SUSTAINABILITY SUNDAY

‘The Road to Sustainability in Flowers, and in Life.’

Please follow along with us as we spend our Sundays exploring and sharing the many facets of the environmental poly-crisis, and how it applies not just to the floral industry, but to all aspects of life.

Before We Begin

Before I go further into the floral side of things, I want to outline a few tools for approaching the thinking that surrounds critical analysis and observation of sustainability flaws in our society.
It’s easy to recognize and call out what doesn’t sit right within our environmental morals; we can sign the petitions and attend the protests, but we need to also be mindful of the questions that need to be asked and think about what responses (rather than solutions) are necessary to enact tangible change.

Solution-Based Questions

I will offer a few “solution-based” questions and musings below that will offer a bit of setup to my next Sustainability Sunday(speaking on environmental impact of import flower production) and beyond:

More often than not, people want to get right into the solution discussion, regarding any problem, without doing the necessary groundwork first. Asking “what is the solution” is like asking ‘What species is the forest?’: it’s almost an incomprehensible question, because there are so many working parts intertwined within the environmental poly-crisis.
Instead, we can begin to consider:
-Solution VS Response, and
-Partial solution VS Total solution

What Are Our Responses

At this point in our human history and relationship with nature, it is more effective to consider what responses we each can explore, rather than what solutions there are, because there are no real solutions. Our industry, systems, and expectation for quality of life have developed with such a strongly embedded growth obligation that some aspects are irreversible (at least without great discomfort) – but we can consider our responses to them, and we can begin with partial solutions.
From clean energy to pesticide-free flowers, there is no one way to fix things, but maybe we can explore the partial solutions that create a snowball-effect into renewed appreciation and care for our environment and a sustainable future. Incremental steps within micro and macro communities will best cultivate the changes we wish to see.