Sustainability Field Report 1
What fascinates me the most about embarking on this research project is the recurrent experience of how the entire process – from first question, to research design, to perspective-as-researcher – re-creates itself as an integral experience each step of the way. I’d like to explain just what I mean, beginning with what reveals itself to me as the start, and engine, of it all: personal experience.
I first approached my topic, ‘an exploration of the relationship between worldview and participation in sustainable systems’, with a ‘removed observer’ attitude, much more visible to me now, several months down the line. Exploring personal experiences of ‘sustainability’ was really a life-direction question for me more than anything else, as I struggled to find a place to combine passion, meaningful work, and an integral perspective. It also started with sheer bafflement – the funny quandary of human behavior in which we know one thing, but do another. This led to the complicated question about how people make changes in behavior and shift perspective – as individuals, and groups. Simple questions like, ‘What makes us recycle?’ began to seem answerable only if I could root my inquiry in a very honest understanding of my own experience. Why and when am I a hypocrite? Why don’t I turn off my computer at night? What is the nature of the translation of an idea, and belief, into an action?
Starting with a personal question is of course appropriate to an integral research project that intends to reveal the ever-present relationship between the question and my perspective-as-researcher. Just as significantly, and from a more ideological place, it is my belief that ameliorating global environmental problems through increasing sustainability is not a goal which can be achieved through an objectification of problems as external or impersonal. Because an integral perspective reveals the equal importance of all dimensions of experience - our systems and culture just as much as our personal ideas and desires – it thus prevents us from overlooking the element of personal choice and responsibility when exploring such a complex problem as our relationship with our environment. What we each individually do, every day, matters. What we think about what we do and why we do it, is therefore a vital core of understanding that change process. So, with an attempt at humble self-examination and a curiosity about our common patterns of behavior, I designed my research question to explore my own experiences, ideas, and contradictions around ‘being sustainable’, the common beliefs we have as a population about the environment and sustainability, and insight from specific change-makers in the field about how they observe change unfolding.
My first step in the project was to immerse myself in an experience where human relationship with the environment would be the primary focus of my activity and thinking. I attended a month-long sustainability training in northern Scotland at the Findhorn Foundation, which covered topics on energy, agriculture, design, community, waste, and socio-political issues. The experience served as a nexus for me to explore my own ideas, and to observe how my concepts and emotions about these subjects changed. Not only learning and discussing these issues, but also living as a member of a community focused on holistic, human-environment relationship was a deeply integral, embodied context in which to do this. Journaling allowed me to record the subjective and objective elements of my own micro ‘change process’. The experience also opened doors for me to contact other individuals in the field of sustainability. Conducting interviews while in the UK, I explored such questions as, how do people change? What inspires them? What patterns can we see? After five lengthy interviews, with more planned, I already note a common theme in the responses I heard, which circle back to my original inspiration of ‘the personal’. Personal experience – in other words, a subjective, emotional, and experiential orientation to ‘the environment’ - seems to be a fairly universal, influential starting point for behavior and choices made in terms of sustainability and the environment.
As a result of these experiences, my perspective on my research question, and how to go about exploring it, is also a process in evolution. Investigating something as complex as beliefs about the environment, and why we behave in certain ways, warrants a sensitive and nuanced process of investigation. As I experience more, reflect on my own assumptions, and my understanding changes, so too does my orientation on how to go about investigating this topic. I find this dialectical process of learning, changing perspective, and perspective ON perspective, fascinating to record and learn from in conducting integral research. It provides not only a sense of excitement for the topic of my research, but also a sense of confidence in the process of continuous learning as a student-practitioner of integral research. As I embark on new ‘sustainable’ projects here in Maine, and connect with a wider community of individuals focused on what this subject means to them and their communities, I am continually inspired and humbled by the complexity and endless creativity of people at work in the world, and with gratitude for the opportunity, I continue to explore my research question.
Lauren Tenney