The Limits of Sustainability:
The Art of Ecology
The poet Gary Snyder sent an epigram for Steward Brand’s
book, The Clock of the Long Now:
‘This present moment
That lives on to become
Long ago.’
Brand: ‘I felt it was The Clock of the Long Now that
responded to him:
This present moment
Used to be
The unimaginable futurei.’
_____________________________________
1. An Unimaginable Future
Home to 175,000 Melanesians, Bougainville, the rugged
10,660 square km, volcanic island in the South Pacific,
ended its decade long civil war six years ago. While the
north of the Bougainville mainland is peaceful and
relatively prosperous, the southern half of the island is
dominated by former combatants and is a lawless and
dangerous place.
100 Km northeast of Bougainville Island, in the North
Solomons’ province of Papua New Guinea, the Carteret (or
Tulun) Islands, have a population of 2,000 Polynesians.
They are 6 islands that lie around a lagoon which is
about 20 km across. There are no cars, there is no
electricity and there are no shops on the Carteret
Islands.
400 people live on the Takuu (or Mortlock) Islands. After
3,000 years the community of Takuu have over 1,000 songs
they can sing from memory.
The 2,400 people from the Carteret and Mortlock Islands
are currently moving to Bougainville, as their homes give
way to the rising ocean. ‘Over the past few thousand
years, the rate of sea level rise remained fairly low,
probably not exceeding a few tenths of a millimetre per
yearii’…‘Twentieth century sea level trends, however, are
substantially higher than those of the last few thousand
1
years.’ These people have found the limits to their
sustainability, their art and their ecology.
Midway between Hawaii and Australia, Tuvalu, formerly
known as the Ellice Islands comprises four reefs and five
true atolls – a total land area of 26 square kilometres
(10 sq miles). After the Vatican City, it is the least
populated independent country in the world and they form
the smallest member of the United Nations since gaining
independence in 1978 from 120 years of British rule.
Polynesian people settled there about 2,000 years ago and
recently, the population dramatically increased to over
10,000. New Zealand annually accepts 75 paying evacuees
as the island has become ranked as ‘extremely vulnerable’
on the Environmental Vulnerability Index.
Tuvalu’s highest elevation is 4 metres above current sea
level and it has almost no natural resources. Apart from
foreign aid, it’s main source of income in recent times
has been from the sale of its area dialling code, ‘900’
and the sale of its Internet domain name, ‘.tv’. Each
family still has its own task to perform for the
community (fishing, house building, defence and so on)
and the skills of the family are passed down to each
generation. They still play a traditional sport,
kilikiti, which is similar to cricket. Although their
traditional poetry and music has died out, the European
influenced, fatele, dance music continues as a
competition, but only the elderly remember the
traditional dances.
In April this year, the 10,000 Faces of Tuvalu project is
due to start. The photographs, profiles and interviews
of each islander will form an exhibition on 1 October
2008 to commemorate their 30th Independence Anniversary
and to enable those countries contributing to global
warming, climate change and sea level rise to understand
how this affects Tuvaluans.
These people have found the limits to their
sustainability, their art and their ecology.
In 2005 the UN University for Environment and Human
Security predicted that the number of environmental
refugees will exceed 50 million by 2010 and the British
Government conference, “Avoiding dangerous climate
change”, concluded that 150 million refugees could be
displaced as a result of global warming by 2050. These
people, from low-elevated areas such as small atolls and
islands in coastal and deltaic regions have found the
limits to their sustainability. And so has the United
Nations in its inability to manage these ‘ legal
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gypsies’, as environmental refugees are not recognised by
the Genva Convention for Refugees.
2. Issues of Sustainability
Sustainability, as in ‘sustainable development’ has had a
rough ride, in terms of definitions, since it was first
coined by Brutland Gro Harlem in 1985. It was almost
immediately undermined as being indefinable and
misleading by those who felt threatened by it. And yet,
despite this denunciation, the word and even the concept
of ‘not compromising the development of future
generations’ has entered many languages as common
currency.
Sadly, when the 1992 Rio Earth Summit popularized
sustainable development and the three pillars to support
it (economic, social and environmental), culture and art,
two of the most enduring systems that define humanity,
were not mentioned among the necessary tools for building
a better future.
