Sustainable Living--It may not be so hard

Technology can be frustrating. That being said, my first draft of this post was erased when there was a glitch with the site. There is really nothing more frustrating than losing information you spent time recording. I am no stranger to this feeling—my computer crashed in January and I lost pictures, music and most of the papers/new stories I had written and maintained in a portfolio.

Moral of the story: Always back up everything on your computer with an external hard drive.

Anyway, my original intent was to talk about sustainability from a new outlook I discovered last week. In addition to interning with Greenville Forward and being a Furman student, I am the student editor for Furman’s online news source, FUnet.

My most recent story was a profile of the house manager for Furman’s Southern Living Cliffs Cottage model home. If you are unfamiliar with the purpose of the home, I am providing a link to the website below, but here is a quick summary. As part of Furman’s efforts to be a forerunner in the sustainability movement, the university partnered with Southern Living and numerous other vendors and donors to create a showcase home.

The Cliffs Cottage was fitted with the most innovative and recent developments in green building technology to form a completely sustainable home. Furman and its partners wanted to show the ability to be environmentally conscientious without losing any sense of luxury, comfort or aesthetic appeal. The Cliffs Cottage will be open for touring and visiting for a year before it is retrofitted and transformed to be the new Center of Sustainability. If you are interested in learning more about the house and its partners, or if you would like to sign up for a tour, visit the website: http://www.furmancliffscottage.com/

My interview with Brett Rayl, former Furman student and new house manager, became much more than a discussion of his daily activities. It resonated with me because Rayl expressed his former misconception that seemed to be like one I have struggled with in the past. This idea is that you dramatically have to change your lifestyle to live according to the principles of sustainability. Or, there is the notion that it is incredibly expensive to truly achieve that goal when building a home.

Rayl explained to me that the intent of the Cliffs Cottage is to provide an example of the ultimate ways you can build a home that is completely sustainable. From there, Rayl hopes visitors will take away an understanding of the ideas behind the materials used and modify them to their own lifestyle. For him, this means washing his clothes in cold water, using his leftover water bottles to water his plants and buying locally.

As he was talking, I thought, “I could do this.” That evening when I was taking a shower, I looked at the shower head and was appalled by how many gallons of water per minute I am using. I cannot remember the exact number now, but it definitely has made me adjust my shower time--even just one or two minutes can make a difference.

But, these small changes are what will really matter. It is a gradual process and is much less daunting than many realize. In the end, it is all about being conscious of the energy you are using and finding ways to curb it just a bit. I think we could all do these simple things and would find the impact to be greatly significant.