By KA Davis, Social Media Specialist
What is sustainability?
When I was 10, my mom started locking the garage door. I had the habit of sneaking out to the recycling bin and start digging. To me, none of it was trash. The milk jugs were fairy houses, and the cardboard boxes were storefronts to sell lemonade. I knew at an early age sustainability was not just one thing. It wasn’t reduced to recycling. And while I was too young to understand that word, I felt the passion around it in me.
When I was in 8th grade, I was required to do a “Be the Change” project. I reached out to our family friend who started a non-profit in Haiti for a task to base my assignment around. She asked me to help her make bracelets to take on her next trip. I remember feeling dumb. Bracelets? How do bracelets inspire change? But as we beaded, she began to explain to me the goal of her non-profit:
Sustainability
“Not just throwing money at a problem but creating long-term solutions.”
That next summer, she invited me to Haiti with her. There I met a girl named Abby. We became fast friends and bonded over our shared goal of being a fashion designer. But after the trip, I realized something. I could easily be a fashion designer if I worked hard enough, but her opportunity was not the same as mine. No matter how hard Abby worked, her goal would remain out of reach based on where she was born. My definition of sustainability then broadened. It wasn’t just about the planet. It was about the people, too. Creating a world where we all have the chance to realize our dreams, one of truly equitable opportunity.
During my senior year of high school, I decided to continue my journey in defining this word by taking AP Environmental Science. It was a year of blowing up the blimp of sustainability, realizing it was in everything. The clothes in my closet and all the hands that have touched them. The way a city is planned and what the grocery store in it carries. The dirt in which we plant plants and how important it is for kids to play in it and get dirty. Trees or the color green does not define our environment. It is a bridge and an umbrella, and a thread sewn into every part of humanity.
I have always been a big picture thinker, and this level of big excited me. I decided to study sustainability at Auburn and after serving in Student Government as the Director of Sustainability, I applied to work at this Office directly.
As part of the intern curriculum, we must learn how to explain sustainability. A task that had previously felt like chasing the breeze.
We were presented with a compass. Something our Office discovered years ago, something that (pun intended) encompasses sustainability. Instead of North, East, South, and West, the compass reads: Nature, Economy, Society, and Wellbeing. Four points in which are connected and pull at each other. Four points we must maintain and steward, resulting in a higher quality of life for not just us but the generations our mind’s eye can’t begin to imagine or see. It’s a care for those beyond us and the nature around us.
Since, it has become the way I define the undefinable. A point of passion for me and an invitation for everyone into something I used to believe was reserved for scientists, vegans, and people who knew everything about recycling.
Now to me, sustainability is borrowing a dress from my roommate and putting aside food scraps from dinner for my neighbors’ chickens to eat. It is saying hi to a stranger and getting outside when I feel like staying asleep. Sustainability is not expensive and pretentious. It is the realization of connection and having empathy for every living thing. It is creative and fun and never one thing.
Sustainability is for everyone. It is not a club for environmentalists; you don’t have to join. The Earth is our home so, whether you like it or not, we are all already family.
That’s why this semester, the Auburn Office of Sustainability is inviting others into this movement through two simple acts: mending and sharing.
We’re hosting a Mending Night — a come-as-you-are space to repair clothes, learn a new skill, and connect with others over thread and story. We’re also organizing a Career Closet Professional Clothing Drive to help provide high-quality professional wear to students who need it. Both are acts of care — for our neighbors, our future selves, and the materials we so easily throw away. Sustainability doesn’t have to look like protest or policy. Sometimes, it resembles a stitched-up hem, a blazer passed down, or the realization that your small action carries weight. This is your invitation to be part of something bigger, not by changing everything overnight, but by choosing to see the value in what, and who, is already around you.
