Alexandra Tatiana Westberg – Scholarship Submission

In an effort to encourage and promote sustainability, Merida Home is offering a $1,000 scholarship to the high school student who best expresses Merida’s key theme: sustainability with style.

Alexandra Westberg – Orange County, CA

It seems that today, most of the country is concerned with “going green.”  People do their part by using reusable shopping bags, trying to help the environment one plastic bag at a time.  And they are helping.  However, I believe that preserving the Earth goes much further than these small actions.  The natural world is composed of complex systems working together to perform a function.  Protecting these systems is going to need a lot of work and a continued effort.  The Earth is beautiful and miraculous, and it is necessary to actively change the way people view natural resources, because they wont last forever.  When I look at something as simple as the wildflower field behind my house and feel a sense of hope, I know that I need to protect this special place.  To me, “sustainability with style” means translating the delicacy and productivity of nature into something that can be used in everyday life to help protect the natural world.

When I think of sustainability, the first thing that comes to mind is recycling.  Without even noticing it, people are affected by recycling everyday.  An innocent bystander sits on a bench that was once a lot of plastic grocery bags and feels a sense of relief.  When I see something like this, I am amazed that what once was just garbage has been turned into something that has beauty in its utility.  Recycling is such a simple act, yet it makes a big difference in reducing our carbon footprint.  What was once discarded as garbage can be turned into an item that is used everyday to reduce our impact on the environment.  It is these small things, much like the small things in nature, which I find wonderful.  These mundane items can be even more stylish than the materials it was made out of.  They can be unique and extraordinary.  We are making an improved world, because we are taking materials and making something much better out of them.

I have a set of plates that are made out of recycled glass.  The glass swirls in different colored patterns that remind me of the yellow of a sunflower.  Instead of ending their useful life in a landfill, the glass was turned into something stylish that I use everyday.  These plates are not the fine china that many people find beautiful, but because it helps the environment in some small way, it makes these plates even more appealing to me.  Style does not have to conform to what our culture deems “cool.”  Style can have an evolving definition – a definition that is special for each person, because each person finds beauty in different things, be it in a plate, a bench, or even a rug.