brainstorming out loud...

sustainability?

it

relates

to

EVERYTHING

CREATIVE COMMONS make it share-able, view-able, & edit-able by ALL

POLICY V. PRACTICE

often two very different things

for example: international companies outlaw buying/trading/selling of products known or suspected to made in sweatshops but still do

countries struggling to be sustainable = sometimes desperate measures = illegal = war

WHY?

WHY?

WHY?

BECAUSE: "one must have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star"

They say college is the best years of your life. It's in those years that you "find yourself", your style, your purpose, your neich. Those friends you make are friends forever, and the things you learn are yours forever. I've been in college for one month and I haven’t exactly "found" myself but I am definitely making some head way. I owe most of my self discovery to my Composition I class. Honestly though, when I first found out that I would be taking Comp. I at USF I pictured the comic book version of myself and the cloud forming over my head reading "WHAT A WASTE!” The one common thing that everyone said about college is that the first two years are an extension of high school (cloud over my head reading "GREAAAATE" while my eyes are rolling and my head tilting back). High school Composition consisted of the same routine different story every week. Read. Reflect. Write a paper. It was robotic. Every class up until this one supported those opinions about college. Comp. I with Trey Connor is unlike any other class. I feel at home in this class. I feel like not just my voice is heard but the words I am actually saying too. Composition easily became my favorite class. Yea we write, ALOT, but its not just writing; its wiki-ing. We blog, we link, we think. I had assumptions of what a college class would be like: group discussions, lap tops, blogging, etc. etc. Composition I is just that. We've discussed so much and yet so little. So much in the sense of depth in the topic of sustainability and so little because we have specific focuses in class. What I’ve learned in the past four weeks is nothing short of money well spent. I've learned and actually retained more information from this one class than any other. While focusing on sustainability, I now know the importance of protecting yet sharing information, the idea of green computing and community literacy, the power of pictures, democracy of the earth, the many keys of writing, and vital facts of life I should have been taught four years ago. All that and I still have three months of class to go!

"Sustainability" was never a word I used often. I really never gave it much thought or credit. "Sustainability" was just this semi-hard word that came up once every year in my history classes. It was definitely not an idea, or concept, and especially not a way of life ("sustainable living?")! However, I quickly learned according to Wikipedia "Sustainability is many things to many people. It can simultaneously be an idea, a property of living systems, a manufacturing method, or a way of life." Before reading about sustainability, if someone asked me what I thought it was, I would have said sustainability is being steadfast! = continuing = living = being able to adapt = Darwinian Theory = life. Close enough right?... Wrong! I was just seeing the tip of the iceberg! Luckily, my blinders were murderlized and I learned that sustainability is everywhere!. It is in the homeless man on 66th st. and Tyrone. It is in the bartender at the emerald who cards you even though you got past the front door anyways. It is in the car that pulls out in front of you because its driver does not have the patience to wait for you to pass. Sustainability is related to everything! Sustainability is a fact of life that is, like all facts of life, undeniable.

One of our assignments, known as the "commons how-to", was to create a property license by going to the Creative Commons website. I created a license entitled "ALL" because it is universal. Sustainability is all about open sources and equal rights to everyone and everything. So through my license all people, all over the world can view, share, edit, and add to my work. "My work" is an interpretation and reflection of everything I have ever come in contact with, so who am I to copyright it? When you copyright something, a novel, a quote, an image, a thought, you "imply exclusions & enclosures" (Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy). It ends there. But things are meant to move people, to empower them, to inspire them to listen to your message and take it further. It is rare to be completely original in this day and age when globalization is pushing everything together creating a global conformity and monoculture. But what is "original"? Is it something that’s new? Foreign? Unheard of? Unique? It’s confusing even to me to think this but I believe that all things are original and all things are not. Everything came from a muse of some sort so it is taken from an inspiration, but your interpretation of it is yours. It belongs to you; the inspirations belong to no one. Who claims to have the power to bless anything with the title of "original"? If we cannot define it, how must we explain it? Or protect it? Or make laws over it? My work is simply me. But to think that not one other person, out of the billions, is like me is ignorant. I have no right to claim ownership over ideas. I may claim my ideas and my beliefs and my values as things that explain who I am and my way of life, but they are not objects to be owned. Most people want to be credited for their work, it is human nature, but to own it is to suffocate it. What if your work was flawed? Many things in our world are based upon ownership, most situations are appropriate, however... some are not. My license "ALL" is a reminder that we are all alike: human BEINGS. We are human THINKERS, human DOERS, but above all things, we are human BEINGS... flawed, blessed, beautiful and influencing.

