Staying Place-based in a Remote Ecosystem

Sustainability can look very different in the era of lockdowns and remote work. Over a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, we continue to see mixed impacts on the environment. Lockdowns and a transition to digital commuting reduced global carbon emissions by 6.4% in 2020. However, the past year has also seen widespread adoption of single-use plastics as well as pauses to policy measures like plastic bag bans in response to supply shortages. Generalizations say little about how these issues impact a specific place like Portland. Though sustainability covers a broad range of geographic scales, in practice, it is largely place-based. To work towards just environmental and community sustainability, we have to look at the realities around us. For many of us in 2020, our worlds shrank and our sense of place dramatically shifted.

Place-based education grounds learners in the local landscape and its communities, keeping learning deeply contextualized. On campus, this is a common experience— we’re all breathing the same air, occupying the same buildings, and touching the same soil. Transitioning to remote programming often relies on basic assumptions about our lives. Many of us are not in Portland. Access to technology is not a given. The past year has seen displacement amidst both snow and wildfire, COVID-19, the ensuing recession, and the growing houselessness crisis across our communities. When we approach sustainability remotely in 2021, these widely varied experiences all deserve to be attended to. 

In the absence of in-person outreach, keeping sustainability grounded can be challenging. At the Student Sustainability Center (SSC), social media has been especially valuable for outreach in this remote context. Outside of our curated feed, I’m constantly bombarded by harmful narratives about sustainability. A lot of these are broad generalizations like the idea that everyone can and should, for example, follow a vegan or zero-waste lifestyle without regard to intersections of culture, disability, and socioeconomic context. Other narratives build up a very specific image for what someone with a “sustainable lifestyle" looks like—including the type of bodies welcome in their spaces, the chic aesthetics and fashion choices they can afford, the cars they drive, the dish soap they use, the sponsored “eco-friendly” gadgets they’re compensated to advertise. Abstractions of what sustainability looks like abound in the form of greenwashing, where corporations rebrand themselves to the aesthetic of eco-friendliness while masking their environmental footprint. For a student who’s interested in sustainability (like myself on my personal Instagram), the SSC’s posts, including resources for sustainability at home, remote volunteer opportunities, and events often aimed at challenging those harmful narratives, are all intermingled with this and other #sustainable content. Images can’t replace hands-on experience or the grounding that it provides. 

So the challenge remains: how do we still engage with sustainability in real, tangible ways in the remote environment? When we’re not all in the same place physically, how can we keep sustainability place-based?

Many new students have never stepped foot on campus. How should we navigate the assumption that students are familiar with the campus when so much of our established programming is situated here? Spaces like the Reuse Room, the Community Orchard, and the Grazing Gardens are all fixtures of sustainability on campus. Like many other newer students, however, I’ve never been able to use any of these spaces. My experiences with the SSC have all been practical discussions of what sustainability looks like in our own lives, not just on campus or in Portland. We have our own capacities for sustainability at the same time as, for example, critiques of the environmental footprint of PSU.

Despite the ongoing challenges of working remotely, there’s an opportunity for beneficial reflection on the diversity of lived experiences for PSU students. Thinking about how our circumstances differ allows us to step back and consider where our own notions of sustainability are rooted in abstractions or generalizations. For example, we can talk about gardening at different scales--from a farm to a community garden to a single-family backyard to a windowsill in a studio apartment. We can talk about how recycling infrastructure varies based on where you live so that students outside PDX can learn about specific guidelines in their area. We can engage with local businesses and organizations run by communities of color to discuss their specific experiences with sustainability issues as our Cultural Sustainability task force has in recorded events during Social Sustainability Month. When we return to campus, we’ll hopefully continue to bring that perspective on how to keep sustainability grounded in a sense of place.