All concepts of sustainability are based on notions of
the future, or as a friend of mine insists, notions of
‘futures’. However, the big problem for me in writing
this paper and indeed considering the whole subject of
sustainability has been the exponential rate of change
affecting our view of futures.
Quite simply, the future does not look like it looked two
years ago. For my18 year old daughter, the future looks
very different from when I was 18. In one generation the
concept and the potential for the future represents the
most profound paradigm shift since Copernicus announced
that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
As Kinzig wrote in a recent Ecology and Sociology paper;
“The last three or four decades have fostered a
revolution in the way scientists think about the world:
instead of orderly and well behaved, they now view it as
complex and uncertain.iii” We are starting to understand
the cascading effects of change: that when single regimes
are crossed, multiple thresholds are crossed at scales of
space and time and social organisation. Ecological,
social and economic domains may be breached.
In 1995, “Beyond the Limits: Global Calapse or
Sustainable Future”iv by Donella and Dennis Meadows and
Jorgen Randers, revisited the previous Club of Rome book
“The Limits of Growth". They suggested that the
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biosphere had the potential for meeting some of the
present environmental problems in the future, if the
correct choices were made. Lovelock, Margulis and Segan,
added a different form of hope in their Gaia Theory –
even if things get really bad, at least our planet had
the capacity to regenerate itself… a few million years
future.
Last year, Lovelock’s “The Revenge of Gaia” was a lot
less hopeful, suggesting that we are at the tipping point
of warming and our only salvation lies in the continuing
use of energy to search for technological remediation.
He promotes nuclear power as the only power resource
available to us, to act in time.
Has the future found the limits of its sustainability?
However, in 2005 the Asian Tsunami and the hurricane that
devastated New Orleans raised more questions about our
ability to manage such events than the cause of the
events themselves. Subsequent debates question the
viability of relief aid and the resilience of certain
sectors of society. Perhaps the most interesting
question is ‘why was there was no revolt or civil unrest
in the United States following the blatant exclusion from
provision for the poor and in particular the African
American poor. These people reached the limits of their
sustainability, at the hands of their fellow citizens.
F. David Peat, a colleague of the Nobel Lauriat, David
Bohm asks: ‘Philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard argue
that the twentieth century’s obsession with material
consumption led to an increasing replacement of real
objects with signs and images. Will this trend continue?
Or will a future society reconnect with the real? How
far can we tolerate our uncertainty? For how long will
we continue to accept the consumer image in place of the
real? In moving from certainty to uncertainty, how will
we begin to represent and envision our new world?v’
3.
Art and Seeing Things Differently
From Einstein’s Theory of Relativity onwards, it is
apparent that the observer inextricably participates in
the scene they are viewing “the forms with which we
represent space (i.e. a map, a sketch, a marquette, or a
photograph) influence the modes of intervening on that
space.” Peat also wrote: “Quantum theory introduced
uncertainty into Physics: not an uncertainty that arises
out of mere ignorance but a fundamental uncertainty about
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the very universe itself. Uncertainty is the price we pay
for becoming participators in the universe."
Or, as the artist David Hockney put it: “the way we
depict space determines what we do with it.”
The control imposed by the fixed visual representation of
rectilinear perspective, culminated in the application of
Descartes’ grid system for rationalising the globe, often
“mistaking the map for the terrain”. With the assumption
of God’s viewpoint the cartographic illusion sanctioned
self-righteous appropriation and colonisation of land.
The Renaissance set a precedent for plundering the wealth
and (non-renewable) resources of others in remote places
that has continued exponentially. Hockney’s words
resonate: “the way we depict space determines what we do
with it.”
And time?
To re-value time – free it from economic myth and spatial
constraints? Living in ecological time, everyday becoming
a connected experience? It’s not just a different
perspective, it’s a different dynamic, a different way of
being. The Greek words, ‘kairos (opportunity or the
propitious moment) and chronos (eternal or ongoing
time)vi’, come to play in this expanded and flexible
notion of time. Some things moving faster and
necessarily producing quick responses, other things
considered, savoured and reflected upon in a slower, long
time context.
