11. Optional Assignment
1. As a team, select a site (it should be something with which you are relatively familiar)
2. How have you observed energy being wasted or used unnecessarily/excessively at this site?
3. Brainstorm 5 suggestions for reducing energy that would work well at your site
4. Narrow your list to the most simple, but effective suggestion for decreasing energy use.
5. Create an advertisement/poster with an eye-catching, colorful, creative, detailed, & concise of the suggestion for reducing energy