A graduate teaching assistant who lived through the Northridge quake in Los Angeles County reached some realizations about her habits of thinking in the wake of that experience. As students schooled or even trained in poststructuralist critical theory and/or protocols of postmodern cultural critique, this teaching assistant and some of her Generation X colleagues realized that they have come to regard their roles as instructors with an unhealthy dose of irony, if not cynicism. As postmodern subjects, they are provoked to postulate themselves as a collection of disjointed subjectivities, a pastiche of motives and personalities, instruments of either hegemonic or destabilizing forces. But these instructors now find themselves asking from what source can they draw enough positive energy to perform their pedagogical tasks even "as if" there were any meaning or value in their work? The teaching assistant has on occasion been confronted with circumstances, seemingly real, and seemingly external enough to make her pause and think: maybe there is something at stake here, and maybe an individual can have some impact on the thing at stake. The experience of the earthquake showed her that the relative stability of instability is not the sum total of existence. So what if there is no "real" foundation?--there are at least contingent issues of importance. The conclusion is that thinking in terms of "sustainability" can help individuals acquire a better conception of the relationship between earth and human beings. Considered in the context of social theory, sustainability might support a movement toward "ethical collectivity." (TB)