We Are Nature: CSSC Fall 2011 Convergence

Social biomimicry. 

Radicles.

Permaculture. 

Ubuntu. 

These are words that stuck with me after the California Student Sustainability Coalition's Fall 2011 Convergence at CSU Chico this past weekend.

Morgoth Gamboa got my adrenaline pumping as he kicked off the weekend with energy, passion, and a way of thinking that was completely new to me. He walked us through the concept of "social biomimicry"- how we can model our activism, communities, and social systems using biology and nature. Just as a baby plant takes in resources and energy, stretches its roots downward and outward in order to grow tall, inhales the good and exhales the bad - so can we as sustainability activists.


The California Student Sustainability Coalition is roots. It's interconnected fungi beneath the soil, creating symbiotic relationships between all of the interwoven life in its realm (that's us!). It's sunlight in the form of new perspectives, voices, insight, passion. It's the ecosystem that contains all of us: "radicles," just waiting to break through the surface to grow, grow, grow - and give back.


By this, I mean that the CSSC is a network of sustainability-minded students from across the state of California, providing a space to communicate, collaborate, and help our campus projects and campaigns grow and develop.


We are a permaculture. Or, at least, we strive to be. If we are conscious of ecological principles, and act out of this consciousness, we can transform our planet and our social system so that they last. When we get rid of the concept of "waste," when we live within earth's limits, when we appreciate one another and grow from our interactions, when we comprehend the intrinsic connections between life, matter, and mind- then, we can begin to approach something like "sustainability." Then, we move toward a permanent culture that sustains itself with intrinsic motivation, mutualistic relationships, and the plain-old happiness that comes from being together- happiness I know I felt this past weekend at the convergence.


In my Environmental Studies class last year, we spent a little time studying wilderness philosophy. Wallace Stegner's Wilderness Letter stuck in my mind ever since... particularly one quote:


"We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope." (read the full letter here)


That quote always spoke to me, but it has taken on new meaning now. "Wild country," or wilderness that exists on its own terms, allowed to grow and thrive as biology mandates, is our classroom. It's "a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures" because the relationships, complex systems, and intrinsic beauty within that culture of wilderness are what we need to study in order to model our communities and restore and sustain "sanity." Then, we can begin to create a "geography of hope" - rooted in a sense of place, we can grow and transform into the kind of culture and the kind of planet we've always dreamt could exist. When I look at where all the convergence attendees came from on the map of California, I see a geography of hope.


I can close my eyes and imagine the CSSC Convergence, with all its elements, from workshops to late night jam sessions to a field full of wet tents, as a garden. Each part plays a role, everyone occupies a niche, every nutrient is used and recycled, and the result is something beautiful. And for that matter, sustainable - because we'll all be back in the spring, and the fall after that, and the spring after that! 


As in a lichen, where the algae exists because the fungus exists, as in a forest, where one live oak exists because another one does, I exist because you, you beautiful sustainabilibuddy, exist: Ubuntu.