Every year, Humboldt County's Integrated Waste Management Program chooses a different theme to highlight for our annual Waste Awareness Week. This year's awareness campaign is scheduled for April 16-22 and will focus on "creating a sustainable environment."

Although the idea of sustainability has recently received much attention, the concept it represents goes back to the beginning of time. Farmers understood that you had to feed the soil to grow a good crop, that you had to save your best grain to plant next year's fields. The phrase "Waste not, want not " was handed down from generation to generation.

Somehow we have lost the balance between use and renewal, growth and preservation, that the word "sustainability" represents.

In many ways, this imbalance has accelerated during the last 50 years, with the advent of television, advertising, plastics and disposable throw-away products. People moved to the cities, women worked outside the home, and life moved faster and faster, with less time for baking bread or canning food, growing gardens and sewing clothes.

I think the problem began long before television and is much bigger than just a preoccupation with convenience. When the 20th century began, we lived in a rural agricultural world. Cars were still the exception rather than the rule. By the end of the century, we had moved through the entire industrial age and into the communication age.

But the industrial model, with its view of the world's resources as potential "products" to be mined, logged, and exploited, has taken us very far from the ethic of "waste not, want not." We in Humboldt County live in a paradox. Surrounded by incredible natural beauty and richness, our world is still rural enough to allow us to live at a slower pace, with room in our lives for many of the ways of the past which no longer exist in an urban setting.

And yet side by side with that beauty, our natural resource-based economy is dependent upon the harvest from the sea and the forest to support many of the county's families. Every day, those who work in the woods and on the water confront the reality that the overharvesting of the past threatens the continuity of resources in the future.

Sustainability is about restoring balance-in our lives, our work and our environment. It is our greatest challenge on every level-and our greatest reward if we succeed. Without that balance, we risk losing all that we value. Within that balance, we are renewed.

Liz Citrino is Humboldt County's Waste Management Director.

* And don't forget a week earlier, the Sustainable Living Fair at Eureka Municipal Auditorium from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday, April 16.