‘Zen Buddhists define their task as “infinite gratitude
for the past. Infinite service to the present. Infinite
responsibility for the future.”vii
4. Ecology
NATURAL LIMITS
Being ‘on the edge’ or to ‘push to the limits’ evokes
excitement. Through much of our short evolution, humans
have seen natural limits as a means to advancement, a
duty to challenge, to overcome, to become master of, and
then to find new limits. But, now, through our
contribution to global warming and climate change, we
humans have, perhaps, generated the conditions in the
natural world to finally limit human endeavor. The
limits are no longer ‘out there’ but right here, now. We
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have to limit ourselves and consider the un-thinkable –
stop growth. So, what meaning has ‘sustainable
development’? For the term suggests an on-going
projection to the future, fed and maintained by us, so
that we may be fed and maintained by it – the myth of
reversible time.
THE SIXTH EXTINCTION
At the beginning of his book, The Future of Life, E. O.
Wilson sets the scene with a quote from John C. Sawhill,
president of The Nature Conservancy: “In the end, our
society will be defined not only by what we create, but
by what we refuse to destroy.” Between The Economist and
The Environmentalist, Wilson constructs a discussion to
consider polar views on how we might get through the
‘bottleneck’ created by science and technology. As we
approach the tipping point of The Sixth Extinction (of
species), Sawhill’s statement takes on bitter irony.
Sustainability ceases to have any meaning in this
context.
It is no longer a question of more or less carbon, more
or less waste, more or less economy. The Sixth
Extinction or ‘Holocene extinction event’ refers to the
dramatic accelerating rate of extinctions, observed and
not observed over the passed 50 years. The pace is
greater than that of the previous ‘Big Five’ planetary
extinctions and is characterised by man-made driving
factors and the very short geological timescale. E. O.
Wilson estimates that at the current rates of human
destruction of the biosphere, one-half of all species of
life will be extinct in 100 years.
Brudtland’s sustainable develop has a hollow ring – to ‘
meet the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.
At the very point of life existing, sustainability has
failed us.
RE-INVENTING ECOLOGY
At the Society for Ecological Restoration World
Conference, in Zaragoza, 2005, there were some notable
changes from the Liverpool conference I attended in 2000:

The first is the generally recognised need for the
participation of people from all continents, and the
representation of indigenous communities.
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
Cultural values and socio-economic concerns are
starting to feature along side the affairs of science
and technology, engineering and economics.

The arts and creativity are becoming understood by many
to be integral to trans-disciplinary working.

Climate change is now not only accepted as a given
factor, but as the driving issue.

In matters of ecology, the final big difference
incorporates all those above, and over-rides the
perennial debate regarding the appropriate meanings and
application of ‘restoration’, ‘conservation’,
regeneration’, ‘remediation’ and ‘rehabilitation’. It
represents a paradigm shift in attitudes towards
ecological re-invention. It is the development of what
Richard Slaughter in his book Futures Beyond Dystopia,
calls ‘Integral, Critical Futures Studies’, or what
Brian Eno and Stewart Brand refer to as ‘The Big Here’
and ‘The Long Now’. It’s related to the notion of
‘question based learning’ and this is a means of
positively engaging the future, rather than being
frozen in the headlights of its uncertainty.
5. Art and Ecology
Why art? Based on the instrumental assumption that to
change behaviour towards climate change, people first
need to change their attitudes, and Art is apparently
good for changing attitudes, Felix Guattari and his
concept of the Three Ecologies has recently gained
popularity in the mainstream British art circles. His
appeal is largely based on a string of logical
assumptions - because ecology is a creative force and
artists are meant to be creative, that they are
essentially, one and the same thing. His work derives
from Freudian psychoanalysis and the idea that the mind
can be split into three parts (self, ego, id). So,
Guattari creates three separate ecologies, the mind, the
social and the environmental. This may be a fine
hypothesis from a psychoanalytic perspective, but it
fails to understand that there is only one ecology - the
ecosystem of the whole and this embraces all diversity.
David Bohm wrote: “If [man] thinks of the totality as
constituted of independent fragments, then that is how
his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include
everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall
whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border
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then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and
from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.”
