https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6703-6137
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ABSTRACT
Sustainability is about carrying life on. If it is to mean anything, it must be for everyone and everything, and not for some to the exclusion of others. What kind of world, then, has a place for everyone and everything, both now and into the future? What does it mean for such a world to carry on? And how can we make it happen? To answer these questions, I take a closer look at what we mean by ‘everything’. I argue that it is not the sum of minimally existing entities, joined into ever larger and more complex structures, but a a fluid and heterogeneous plenum from within which things emerge as folds. How, then, does such an understanding of everything affect our concept of sustainability? It can no longer be understood in terms of the numerical balance of recruitment and loss. It is rather about lifecycles, about things’ lasting. In the sustainability of everything there is no opposition between stability and change. The more that global science has committed itself to a numerical calculus of sustainability, the more it has fallen to art to present the alternative. This has crucial implications for the ways we think about democratic citizenship.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 I am most grateful to Claudia Zeiske, of Deveron Arts, without whose initiative this essay would never have been written. An earlier version of the essay, entitled “The Sustainability of Everything”, was published as Chapter 21 of my book Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence (London: Routledge, 2022, 325–336).
2 The rationale of modelling the ocean as a totality, with a capacity to accommodate a finite number of waves, is nicely illustrated in an anecdote told by Stefan Helmreich. At the First International Australasian Conference on Wave Science, held in Newcastle, Australia, in 2014, Helmreich put the question “How many waves are there in the ocean?” to scientist Alexander Babanin. Without a moment’s hesitation, Babanin proceeded to work out that if oceanic waves are, on average, 100 metres long, and if their crests are spaced, again on average, 100 metres apart, then the average wave covers an area of 104 square metres. Given that the world’s oceans extend over 1016 square metres, Babanin arrived at an estimate of 1012: a trillion waves (Helmreich Citation2014, 266).
3 In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED, also known as the Brundtland Commission) defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED Citation1987).
4 On the distinction between progress and sustainability, see Ingold (Citation2024, 87–91).
5 This is to extend to design an argument that I have made elsewhere for thought: “Indeed it is largely in the attempt to think themselves out of history, and to evade the implications of the passage of time, that human beings have created a history of thought” (Ingold Citation2016, 142).
6 In the original German, Klee wrote: “Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, so ndern macht sichtbar”. This lends itself to translation in many ways; the one I use here comes from the English-language version of his notebooks (Klee Citation1961, 76).
7 This conclusion aligns closely with that of anthropologist Arturo Escobar, who sees design for sustainability as revolving “around a vision of the Earth as a living whole that is always emerging out of the manifold biophysical, human, and spiritual elements and relations that make it up”. Drawing on the philosophy of William James, he calls this living whole the “pluriverse”. I have much the same idea in mind with the plenum (Escobar Citation2011, 139).
8 Anthropologist Michael Pröpper (Citation2017) commences his comprehensive overview of the potential contributions of art to sustainability science with the remark that “academic sustainability science has so far been largely oblivious to the potential contribution of art”.
9 The primary meaning of “to observe”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “To act in accordance with, fulfil; to keep, maintain, or follow” (www.oed.com/dictionary/observe_v?tab = meaning_and_use#34130923, accessed 28th December 2023). The term is nevertheless contested. Philosopher Anna Bloom-Christen, for example, notes its technical usage in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century France, to refer to the methods of police surveillance of the absolutist state (Bloom-Christen Citation2024, 63).
10 In a recent article, anthropologist Didier Fassin argues that truth is profoundly and permanently in tension with the real. “Reality is horizontal, existing on the surface of fact. Truth is vertical, discovered in the depths of inquiry” (Fassin Citation2014, 41). For reasons that should now be clear, I do not accept this distinction. For one thing, to exclude from reality everything that cannot be ascertained by the facts is to consign the greater part of experience to the realm of fiction. And for another, in my understanding the facts are not a cover-up, concealing a truth that lies beneath. Truth, indeed, is neither vertically nor horizontally arrayed: to reach it means going not down or across but along. The search for truth is a process of longing (Ingold Citation2022, 277–278).
11 Dewey’s essay The Public and its Problems was first published in 1927 (Dewey Citation2012).
12 The Canadian writer and activist Heather Menzies speaks of commoning in just this sense, as “a way of doing and organizing things as implicated participants … immersed in the here and now of living habitat” (Menzies Citation2014, 122–123, original emphasis). See also Bollier and Helfrich (Citation2015), who entitle their collection Patterns of Commoning.
13 The animal in question was in fact a beech marten, a member of the weasel family. This attack, on 29 April 2016, was only the first. A few months later, on 21 November, another marten struck. Instantly electrocuted on contact with the 18,000-volt cable, the animal’s singed body was recovered and put on display at the Rotterdam Natural History Museum. See www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/27/cerns-electrocuted-weasel-display-rotterdam-natural-history-museum (accessed 28th December 2023).