Little Lessons from House Plants: Lesson 2, Sustainability
Basil told me how we can save the planet without directly trying
“Sustainability is the ability to be maintained at a certain rate.”
Basil is an edible superpower with the ability to elevate basic foods like eggs and cheese into dishes that smell, taste, and objectively are fancy.
Recently, I finally did something about my admiration for basil: I bought my own basil plant.
But here’s the catch I didn’t expect.
There I was, on a MonTuWednesday morning, struck with the inspiration to cook an omelette for breakfast, and I thought, Wouldn’t it be nice to chop up a handful of basil for my omelette— and I have basil right here!
My hand reached for the plant and then stopped. I realized something. The plant was still small, and if I took a handful of basil right then, there wouldn’t be many leaves remaining. Did I really want to use most of the plant’s yield on this omelette? Was the omelette worth it?
And in that moment, the lesson of sustainability hit me. Not in a trendy way. Not in a feel-good-about-myself way. Sustainability hit me like this will be gone.
The Meme-ing of Sustainability
The word sustainability has been commodified for consumers to indulge in.
It’s a buzzword now for environmental influencers, which means that it has morphed into a new, meme-y meaning.
Nowadays, sustainability can be an identifier for others to see which direction you lean in our current political environment. It can be used socially to cue others into your personality, such as when used as a synonym to “eco-friendly.”
Sustainability is branded. People might as well walk around with stickers that read, “I’m not into Earth-killing; I’m a good person. You can trust me. Let’s get coffee together.”
In search of a definition for sustainability with substance.
Let me explain with a marshmallow or two. All-inclusive people of the planet, I present to you the famous child Psychology study, The Marshmallow Test (cute video here).
If you’re not familiar with it, here’s the run-down. Experimenters put a child in a room and offer them 2 options.
Option 1: you can have 1 marshmallow right now.
Option 2: you can wait for 5 minutes and have 2 marshmallows, (double the marshmallows!) when the 5 minutes is up.
According to popular Psychology, people who can hold out for the second marshmallow do better in life. In 2018, conflicting information about the design of the study put the results into question, but the point remains the same— it’s a test of delayed gratification. Do you have the foresight to determine the best course of action to take now for a better future state, and the discipline to hold yourself to that best course of action?
Thank you for allowing this marshmallow segue. Now, let’s get back to basil.
Organic delayed gratification, home-grown by basil
In my own grownup experiment, I conjured up hypothetical future scenarios by mapping them onto my basil plant. How important was it to have basil in my omelette if it deprived me of a better meal in the future, maybe a meal I could have shared with others? What was the best course of action to ensure a better future state?
Delayed gratification would suggest that I refrain from my initial impulse to grab a handful of basil so that more leaves could grow for a more bountiful harvest later.
And here on a micro-scale, when the basil grows within my own space, sustainability is fairly straightforward. I have access to more information and therefore more responsibility. I have to confront sustainability because the consequences of what will happen if I don’t are obvious.
The possibility of losing everything is sobering, but this lesson also opens me to wonder. Up-close, I have the opportunity to open my mind, be curious, and learn from my plant teacher.
The lesson.
Sustainability asks of me to
Respect myself—and what I interact with—equally.
Choose a future that benefits us equally
Use that future as the guiding force to the actions I take today.
Engineering delayed gratification to grow sustainability
As James Clear writes in his book Atomic Habits, “bad” behaviors tend to reward us immediately but have detrimental effects in the long run (i.e. smoking a cigarette relieves stress but causes lung cancer). On the other hand, the benefits of a “good” behavior are delayed and immediate outcomes tend not to be gratifying (i.e. prioritizing studying is unpleasant now but leads to mastery). This dynamic helps me contextualize delayed gratification and choose the action that puts stock in a better future. I respect myself when I act in a way that ensures my well-being for longevity, not just right now.
To keep me motivated in the interim, Clear suggests that I engineer a small, instant reward into the “good” action. A basil-with-a-side-of-egg omelette will fill me now, but two days from now when I’m craving pesto, I’ll probably regret wasting it all. However, taking just enough basil for a garnish to give off an exquisite fragrance and taste satisfies me immediately and allows the plant time to flourish. By providing for both of our futures, we both win. So long as the basil plant shall live, I benefit from its gifts. I’m alright. You’re alright. We’re alright.