Climate change and sustainability are increasingly
understood as sociological phenomena and as such
legitimately enter the influence of the arts. But what
right or ability do artists have in these matters? If we
take the route of the word ‘art’, we find ‘rt’, an IndoAryan noun/adjective of the Rg Veda, meaning the dynamic
process by which the whole cosmos continues to be created
– virtuously (Pirsig). So, in continuity and contiguity
sustainability has the potential to find, through art,
its immense scale and ethical value. And in ecology we
find the process of redundancy that creates a context and
a capacity for new forms to emerge.
The narratives are themselves important. All art tells
stories and the ‘art’ is in how those stories are told –
the poetry, the making, and the Greek word poiesis, from
which we get poetry, means to make – the process of
making something.
I don’t believe you can own a piece of art. The painting
on the wall, the sculpture in the park, the words in a
book, or the melody on a CD are not the art. They are
just things - fetishised objects. The art is in the
making, how they are made – the process, the practise,
the act of making. If we let them, the objects provide a
focus for our attention and we may be able to evoke, or
recreate the art from them – as a cognitive experience.
And so, we may consider the function of ecological art as
a synthesis of these
words through action, performance, relationships,
transformations and
metaphors. And it is at this point of convergence that
each discipline is
given meaning by the other. Just as David Bohm called for
a ‘new order’ of
physics to change the way we think of the physical world,
perhaps we need a
new order of art to change the way we think of the
future?
HARRISONS
For me, the work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton
Harrison is exemplary in that they transgress the scales
of other disciplines in their ecological reclamation and
re-empowering use of maps, or “sustainability icons”. As
an art form and visual metaphor their mapping processes
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combine with written and performative art forms to
envision sustainable landscapes and bring new
understanding to pattern recognition. But the sum of
their art posits itself in the form of “conversational
drift” – the continuing discourse of their interventions.
Michele De Certeau’s essay in the catalogue of the
Harrison’s seminal work, “The Lagoon Cycle” comments on
their plea to "Pay attention to the flow...”, Certeau
suggests, “Art is what attention makes with nature", so,
through art, maybe, we can see nature more clearly?
Maybe, the practice of art can help us to focus on
nature, or the ‘nature’ of things? Certainly, the
Harrison’s ‘sustainability icons’ provide visual, written
and performed metaphors that help us to potentially
transform landscapes into: "… the co-evolution of
biodiversity and cultural diversity to the advantage of
each other". Because, as Paul Klee wrote: "For the artist
communication with nature remains the most essential
condition. The artist is human; himself nature; part of
nature within natural space."viii
In their eco-arts project, Greenhouse Britain: Losing
Ground, Gaining Wisdom, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton
Harrison assert that language carries the determinant
cultural metaphor and potential paradigm shift from
‘development’ to ‘settlement’. The distinction is
apparent in the difference between the Government’s
strategy of ‘managed retreat’ from rising sea levels and
the Harrisons’ term, ‘graceful withdrawal’. The first
coins the language of engineering and war in its
assertion that we are still in control. The latter
responds with an ethical aesthetic of ‘becomingness’.
The strategies may at first appear to be similar, as they
both recognise the efficacy of not defending the
indefensible from the inevitable. But they differ
greatly in how we may proceed and what questions need to
be asked. What do we want to sustain? Is development
itself our desire, or ‘a new culture in which problems
give way to capabilities (E. Paolozzi 1984)? ‘Do we want
sustainable development, or the development of
sustainability?’
To bring the original definitions of ecology and art
together, we must understand the links between them. We
must see each as a moral and aesthetic imperative for
biodiversity and cultural diversity - the celebration of
the richness of infinite possibility, and the confidence
to cope with change. Perhaps this is the leaping
together of knowledge that E. O. Wilson refers to as
‘Conscilience’?
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Let us then consider new understandings for what art and
ecology might be. Not by reductive definitions, but the
potential for expanded diverse meanings. A capacity from
which further possibilities might flow, or as Robert
Pirsig writes in Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals: "The most
moral activity of all is the creation of space for life
to move onward."
