My Interest & Expectation (Wk1 Assignment)

Hello Dear Reader,

For the first week of my course on Sustainable Consumption, I was asked to describe my interest in sustainable consumption as a topic and my expectations for the course.

My Interest

If you explored my background on my LinkedIn profile, you will have discovered that I have an undergraduate degree in Physics. Thus it is probably not surprising to find out that my initial interest in sustainable consumption arose on the basis of energy consumption or (in the case of the US in particular) the overconsumption of energy resources. As I began to delve into the topic on my own, I soon found that the US tends to overconsume all sorts of resources (at least on a per capita basis).

For a very short synopsis of the consumption habits of the US (and many other Western cultures) I recommend The Story of Stuff. It is an online video that is about 20 minutes long, which highlights some of the history and issues of unsustainable consumption. Additionally, after reading Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization by Lester Brown among other books, I was reasonably convinced that not only is unsustainable consumption an issue that needs to be addressed but that it is an urgent issue indeed.

My Expectation

I spent the past year working as the Sustainability Coordinator at Dickinson College, which required me to address a wide variety of sustainability issues ranging from "What types of technologies should be implemented in order to achieve optimal energy savings at a minimal cost?" to "What is the best way to get people to turn off lights?" to "Should the college reduce the quantity of meat-based meals offered in the cafeteria?" with a lot of other questions in between.

Therefore, following a year of very broad, generalized research on sustainable consumption, I hope to be able to dig a little bit deeper into the topic and perhaps identify any underlying principles or tendencies. In particular, as a Climate Change MSc student, I hope to uncover many (if not a majority) of the ways in which sustainable consumption (or really, unsustainable consumption) habits are linked to global climate change.

I hope that this post gave you a reasonable estimation of my perspective from the outset of the course and the beginning of this blog. Please do post any comments or additional suggestions for informational material below.

Sincerely,
Sean Diamond