* Sustainability: how do you define it for yourself ? ...

Sustainability is the capacity of perception and communication with the strange/with the alien. Environment is what we cannot control.

(rk: I guess this definition is contributed by Davide Brocchi - everybody please sign your posts...)

I would define Sustainability as: a way of life that does not prey on other ways of life ...

The German theologian Günter Altner quoted (at the UNESCO conference on Higher Education for Sustainability in Lüneburg) a sentence from Albert Schweitzer’s book Reverence for life (1969), a sentence which I feel very close to my own personal definition above: “I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live.”

As Günter Altner pointed out: “Schweitzer’s ethics forms a dialectic connection between the anthropocentric and biocentric position. It is formulated exactly on the joint line that calls for the connection of social and ecological care within the concept of sustainability.” (Altner in Eds Adomssent et al., Higher Education for Sustainability: New challenges from a global perspective, VAS, 2006.)

— Sacha Kagan 2007/07/03 14:19

NB: I’m no longer satisfied with what I proposed above as ‘definition’ but I leave it there for the sake of the discussion, if anyone passes by this page ... — Sacha Kagan 2008/01/27 03:51

The Norwegian word “bærekraft” (litt: the force that carries) is interesting from my point of view, as it displaces our understanding of sustainability to a power or a force, to which I would add the “evental” angle: this force is always brought into play through events, and always in an encounter between differences (as in Davide’s definition above).

In other words, there is always an ethical perspective that comes into play when we try to understand what events seem to push the movements that enter an event and constitute it, in carrying directions (and yes, surely, there is a thin line here between carry and care, one that is always actualised in the event, whether visible or not).

In the book that Sacha Kagan and Volker Kirchberg edited, I have called this a matter of sustension - when what is created out of encounters between different moving forms of life has a higher level of virtualised potentiality than what entered it.. yet, at the same time, this way of thinking is very unilinear and would be useless to a great number of the people of the earth, thus presenting in itself an un-sustensive definition.

So I would suggest that we should look not so much in terms of in- and output as in much debate on sustainability - but look instead at the tensions present within the evental sphere itself, and look at the increase in uncertainty/openness as a non-teleological way to understand sustension/bærekraft/sustainability. Uncertainty is sustensive - openness is a symptom, if you like, of bærekraft. Openness to life is sustensive - reduction of life forms is a reduction of virtuality and is always an act of violence (if not necessarily intended this way).

-Oleg

I would like to add Gregory Bateson’s definition of “a healthy ecology of human civilization” (from “Ecology and flexibility in human civilization”, 1970, reprinted in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972):

“A single system of environment combined with high human civilization in which the flexibility of the civilization shall match that of the environment to create an ongoing complex system, open-ended for slow change of even basic (hard-programmed) characteristics.”

Gregory Bateson being a primary inspiration for many advocates of sustainability worldwide, it is a good idea indeed to plunge back into his enlightening texts...

— Sacha Kagan 2008/07/25 23:44

Sustainability is living within ones means, this is not just aimed at the individual, but the community, the nation, the entire human race. Our means is the environment, the planet we live on, the natural resources available to us. Now the human race has developed more complexities to balance, economics and financial institutions, we must also live within our means within these systems. And living is not just a day to day activity, not just a year to year or even just a generation to generation activity, it is an undefinable length of existence that we can share with all the other organisms on this planet.

As individuals we live in financial debt, as nations we live in financial debt, and as a human race we live in natural resource debt. The idea of developing a Culture of Sustainability starts to make sense when you realise how disassociated we have become from the basic balance inherent in everyday mother nature.

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” J Krishnamurti

Rosie Horn - rihorn@photogirl.co.nz - 04/01/09

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