6. Sustainable Development Vs. Capable
Futures
Sustainable development comes from Problem Based Learning
and it starts with the assumption that ‘everything’s
going to be alright’. All we need to do is identify the
problems and with the right science and the right
technology we will ‘fix it’. But of course we tend to
only recognise the problems we have been trained to
diagnose and we are only able to cure what we are able to
diagnose. And so, through a positive feedback loop, or
vicious circle, sustainable development contributes to
the very problem it was meant solve. Meanwhile, the
cancer grows exponentially.
Sustainable development has been used essentially as a
means to conserve current economic systems of the
dominant world cultures and importantly, we start to
understand the language of denial.
As a metaphor for status quo or the myth of culture as
immortality, sustainability perpetuates the very culture
that is destroying our planet. Sustainability maintains
desire and desire is the route to distopia. And
development is the means (myth) that evolution is a
purely linear process and its conditions are the
furtherance of our well-being, when the opposite is true.
To think the unthinkable … is to change attitudes; to
take our society out of suburbia and the normative
feedback loops of purposive degeneration and inertia.
Or as Richard Slaughter writes in Futures Beyond
Dystopia:
‘As we contemplate the dilemmas of the twenty-first
century, it is clear that a viable future for humankind
cannot be based on industrial era assumptions, models and
values. We should not therefore uncritically carry over
existing cultural commitments from one era to the next.
Rather, we need to let go of some earlier commitments and
consciously take up others. We need grounded visions,
designs if you will, of a world that has experienced a
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recovery of vision, meaning and purpose; one that has
moved beyond the disastrous conceits of industrialism –
particularly the obsession with material growth, the
subjugation of nature and the marginalization of nonWestern culturesix’.
Looking Forward to Collapse
So, what is ‘sustainable’ - support, nourish, feed,
endure?
What is the opposite of sustainable? Collapse,
‘give way’, let go, starvation, withhold. Perhaps, to
understand sustainability, first we must understand
collapse as a dynamic gestalt process – moving on,
through completion, to entropy. The highest notion of
sustainability, may, therefore be ‘change’ itself.
Sustainability Development
/ Collapse Becoming
(evolving)
Re-invention
Capability
Redundancy
Capacity
Questions of Ecological Resilience
How fast a system returns to equilibrium after a shock or
stress is called ‘engineered resilience’. However, the
term ‘ecological resilience’ is now applied to how far a
system may be perturbed before it collapses or becomes
another state of being.x So, the capacity to withstand
disturbance is not just a question of how long the status
quo can be maintained, but how we might evolve to dwell
in this new world.
Some states or configurations of being are thought to be
desirable by some, but may be considered undesirable by
others. That desirability may be expressed in economic
terms or other values. Some regimes may also be
considered undesirable, but are never the less, resilient
(i.e. slavery or desertification). Collapse, or
‘release’ from such situations would be considered
beneficial.
“Adaptability is the capacity of the actors in a system
to manage resilience. Complex adaptive systems are
generally characterized by self-organisation without
system-level intent or centralized control. Humans,
however, are unique in having the capacity for foresight
and deliberate action and self-organisation in complex
social-ecological systems is therefore somewhat different
from that in ecological or physical systems.xi”
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Our capability to manage resilience may, therefore
determine whether we can avoid bringing about an
undesirable state or succeed in creating a desirable one.
However, transformability is the capacity to invent
fundamentally new systems from untenable situations.
Getting trapped in resilient undesirable socialecological systems may call for a large external
disruption or internal reform to bring about change.
Such transformations may generate new system
configurations, but what they might become and how they
may be managed are of considerable concern.
The term ‘shooting the rapids’, as an organizing
metaphor, ‘… is analogous to the periods of abrupt change
or turbulence observed in managed social-ecological
systems (SESs), in which previous rules and social
mechanisms may no longer applyxii. Here, not in an
instrumentalist way, but as an inclusive necessity, the
practitioners of creative arts may contribute skills and
envisioning capabilities to the process of
transformation.
Based on the ‘adaptive cycle’, the concept of ‘adaptive
capacity’ takes us through collapse, reorganisation and
recovery - or evolution.
7. An On-Going Conclusion?
And to bring us to ‘an on-going conclusion’, I’d like to
introduce a little science fiction, or is it fact?
