A person can scarcely accomplish anything, especially over an extended period of time, without a decisive commitment to the undertaking. One is unlikely to find a productive niche in life by bouncing from endeavor to endeavor. Decisiveness has a value in many settings, certainly here.
Value for Friday of Week 17 in the season of Growth
Living Sustainably
If we use our fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful, and will have to be stopped in the interest of coming generations. The heat of the sun’s rays represents an immense amount of energy vastly in excess of water power. [attributed to Nikola Tesla, 1915]
A wise person seeks strategies that succeed over time. Whether the issue is the availability of food and water for the billions of people on Earth or how long one’s personal assets will last, sustainability is essential value in the assessment of and plans for future well-being.
Real
True Narratives
Some people have tried organizing ecovillages, in which people share equally and live in a sustainable way. Though relatively few people live in them, they keep an ideal alive.
- Jan Martin Bang, Ecovillages: A Practical Guide to Sustainable Communities (New Society Publishers, 2005).
- Jonathan Dawson, Ecovillages: New Frontiers for Sustainability (Green Books, 2006).
- Liz Walker, EcoVillage at Ithaca: Pioneering a Sustainable Culture (New Society Publishers, 2005).
- Hildur Jackson and Karen Svensson, eds., Ecovillage Living: Restoring the Earth and Her People (Green Books, 2002).
Other narratives on sustainability:
- William deBuys, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (Oxford University Press, 2011): “ . . . the Southwest, and other subtropical regions including southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, face imminent danger from droughts, fires, heat waves and other social stresses.” “ . . . it is a sweeping story, encompassing global weather patterns, the mysterious histories and farming practices of the native people whose settlements rose and vanished in the desert, and the firefighters, biologists, anthropologists, water administrators and others who deal with increasing dryness today and seek to plan for an even drier tomorrow.”
- Lucas Bessire, Running Out: In Search of Water On the High Plains (Princeton University Press, 2021): “Bessire . . . reminds readers that the High Plains supported only marginal dry farming until after World War II, when the newly discovered Ogallala Aquifer, which extends from South Dakota to Texas, produced an irrigation bonanza that now supports one-sixth of the world’s grain production. Like fish, forests, and buffalo, it seemed inexhaustible—until it wasn’t. Massive withdrawal is shrinking the Ogallala, and many wells are running dry.”
Champions of sustainability:
- Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life (University of Chicago Press, 2017): “Thoreau laid the groundwork for a field that would come to be known as ecology. He was one of the first advocates for the establishment of a system of national parks. He was a passionate champion of the ethical treatment of all living things and embraced the tenets of Eastern religion, incurring the wrath of fundamentalists who accused him of blasphemy.”
- James Rebank, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey (Custom House, 2021): “tackles the confounding problem of how to make money from land without wrecking it.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
Resources: In technologically advanced societies, people are massive energy consumers, posing global challenges for the sustainability of life as we have developed it. In our time, dependence on oil and other fossil fuels has posed an immediate challenge, to which none of the world’s developed nations has responded with suitable urgency.
- Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World (The Penguin Press, 2011)
- Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (Simon & Schuster, 1991).
Climate change:
- David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Tim Duggan Books, 2019): “There’s plenty of science consulted here, but the book, he writes, isn’t about the science of warming: It is about what warming means to the way we live on this planet.’ He warns of collapsing ice sheets, water scarcity, an equatorial band too hot to be livable and — for anyone fortunate enough to reside elsewhere — extreme heat waves that will burn longer and kill more.”
Population control:
- Alan Weisman, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? (Little, Brown & Company, 2013), laying out scenarios for a sustainable world population.
- Joel K. Bourne, Jr., The End of Plenty: The Race to Feed a Crowded World (W.W. Norton & Company, 2015): “Bourne concentrates on rehabilitating Malthus’s reputation and making him less armchair scold than prescient thinker whose ideas about poverty are startlingly relevant.”
- Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Poetry
I recall that man and not two centuries
have passed since I saw him,
he went neither by horse nor by carriage:
purely on foot
he outstripped
distances,
and carried no sword or armour,
only nets on his shoulder,
axe or hammer or spade,
never fighting the rest of his species:
his exploits were with water and earth,
with wheat so that it turned into bread,
with giant trees to render them wood,
with walls to open up doors,
with sand to construct the walls,
and with ocean for it to bear.
