Sorry to say that I’ll be disconnected again for a few days, as I make the long drive home from Boston to Madison. Please enjoy (or ignore) another blast from the past while I’m wandering without Internet connections.
An interesting sidebar from the Discovery Channel web site suggests that the human race is too big to be sustainable [the original link has expired]. According to the researchers’ algorithm, there are 1000 times too many humans, as compared to a representative sample of other species. Said report co-author Charles Fowler:
“It is probably not unrealistic to say that nothing less than a full paradigm shift is required to get there from here….It requires changes in our thinking, belief systems and understanding of ourselves.”
While the report falls into the Chicken Little category a wee bit (somehow, humanity keeps on going despite its bizarre imbalance), it does hold eery parallels to the arts and culture world. The word ‘sustainability’ is cropping up everywhere these days…among foundations seeking to support ‘sustainable’ projects (usually meaning revenue-generating), among arts advocates seeking to preserve the current state of the nonprofit arts, and among consultants smelling a new trend in the water.
These conversations in the nonprofit arts world rarely define what ‘sustainability’ means, or how we might measure it over time. Worse yet, the word has become attached to an organizational strategy (how do we make our region’s symphony, museum, or folk arts festival sustainable?), rather than an ecological strategy (how can we sustain our community’s access to a broad range of creative experiences that includes these traditional ones?). With such a focus on individual organizations, we often miss the things we are actually trying to sustain: a dynamic cultural life, multiple levels of engagement for many citizens, opportunities to explore, create, discover, remember, and engage the creative process.
In the economics and ecology worlds, ‘sustainability’ is a property of a whole system, not a specific organism or organization. What you ‘sustain’ in such disciplines is not individuals, but outcomes…a dynamic economy with breathable air and drinkable water, for example. According to the most-cited definition of ‘sustainable development’ in the world economy world:
“Sustainable development is development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
–Gro Harlem Bruntland, World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987
In an ecosystem, things are born, things grow, and things die. In fact, ecosystems run into trouble if all three of these things are not on-going: if you work too hard to preserve standing trees, you crowd out future growth and emerging plants, for example. To carry this metaphor to the arts world, we might find our time better spent exploring how to create a context in which a full spectrum of creative and cultural activity exists in our community, rather than the sustainability of its single, long-standing institutions. These organizations still serve a vital purpose, mind you. And I’m not suggesting we kill them off to feed the roots. But focusing only on their sustainability is a short-term strategy at best, and at worst, a myopia that could damage the longterm health of creative communities.
There’s a world of discussion out there about creating contexts for sustainable development, social evolution, and world ecology (try this Google search for some examples). It would be wonderful to learn from these fields as we in nonprofit arts and culture stumble into our own ‘sustainability’ discussions.
Since the Discovery report suggests that we’re living on borrowed time anyway, we might as well use that time where it’s most useful.