A happy story. So why haven’t people figured it out yet for the world?
Context and complication, often with Capitalism
My omelette example takes place in such a contained location that the sustainable choice is obvious and easy. Not destroying a basil plant is on the same basic level as a toddler being able to wait for another marshmallow.
But sustainability is rarely so straightforward. If it was, we wouldn’t be in the dire environmental situation that we are in today. Instead, sustainability appears in our lives in overt ways and larger scopes.
As an example, let’s look at basil when it’s found in a much bigger building than my apartment.
The Supermarket: How Capitalism is like magic, but not in a good way
Grocery stores succeed because they are convenient. Demand is a by-product of developing industry, and grocery stores ease and assist humans to serve that demand. For the cheap price of money instead of the bigger expense of making difficult decisions or spending time we don’t have, grocery stores have commodified food into marketed magic, like in Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California:” what peaches and what penumbras!
Instead of a superpower, basil is now a magic trick that appears out of nowhere. From a shelf or a menu, ask for basil and I shall receive (so long as I have the money).
As a consumer, I am veiled by the privilege of ignorance. I can be completely unaware of where my food is grown, who picked it, which company owns the farmland, how the basil is processed, packaged, and transported, how the pay is divided among the parties involved, how employees are treated, the company’s sustainability policies and whether or not they are upheld, how the deal between the supplier and the provider (my grocery store) is brokered and managed, who finally put the basil there on the shelf for me to find, and how that employee is treated. There will always be more information that I don’t have access to. In fact, the players involved don’t want me to know those background details. The only thing separating me from that basil is whether or not I have the cash to buy the product.
I can’t know, but I have to eat. At this point, sustainability is beyond my individual control. The systems in place, even as they serve us, force us to perpetuate unsustainable practices.
Now, the question is not whether or not we are acting unsustainably— we are. Instead, it’s a matter of how much.
Consider another layer of agency removed.
Trent would love to respect sustainable farming practices and their body, but their paycheck forces them to buy processed fast food that is produced unethically.
Sustainability is no longer a choice.
What can humans without choices do?
So left to our own devices in the real world, what else can we do but slap sustainability onto a sticker on Instagram and try to make a living out of it while we’re at it? What better voice do we have against the all-controlling corporations?
Despite the less-than-healthy implications that social media breeds, it demonstrates a working model and possible solution: trends. One action leads to another. We mimic the peers in our environments subconsciously. Ripples start small; basil buds from a seed.
Change begins with mentality.
The way I think dictates the actions I take. If I meditate on the ways in which I participate in sustainability, that practice comes to the forefront of my mind and shapes my life and the lives of others around me.
Also recalled in Atomic Habits: The Sorites Paradox. You may be familiar with it when presented as a heap of sand. No single grain of sand can make the difference between a heap and not-a-heap. Clear uses the paradox to describe the power of compounded habits. Give a man a coin, and he is not rich. But keep giving another coin, and another, and another, and at some point the man will be regarded as rich. But which coin was the tipping point? Each coin contributes to the wealth and is important to build the vision. Mentality matters: individual thoughts compound and lead to actions. Each action touches the world around us and counts toward growing change.
The vaguely gradual, un-pinnable nature of change bothers me. But something I believe beyond a doubt is that living so that others may live as well must be the right thing. It must be right because I simply cannot imagine it being untrue. And I have a feeling that if enough people learn how to act in our collective interest, to live in a way that respects themselves and others in a way that will last, we won’t have to do anything extra to save the planet.
It’s not easy because it requires a lot of mental energy to shift thinking away from the answers provided to us by our operating environment. It takes bravery and effort not to settle but instead to build a better definitions for sustainability. We have to stand up for our authentic selves and as our authentic selves if we choose to save life.
Calls to Action
Ask yourself, Am I living for us?
Choose 1 action to extend (“pay it forward”) so that another person can do the same thing.
See how many aspects you can count in your life that can be rated by sustainability— it doesn’t have to be environmental.
Talk to a person of authority or entity in your community about ways to improve sustainability practices.
Did you like this little lesson from a plant (communicated through me)? Comment how you can relate or what it make you think of, and look out for the next lesson: patience.