Seriously.

I’ve been thinking. (Dangerous, I know, but it’s an occupational hazard.) I’ve been thinking about my main extracurriculars this year, both of which have names that are dirty words to some people. To others they’re squeaky clean. A little too clean.

The words are Diversity and Sustainability (with aptly grand Germanic capitals). They might sound like things we’re told to like: Brussels sprouts and liver. Except they don’t sound like things at all: they’re abstractions, ideas. And don’t get me wrong: I love me some ideas. I’m as grateful as you are for the cephalization of our massive mammalian cerebra. (“Huge noggin… It’s like Sputnik”-that’s a shout to my fellow fans of “So I Married an Axe Murderer.”)

And yet it’s my old animal brain that makes me want to act. My cerebellum likes things, concrete details. To be accurate, it’s my entire brain that loves details, though I do wish I could click “Compress drive to save disk space,” or purge Culture Club lyrics that waste precious ganglia.

But here’s my question: what do Diversity and Sustainability really, concretely mean? And what do they have in common, besides the fact that both connote sunshiny, good-for-us goodness?

I’d say “survival,” as basic as that, or “health,” but those are still abstractions. They’re ideas, not things. They’re not, as the poets say, images, a word that means brain-pictures, like the unpleasantness that comes to mind (and bile ducts) when I say “Rosie O’Donnell devoured another fifth-grader.”

When someone says Diversity, I picture faces, curves of eyes and lips, colors of iris and hair and skin. I hear voices, some lilting, some halting, some fast, some slow, sharp or round vowels and flat or rolling r’s. I smell curry and collards, fajitas and injera.

When someone says Sustainability, I smell buckets of compost and recycling bins, and see solar ovens and windfarms. I picture smaller trash cans. I picture Al Gore devouring a fifth-grader and claiming it somehow as a carbon credit. (Then I shake my head to make it stop. I’d prefer to picture a Deschanel sister: Zooey or Emily. Probably Zooey. Maybe Emily. No, Zooey.)

And yet here’s the payoff: when someone says Sustainability, what I’m picturing is actually something like Diversity. My cerebrum conjures ideas like biodiversity, genetic drift, and relations among species (not of the Gene Wilder + sheep kind). My cerebellum winces at the cloning of food animals, not out of ignorance or antipathy for science (we’ve seen enough of that on campus in the last two weeks with events pro-intelligent design and anti-global warming), but out of genuine, justifiable terror. Genetic identity is a recipe for species collapse. Cloning cattle, like the monoculturing of corn, is unsustainable because it rejects diversity as the crucial evolutionary mechanism for the health of systems.

And when someone says Diversity, what I picture is something like Sustainability: a healthy human environment, one that will last because potential resources aren’t just discarded. My cerebrum conjures ideas about growth through nutrient encounters with people and places that aren’t one’s own. My cerebellum pictures a spider web and pages of life-cycle assessments.

In either case what I imagine is a gorgeous campus, alive and full, a livable world.