I recently finished a local discussion course from the Northwest Earth Institute on Choices for Sustainable Living. Four to seven of us just sat around once a week talking about a few readings offered in our text. We also challenged one another and really began to understand how each of us creates our own patterns of sustainability.

Sustainability is a subject I think about a lot. I also try to help my customers think about some of the possibilities through articles and resources we provide on the Firefly Diapers website. I am under no illusion that I have the subject mastered, though.

Sustainable choices are not always as simple as they might seem at glance, either. Businesses often help you to make sustainable choices in your buying, but surely a more genuinely sustainable model involves not commercializing our lives and seeing ourselves as “consumers” rather than humans. Yet, we do all buy (do we ALL, or is it just most of us?), so we want to know how to make those choices sustainable, too.

A couple of weeks ago, as I was thinking about and researching the idea of carbon offsetting through planting trees, I ran across a website that takes a different approach to global warming, environment, and sustainability: Thwink.org.

Can you take a challenge? A challenge to your thinking as well as a challenge to your behavior? At Thwink, Jack Harick takes a systems approach to the problem of solving “the global environmental sustainability problem using the most efficient and effective methods available,” and he comes up with a very different solution to the approach most of us take. Rather than the intuitive approach of classical activism, he suggests we need analytical activism. Classical activism can solve simpler, linear problems that follow cause and effect, but a massively complex problem feeding itself from many directions needs a new approach. We need to look at the processes involved and analyze the system. When it comes right down to it, we have the problems of sustainability in front of us as well as the technological answers, yet we still experience change resistence. From that point, most of the Thwink strategies jump off. Don’t let me ruin it for you by making these strategies seem simple enough to be explained in a few lines.

The concepts presented at Thwink aren’t simple–nor is the process of reading them and applying them. If you can accept the challenge to rethink how you approach the big questions about sustainable living, I suggest you start with the step-by-step guide to Thwink.org and their approach.

You are probably reading this blog because cloth diapers are one of your simple, sustainable choices. I hope all of us can put our creative minds and active feet together to integrate this small, family solution into the larger, more complex choices we have to make.