[from Pablo Neruda, “The People”]
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Music that adheres to its roots in nature reminds us of the value of sustainability. Usually this is performed on one or a few simple instruments, and sometimes by voice. Here are some albums and compilations:
- R. Carlos Nakai, “Canyon Trilogy” (1988) (122’)
- R. Carlos Nakai, “Earth Spirit” (1986) (60’)
- R. Carlos Nakai, “Water Is Life” (62’) celebration, live at Martha’s Vineyard
- R. Carlos Nakai, Native American flute with rain sounds compilation (129’)
- R. Carlos Nakai, Native American flute with fire and night sounds for hot summer night compilation (60’)
- Flute music of the Andes, “Spirit of the Incas” album (52’)
- “Flutes of the Andes” album (108’)
- FARA, “Energy Islands” (2022) (58’): “As we sit in our houses, thinking of an impending winter of ever-thicker jumpers and of still shivering, rue on the fact that the Orkney Islands produce more energy: wind and water derived, than the grid can even handle, resulting in an excess, unable to be passed further south.”
Popular singer Billie Eilish is an activist on climate issues, including sustainability. “. . . Eilish refuses to fly private and is committed to finding unusual workarounds for travel. Her determination to reduce her carbon footprint resulted in 8.8 million gallons of water saved, and 15,000-plus tonnes of CO2 neutralized, which Reverb’s recently released tour impact report says is ‘equivalent to taking 3,000 homes off the electric grid for a year.’ Close to a million dollars were raised when Eilish engaged thousands of her fans to support climate and other social justice causes.” She has been lauded “for her trailblazing advocacy for sustainability and the environmental movement . . .” Here are links to her releases, her playlists, a time capsule of sorts, an interview, and some videos.
Sheryl Crow is another popular singer and activist on climate and sustainability. She has received a Natural Resources Defense Council Forces for Nature Award. In connection with her campaign for reusable shopping bags, she says: “I’m a big believer in doing what you can . . . Even if it's something as small as reducing the amount of plastic we each use daily that ends up in landfills, whether it is plastic bags, water bottles or product packaging.” Here are links to her releases, her playlists, a documentary film, an interview, and some videos.
Popular singer Jack Johnson is working to make rock ‘n’ roll go Green. “With his wife Kim, he founded the Kokua Hawaii Foundation to support environmental education in Hawaii's schools and communities, as well as the Johnson Ohana Charitable Foundation to support environmental, art and music education worldwide.” He has been involved in several projects on sustainability. Here are links to his releases, his playlists, an interview, and some videos.
Jasper Høiby is a jazz bassist whose planetary ethics are in the forefront of his art. He “marries Coltrane and Rollins inspired jazz with environmental protest, underlining the message with voice samples”. He is creating “a series of four albums from Jasper Høiby’s Planet B, featuring saxophonist Josh Arcoleo and drummer Marc Michel, that focus on global topics of vital importance – Humanity, Climate Change, Artificial intelligence and Monetary Reform.”
- “What It Means to Be Human” (2022) (41’): “This album seeks connection. A connection between humanity and the planet, between the problems we all face and about an opportunistic optimism to fix them.”
- “Planet B” (2020) (45’): “At this point in time its gotta be about more than making music for music’s sake. Planet B is a conversation about who we are as a people today, how we exist in relation to this earth and to each other, and where we want to go from here. Let us be inspired together and explore what a reimagining of this planet can be.”
Before the series starting with the album entitled “Planet B”, Høiby was already expressing his ethics in music, with the jazz trio Phronesis:
- “We Are All” (2018) (41’): “. . . in its title and scope, it . . . seeks to focus attention on an important message of togetherness and balance beyond the one they demonstrate on the bandstand. The trio aim to shine a light on the interconnectedness of all living species and the responsibility we hold as human beings to coexist in harmony with our environment, and to protect the beauty, fragility and welfare of our planet, and each other.”
- “Fellow Creatures” (2016) (55’): “. . . the titles and to some extent the writing are inspired by a brilliant book by Canadian author Naomi Klein called, ‘This Changes Everything’. The book talks about what we have to do to make sure that we don’t devour this beautiful planet, along with all its natural resources. It discusses how we can seize this environmental crisis and transform our failed economic system to build something radically better for everyone.”
Other artists and their albums:
- Ibrahim Maalouf, “Capacity to Love” (2022) (54’): “The set begins with Charlie Chaplin’s stirring pro-democracy/anti-fascist speech from The Great Dictator and ends with ‘Our Flag’, a blistering poem written and performed by Sharon Stone with a similar theme.”
- Shabaka and the Ancestors, “We Are Sent Here by History” (2020) (64’): Saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings says “One thing that’s come up in our conversations, and has been transmitted into the narrative of the album, is the fact that we need to try to imagine what the future can hold idealistically . . . We need to start articulating our utopias, articulating what needs to be burned and what needs to be saved.”
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Gotye, “Eyes Wide Open” (lyrics)
- Coldplay, “A Message” (lyrics)