Entitled, We are there, now: in a future present, this
extract was written for a compendium of writings by
ecological artists, called ‘Watershed: a turning point in
the future of art and ecology’
While I was sleeping, the time changed. The tense changed
too. The new paradigm is here, now – ‘eco-culture’xiii.
Welcome to the future and a liberated ecological art. No
longer do artists have to be prophets of doom, thinking
the unthinkable, trying to change the attitudes of others
and making a stand against society. The tide turned.
Artists and scientists, teachers and politicians,
commercialists and industrialists learned how to make the
new world work – a new way of life – ‘ecopoiesis’xiv.
There was a time, before the effects of global warming
became evident, when people lived in denial of what was
taking place.
Brave artists and scientists worked to
create understanding in the pre-paradigmatic state of
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Postmodernism, the antithesis of a culture that could be
traced back to the Industrial Revolution, the Age of
Enlightenment, the Renaissance and even Ancient Greece.
There was no way that art would change the world, but the
world has since changed art. Now, as our relationship
with the world has shifted, we are forced to embody a new
order, and ecology has become the central focus - a
dynamic synthesis of art and science, nature and culture.
Earlier notions of ecology presupposed ecology to be a
science, we now know it to be art.
The problem was that linear forms like progress and
development were used as moral values by societies
unwilling to recognise the complex, non-linear world – we
needed different concepts to embrace the uncertainties of
quantum theory and climate change. Much art, even ecoart became trapped in the paradox of radical gestures
performed in reactionary contexts. In more than forty
years, little had changed. Indeed, Wittgenstein would
have appreciated playing-out the endgame of life in acts
of art while science measured the effects. It was like
applying quantum theory to Newtonian physics – they
didn’t fit – the later assured certainty, while the
former demonstrated uncertainty. Uncertainty has never
been a problem in daily life. Uncertainty became a
problem when people couldn’t let go of their ‘classic’
mindsets and binary opposites.
In previous writings I have called for society’s need to
become an ‘eco-centric culture’. Global events are
possibly forcing this paradigm shift upon us, if we are
to learn anything from what Slaughter calls the ‘tsunamis
of change’. But eco-centricity is not just a matter of
political, ideological, corporate and civic preferences,
it’s a way of understanding and working with our
‘embodied ecology’. So, restoration of the habitats of
others becomes the realisation of our complete
connectedness – one specie’s extreme environment becomes
a sustaining habitat for another, given time.
So, what does the new art look like? How does it sound?
What senses does it engage? What questions does it
evoke? Or, is it the same old art trying to survive the
new world? Has eco-art found its place and time, only to
become the mainstream? If this is the norm for the new
world, what is the avant-garde? Is there a need for
fashion and novelty? Does art sill need to join-up with
science and other disciplines? Was eco-art, as
Wittgenstein might have put it, a way to let the fly out
of the bottle? How did suburbia become the aesthetic
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driver of global economies? And can life continue to
support suburbia in a climate changed world?
Waters run this way and that. And having run this way, a
pattern is formed, a ‘basin’ of rivers, wetlands,
aquifers – a diverse and dissipative body of waters, an
ecosystem. ‘To run at the edge of language’
(Wittgenstein); and this is the language of the ecocentric culture, the eco-art. Watershed as a metaphor
for a new paradigm – an ecological capacity for
convergent knowledge and art as the continuing creation,
the evolution of a new understanding of planet as
watershed.
-----------------------------------------------Critical Futures Studies are a powerful and complex
concept that simply incorporate all our developmental
strategies, holistically. It need not be complicated.
It need not be the sole territory of technocratic
professionalism. If we do not engage with the future
then we will have discarded our birthright. If we are
prevented from participating in futures planning, then we
are being denied our voice and capability to survive.
Through expanded notions of arts practice we may develop
the potential to open-up this process – to take
responsibility for and be accountable to the future.
We are the future we create, the embodiment of our time.
witness the dance
creation and destruction
confluence of life
uncertain actions
words hanging on isobars
flesh caught on barbed wire
capped to forget
percolating poison
landfills drifting by
laying hills to waste
stewards of suburbia
raping valleys
subsuming sprawl
landscape of denial
building violence
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Jerusalem
in a Disney desert
the promised land?
END
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ii
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