vacation makes me think.

I got sad while at our family tradition summer vacation home because it make me consider somethings. I am so interested in sustainability that I want to dedicate my career to it. I want to study change and understand what it takes for communicate the need (or lack of need) for different types of social change. The sustainability issue is so important, in my opinion, because if we don't do something about these problems, we will destroy human interaction with the earth. I say human interaction, because I believe the earth will go on just fine.

I got sad because I started thinking about my dear cousin, who has always been a part of the fond memories I have from my whole life of taking this vacation. She's 2 years younger than me and surprised us all by having this very impressive engineering career. The highest paid of all the engineers. I was sort of proud of her. Good for her, being a female doing something many females might shy away from. But I started to consider what her job is. She, as a petroleum engineer, is looking for ways to get the most out of oil fields. Get oil in the most efficient way.

Everyday I think about ways that will make oil a thing of the past. Oil sustains our reliance on gas and cars and global warming. Global warming will destroy the world as we know and love in ways we can hardly predict. It is disheartening to realize that you just might profoundly disagree with someone that you love, who you have grown up with, someone of your own flesh and blood.

I don't know her side of the story. I am scared to ask. I fear that I don't like it, and I don't want to know it. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe she is doing this because she is looking for a career where she can help. Maybe she wanted to join a flawed and dirty profession with the ideas that in the future she would be in a unique position to make it better. Maybe I don't know what I think I know. Maybe what I think to be true is wrong.

I got sadder when her brother told me that she might move to the outer banks because there might be oil there that could sustain the United States' oil consumption for 70 years. That is most likely the rest of my life. It makes me sad to think that for the rest of my life we will be using oil because I want this to change now.

I felt better though, when I heard that by 2015, Mercedes will not be making cars that use gasoline. Mercedes...a company being socially responsible and who will appeal to the greedy, brand-hungry masses. Put that way, it sounds kind of awful, but I am hopeful because what we need is for eco-effectiveness to be mainstream. We need sustainability to continue to shift full-speed ahead to be the acceptable standard. I really hope it does, and I think it will.