Sustainability or Survival?

Steinman, Urban Apple Orchard

A conversation with my friend Lori at the peace rally Saturday in Salt Lake City is typical of comments I'm hearing from people more and more: climate change is inevitable and it is too late to do anything about it. This soon leads to despair as we contemplate what a world with climate chaos and insufficient resources for our growing population will be like. How can we have hope?

It is pointless to give up. It is pointless to imagine a world of sheer terror and deprivation, a world without joy. Yes, we are starting too late to avert global warming, but if we can keep focused on the longer view and we begin making the necessary changes, there is still hope. We can also start preparing for a world that will certainly be very different from the one we know today. In terms of material consumption, "the party's over," as Richard Heinberg said. And we are long overdue in reducing our over-consumptive lifestyle, which has cost the poor of the world so dearly already.

So maybe the name of the game is survival rather than sustainability. We in the developed world are living a lifestyle than cannot be sustained. The world simply does not have enough resources: not fossil fuels, not food, not water. If we are smart, we will all start learning how to live on less, how to lower our material (not social, emotional or spiritual) expectations. An economy like the U.S. economy built overwhelmingly (66%) on consumerism, is not sustainable. We need to go back to living within our means. Whenever human societies tried to live beyond their means, the result was always the same: collapse. If we are smart, we will start building communities where people work together, cooperatively, for the common good rather than competing for individual advantage. If we are smart, we will try to strengthen our local infrastructure, from local farms and urban gardens to local energy production. Thinking in these terms, the future seems less dire. There is the prospect of more satisfying relationships, of healthier food, of more time for socializing or spiritual growth rather than the time-consuming and stress-inducing rat race created by hyper-consumerism.

So how does all this relate to art? Does art have a role to play in helping to create this new society? I can think of a couple of ways, but suspect I will later think of many more. Artists who create art from used materials set a model for thinking creatively about how to fulfill our needs without depleting nature's supply of resources. Artists who work with communities, like Suzanne Lacy, Vijali Hamilton, Lily Yeh, Betsy Damon, Susan Leibovitz Steinman, and many others, teach us how we can work together for a common purpose.

Steinman's Urban Apple Orchard, a public art project next to San Francisco's Market Street, was created with the help of local residents, students, and homeless person. The result was a temporary orchard. At the end of the project, the trees were given to local schools and to a neighborhood organized park. For more on Steinman, see http://www.steinmanstudio.com/.