Imagining Sustainable Futures (Kerry)

Before proceeding with any discussion about the role of art in imagining sustainable futures, it is necessary to provide a base understanding of the meaning of the term sustainable in this context. It is a word that has entered the everyday language to the point of being a buzzword; a word echoed by corporations, politicians and grassroots eco-warriors alike.

In 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development produced a report, Our Common Future, which included the most commonly upheld definition of sustainability. In the report there was a clear call to global cooperation and to consider the combined “social, economic and political concerns if we are to successfully move toward a more sustainable future.” (Parr, p. 1) Sustainability was understood as “development that meets the needs of today without compromising the needs of future generations.” (Parr, p. 1) In 1991, The World Conservation Union, the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Wide Fund for Nature joined forces to produce a document called Caring for the Earth: A Strategy for Sustainable Living. The aim of the document is to help improve the condition of the world’s people, by defining two requirements as follows:

“One is to secure a widespread and deeply-held commitment to a new ethic, the ethic for sustainable living, and to translate its principles into practice. The other is to integrate conservation and development to enable people everywhere to enjoy long, healthy and fulfilling lives.” (Caring for the Earth, p. 2)

Some principles to guide the way toward sustainable societies are outlined:

• Respect and care for the community of life
• Improve the quality of human life
• Conserve the Earth’s vitality and diversity
• Minimize the depletion of non-renewable resources
• Keep within the Earth’s carrying capacity
• Change personal attitudes and practices
• Enable communities to care for their own environments
• Provide a national framework for integrating development and conservation
• Forge a global alliance (Caring for the Earth, p. 2)

In her book Hijacking Sustainability, Adrian Parr voices a concern about a limited view of sustainability. She is concerned about a view that favours global economic prosperity and gives priority to action from multinational corporations and multinational organisations to the detriment of local specificity. (Parr, p. 2) She notes that there are thousands of grassroots local organizations seeking justice for “the underprivileged, including the right of the environment not to be destroyed.” (Parr, p. 2) Parr uses the term ‘sustainability culture’ to describe this localised enthusiasm for sustainable ways of life and social equality. She sees popular culture as the arena in which the “meaning and value of sustainability is contested, produced, and exercised.” (Parr, p. 3) It is a social practice that allows new and emerging values and practices to intersect with the traditional. Although Parr does not refer to the role of art in the conversation about sustainability, nevertheless it can be the artists within a community who influence popular culture.

An exhibition held in 2010 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), In the Balance: Art in a Changing World, is a specific example of popular culture dealing with the issue of sustainability and responding to current environmental debates. Irene Watson begins a discussion in the exhibition catalogue by mourning the lost possibilities for Indigenous Australia following colonisation by European settlers in the name of progress. She is referring in particular to the Murray-Darling river system. She observes that the coloniser’s idea of progress has directly impacted the river system and in so doing has disconnected the Indigenous people from their country and their “sustainable relationships with the seas, waters and lands” of their ancestors. (Watson, p. 12) Watson acknowledges that the Indigenous people now live at the margins of Australian society, however she sees the evidence of Indigenous artists providing “a creative response to the environmental imperatives of our time.” (Watson, p. 12)

The intersection of the new and the traditional culture, as referred to by Parr, is made clear in the work of several Indigenous artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art, including Lorraine Connelly-Northey. Connelly-Northey is a Waradgerie woman who is “remaking the past.” (Watson, p. 12) According to Watson, she works with settler’s discarded commodities as an act of resistance and “transforms them into the baskets and possum-skin cloaks of her ancestors.” (Watson, p. 12) Watson describes Connelly-Northey’s work as a re-weaving of materials such as the barbed wire of settler’s fences, corrugated iron, and mesh, processing them as an act of decolonisation. (Watson, p. 12) Watson is realistic about the effects of colonisation and climate change on the river system but claims that “what we call Art can also be a strategy for survival.” (Watson, p. 13) She suggests that the In the Balance exhibition could be a “strategy and a hope for the ending of acts of inhumanity and environmental destruction and [could] allow [the Indigenous people] to grow up and take that different path…, back towards being human on earth.” (Watson, p. 13) Watson recognises that this could be a dream but that the generations to come “need visions to imagine and grow a future humanity.” (Watson, p. 13) Watson is referring both to the sustainability of the Indigenous people’s way of life and also, inevitably, to the sustainability of the environment. Hers is a political view; she identifies the In the Balance exhibition, and the Indigenous works in it in particular, as “calls to action to change…going beyond political rhetoric, going to a place of ancient obligations in order to bring change, but also the balance and harmony to our lives as humans on earth.” (Watson, p. 13)

References

Parr, Adrian. Hijacking Sustainability. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2009.
Prescott-Allen, Robert. "Caring for the Earth: A Strategy for Sustainable Living." ed David A. Munro and Martin W. Holdgate. Gland, Switzerland: The World Conservation Fund, United Nations Environment Program, and World Wide Fund for Nature, 1991.
Watson, Irene. "Aboriginal Worlds, Genocide, Ecocide and Cycles of Life Returning." In In the Balance: Art for a Changing World, edited by Rachel Kent. Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2010.