Meeting the Challenges of Being Sustainable

When I think of what it means to be sustainable, I think about how we use and create energy.  It’s a fairly broad issue to confront when we’re talking about maintaining our survival and our ability to thrive and grow as a society but I believe that technology provides a great opportunity to sustain humanity.  Technology is one aspect of the human race that seems to keep growing and evolving.  However, it doesn’t just do this linearly.  I would argue that our progress has been exponential and I believe that it’s safe to say that if we give ourselves, the public, the ability to make decisions concerning renewable energy, we can solve the problems of waste, carbon emissions, and other issues that have been an effect of poor technological management within my lifetime.  One such technology that could solve our energy crisis would be solar energy.  In Japan we are seeing a growth in solar technology brought on by the partial collapse of public confidence in the Japanese nuclear infrastructure after the meltdown at Fukushima.  Japan has been a leader in solar power development for a long time but with the success of nuclear energy in the late 20th Century, a disinterest in solar became evident as the return on investment began to rise.  Since I am an architecture student, I am mostly interested in ways in which we can improve the built environment to be more efficient and sustainable.  I believe that systems like solar power can be easily integrated into our society today to improve our quality of living.  Since solar power has an ability to support individual units like a home, we can, with this technology effectively reduce our reliance on a power grid that provides large companies an incentive and ability to produce unclean energy to the masses.  This technology is just one way in which we can allow the consumer to change the future of where we find our energy.