The Origins of Sustainability GEM: My Unusual Path to Sustainability
Hi world, I’m Gemma!
I have dedicated my life to understanding what sustainability means and how to live a sustainable life. I started Sustainability GEM with the mission to amplify and proliferate the voices and actions behind supporting a sustainable future. My career has developed over the past 20 years starting and it all began with an unassuming film.
It began with an innocent viewing of the 2004 documentary film, Supersize Me. Casual TV for a then 10 year old, but I think that should give you a good idea of the type of person I am - endlessly curious about the human condition. I can remember the afternoon as if it were yesterday. Sitting on the floor of the living room in awe of what was being laid out before me. If you haven’t seen the documentary, go watch it and, trust me, you’ll only need to watch it once. In the film, you follow Director Morgan Spurlock's endeavor to consume nothing but McDonalds for a month. To top it off, when offered the supersize option, Spurlock had to accept. I think you can imagine that it doesn’t turn out so well.
“I have dedicated my life to understanding what sustainability means and how to live a sustainable life.”
The health repercussions of consuming nothing but ultra-processed fast food are nothing surprising. High levels of salt, sugar, fat, and unrecognizable ingredients that send the human body into whack. At the end of the documentary, you are confronted with mounds of these ingredients and asked if you would consume that amount. The obvious answer is “no way,” but that is the exact amount in the food consumed throughout the documentary. These shocking revelations on the impact of such readily available food on the human body sent me into a line of questioning that continues to this day. How is food that is so bad for us so available? How is it so cheap and what does it really cost us? What started as an enquiry into human health led to answers tucked away in economics, politics, and the environment. After snowballing for 20 years, this personal, academic, and now professional question has led me to the conclusion that if it’s bad for your health, it’s definitely bad for the environment.
So if it’s good for the health of the earth, then is it good for us? YES!
It’s not all doom and gloom. I wouldn’t have decided to start my own business focused on sustainability if I didn’t have hope. The more I learn, the more hope I have. There are solutions abound, and many of them have been right in front of us all along. What are the solutions to a sustainable future, you ask? That’s a nuanced answer, however, what is very clear to me is that it starts with our mindset. How we think is the solution to climate change, social and environmental injustices and more. If we do the work to understand our (human) interaction with global systems, then we can get there.
Are you in?