Yes, we humans are flawed. We have done wonderful, horrible things! Wonderful things such as the invention of computers! And other "useful" electronics. How horrible are we to not properly dispose of our electronic wastes though! (otherwise known as "e-waste"). Thus, the birth of green computing! A movement born to reduce the use of hazardous materials, maximizes energy efficiency during the product’s lifetime, and promotes recyclability or biodegradability of no longer usable products and factory waste! A key movement is attaining sustainability! Now why didn’t I know this when I got mad at my walkman for making my favorite song skip and throwing it in the ocean when I was eight? Oh, God forgive me for the ocean wildlife I killed! Picture me with my hand on my hip pointing while you read this: Efforts like green computing really should be more popular among younger ages! Our elders have no idea how much power and influence the youth of the world has! We had an assignment to find some sort of establishment that practices green computing and community literacy. We were to conduct an interview and report what we found. I returned to my high school to carry out this mission, the wonderful establishment of Saint Petersburg Catholic High School! I interviewed Mr. Nikolaus Vandewalle, Student Activities Director. He was in charge of The Student Government Association, which I was unhappily a member of in my last year of high school. So I say to him "Hey, Coach Van, (that’s what the kids called him) how is St Pete Catholic green? How do the Barons practice "green computing"?"... He thought for a moment, chuckled a bit... "Honestly, what the heck is green computing?" We both laughed. I then quickly and shortly explained it and also touched on community literacy, telling him how it’s about the different methods of literacy practices. He said to me "Marissa, you would be more qualified to answer that than I would. The "green" movement is very modern. I'm too old for that stuff. Saint Pete Catholic is a school. We teach. We educate. Yea, we praise recycling and what not, but as far as actually practicing it, that’s something to be discussed off campus." Of course more was said but that was all off the record. Basically, my high school did nothing to contribute to green computing, which would make sense to me because I never really felt like I belonged there anyways.

High school was about one thing: standing out while fitting in, being you and being them, doing, saying, wearing it first but being cool. It was about not being you. It was about being an icon. You had to portray an image and it had to have a lot to say. I learned allot about icons and images in high school, but I discovered a different form of it in Scott McClouds UNDERSTANDING COMICS. We were assigned to read this for Comp. I. It’s amazing! Think about it, you see an image...your retinas send the image to your brain which recognizes its identity and which then carries out the image's purpose. Yes, images have purpose!... and meaning and commands and feeling and power!

This is mcclouds message. The power of the icon! (or "any image used to represent a person place thing or IDEA") the different types of icons that represent concepts ideas and philosophies and how some icons are more "iconic" than others. I never realized the power of images and the thought that goes into making those images. If you think about it, everything is an icon, at least to someone out there, all images convey messages, and the message varies from person to person depending on how they interpret it... BUT.... comics, sequential art, has specific messages, they tell stories...but it’s also so much more than that!

How different styles come to be is amazing! Also how the human mind came to recognize certain shapes as something very specific, like a face.."the fact the your mind is capable of taking a circle, two dots and a line and turning them into a face is nothing short of incredible!" says mccloud. It really is, I never gave my mind so much credit before. It was funny how mccloud made a point that we are all so self-centered too. He’s right but I never thought how even when it came to comics we think of ourselves. "we assign identities and emotion to everything we see" we relate OUR lives and OURselves to those general cartoon characters that have faces made of a circle, two dots and a line and WE JUST CANT HELP IT... I believe we give icons power, "we" being the human race, past present and future. I could draw anything, give it a name, an identity, a message, and I just created an icon. it is believed that many ancient societies knew the secrets of the universe even though they didn’t have technology or the things we have today, but all that jazz just crowds the mind, technology makes us dumber... those ancient cultures had nothing better to do than think, and talk, and read the stars, and work, and draw, creating a tradition that has mutated and transformed over the centuries. Think of how much comes from images, symbols, icons, comics... they might not have had electricity, but they were definitely onto something.

Ancient societies also knew how to live sustainably. Each person had a role and a job vital to the survival of the community. Everyone knew their place and there was no greed. In EARTH DEMOCRACY Vandana Shiva talks of how humans have forgotten that way of life and how we must get it back through the movement of earth democracy. "Earth Democracy is both an ancient worldview and an emergent political movement for peace, justice, and sustainability. Earth Democracy connects the particular to the universal, the diverse to the common, and the local to the global." says Shiva. Trey Connor could not have found a more appropriate book to read for this class. I already knew about the Green Revolution and effects of using non-renewable resources, and how cultures are losing their identities through globalization. But again, that’s just scratching the surface. Shiva talks of all the underlying issues we face when it comes to the earth. It wouldn’t be to far fetched to say that humans could be the worst thing that ever happen to this planet. Every time a new resource or material was discovered we destroyed the land that hosted it, exterminating the communities that inhabited the area, creating conflicts on local and global levels over that had more and how much it cost.

Mikaella's Revision!

kims input =)

Becky Say's Kudos!

Deidre's Edits!

Sam gives you props