Service and Sustainable Development
![SDGs](https://portfolios.uwcsea.edu.sg/mccle51104/files/2020/09/SDGs.png)
What is “service”? What is “sustainable development”? To be honest, I don’t know.
What I do know is that Service and Sustainable Development are two sides of the same coin – Sustainable Development basically means individuals and societies living in systems that can be improved on and continued indefinitely to maintain a good quality of life for all. Sustainable Development does not mean creating the perfect global lifestyle that never changes – technology evolves and it is the nature of all environments to have flucuations, so that wouldn’t make sense. What it means is creating true human happiness that does not detriment the happiness or opportunities for happiness of future generations. Service is action in pursuit of this, usually in the form of directly helping others.
But notice the “basically”. It took me years to grasp these concepts, but it will take me a lifetime to understand why this world and its systems are unsustainable and not maximising happiness. And it will take another to find out what a sustainable, happy world would look like.
Isn’t that wonderful? A lifetime of learning, growing, dreaming, and connecting with the Earth. Join me on my journey.
Rainforest Restoration Project – Session 4 and Family Festival
One of the biggest events on service's calenders is the campus Family Festival. It is essentially a school fair with rides, second-hand goods shops, and food. A lot of these goods and services are provided by the service groups, with additional stalls set up for...
Rainforest Restoration Project – Session 3 – Tree Planting at Woodleigh Park
Although it was only my third session, it was time for us all (the Dover members included) to bring some of our "babies" (saplings) to their future homes to grow up. To do this, us East members carried 6 of our saplings down to the service bus bay and into our bus,...
Rainforest Restoration Project – Session 2
This session, we looked in more detail at why we are doing this project, discussing the benefits of trees -especially local - in Singapore. From flood management to temperature control, and biodiversity encouragement and mood lifter, I learned even more benefits than...
Rainforest Restoration Project – Session 1
As an introduction, the RRP is a UWCSEA service wherein we volunteer to take care of saplings of local trees in our tree nursery, and then help plant them around the island. We mostly get our trees from the Singapore Botanic Gardens. Although the first session was...
2018 – 2019 Activities and Service Selections
It is time for the annual (semi-annual, really) struggle. The choosing of activities and service from the eye-stretchingly long list on the CIMS system. However, this year, I had some help in the service department. This was because, this year, there was a Service...