There are clues about what sustainability might mean. As Ted Chamberlin suggested in a previous chapter, learning may be more about recognitions than about definitions or acquiring information. Perhaps we want to recognize rather than define sustainability. One way to create such recognition might be to ask, What are the characteristics of a sustainable culture? If we can determine those, then perhaps we can back into a recognition. Indeed, a sustainable culture begins in recognitions.
A sustainable culture recognizes relationships. That is, it knows that everything is connected. It knows that, as folks like John Muir, Wendell Berry, and Gary Snyder have said, You can’t do any one thing. The farthest reach of the spider’s gossamer web trembles at the slightest touch. Our whole system of environmental, social, and personal worlds of intelligence and spirituality is also gossamer, equally sensitive, equally fragile, equally interrelated. A sustainable culture recognizes that all health—human health, the health of other species, community health, economic health, and the health of our institutions—is related, and all health is directly tied to the health of the soil. None of the former is possible for long without the latter. A sustainable culture recognizes the relationships between humans and other creatures, from microviruses to watershed ecosystems to global ecology to the cosmos beyond our globe, and seeks to create healthy relationships with all.
A sustainable culture takes care not only of the human species but others as well, protecting biological diversity. A sustainable culture also takes care of ethnic diversity, including language diversity, ceremonial and ritual diversity, and diversity of worldview, recognizing that these diversities are as critical as biological diversity to the world’s survival. “Men are like plants,” J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur wrote in 1782; “the goodness and flavour of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow.”1 The differences between us are as fruitful to the whole as the commonalities.
A sustainable culture is a socially and economically just culture, recognizing that wealth is never an individual or corporate accomplishment. It is a gift of society. That may rankle, since most prosperous folks see the acquisition of wealth as a personal triumph of persistence, hard work, and better brains than other folks have. Yet the corporation itself is a creation not only of individuals or partners but of the society that gives the corporation its charter and allows it to conduct business in the society’s interest. Theoretically the society can withdraw the charter that allows its existence. The perpetual demands by corporations that Congress (and therefore society) make allowances for the free exercise of their economic muscle attest to the fact that, at some basic level, society grants us the privilege of generating our wealth. The perpetual presence of transnational attorneys in the congressional committee rooms during markup and when regulations are drawn up following a bill’s passage also points to society’s role in granting us our wealth. Even the smallest commercial enterprises must have a license from society to conduct their business, and society presumes that business will be to its benefit as well as the proprietor’s. Corporations and commerce therefore owe society some return on society’s investment in their corporate success beyond the tax loopholes they manage to find and the grants and scholarships they give for public relations purposes. Indigenous societies recognize that such reciprocity, returning a portion of what has been taken, is a fundamental principle of sustainability. Mainstream American culture might appropriate such wisdom and then pass it on to the next generation as a wise gesture toward maintaining the culture. Following the path of reciprocity offers every citizen an opportunity to return something of value to the culture and to the earth in exchange for his or her own existence. Any system that deprives people of an opportunity to see themselves as useful members of the human community or that denies people a means of giving themselves to a larger community beyond themselves—including the earth community—is not sustainable. It will freeze to death of its own coldness.
There is no sustainable culture without a healthy intellectual and spiritual life. A sustainable culture incorporates systems for healing, reconciliation, and the return of exiles and affords healthy, nonviolent means of resolving differences. It provides all citizens a sense that we are in this together. A sustainable culture nourishes its artistic enterprises, recognizing that no culture can sustain itself for long without the arts, and if it could, it would not be worthy of the name. A sustainable culture also nourishes its academic efforts, recognizing that new knowledge about the past and the present in the sciences, the humanities, and the arts is essential to creating a sustainable culture. It supports its education systems for everyone, cradle to grave, recognizing that the young must be raised to understand and appreciate the values of the culture and to have the wisdom to grow beyond them. Helping children understand the culture and discover means to transcend the old ways is essential to keeping a culture alive, flexible, and sustainable. A sustainable culture affords its citizens avenues of meaning. What good does it do us to become wealthy if we cannot find any meaning for our lives? A sustainable culture understands the implications of its stories and tells the healthy stories over and over in proper season. In every culture we become the stories we tell ourselves; they are self-fulfilling prophecies. If the stories we tell about ourselves and about our culture’s future are healthy, we will become healthy—and that health includes all the elements we have talked about thus far.
A sustainable culture has sustainable food sources and experiences food security. It also has sustainable energy sources. A sustainable culture has avenues of new development, including intellectual growth and spiritual development, not just economic growth.
In light of these recognitions, we are ready to look at a tentative definition of sustainability: Sustainability is a worldview. That world-view recognizes the relationships, the connections, that ramify through every aspect of Nature, including the human, and knows itself to be dependent upon the land.
Out of that worldview comes a set of principles for our conduct. Cultures that hold a worldview based on sustainability strive for, and achieve with varying degrees of success, a clear measure of balance and harmony in their societies and offer means for individuals to achieve balance and harmony in themselves. The culture’s relationship to each element of the natural world’s ten thousand beings is regarded as essential and given due respect. A sustainable culture honors that world-view and lives it out to the best of its ability hour by hour and day by day.
Out of these general principles come specific actions derived from direct observation and experience. Reciprocity, which is built into the system, can become an asset or a liability depending on people’s attitudes and actions. If you don’t have the worldview, you don’t get the sustainability. Among the outcomes of a sustainable worldview are longevity, respect for self and others, and a satisfying and meaningful life in community with others.
Larry Gates, a fisheries biologist with encyclopedic knowledge of much else besides, told me, “We don’t need a definition of sustainability; sustainability operates out of a system of principles.” Yet I’ve tried to work toward a definition of sustainability in part because the usual view is that sustainability is synonymous with longevity, and I think that answer doesn’t look quite hard enough at the concept. Longevity is the result of a process. The cultures that have lasted longest have lasted not because they are sustainable cultures, as if that were an inherent characteristic or a state they had achieved. Rather, they created a process that grew out of their worldview. The choices they made created the conditions for longevity, every day. Inevitably, those choices were dictated by their particular worldview. There has never been a sustainable culture without need to worry any longer about the future. Longevity is, has always been, a by-product of the culture’s life, developing from the myriad choices about how and what to eat, how to dress, how to create shelter, how to maintain resources, how to treat our neighbors both near and distant, and how, finally, to treat ourselves—all with respect. The definition of sustainability lies in the worldview and ways of the culture, not in the outcomes we hope for.
Further, sustainability is not a state we reach but something we work toward forever. In that sense of it Larry is also right. What is great about cultures that have been around forever is not that they are sustainable but that they have lived, and continue to live, a sustainable life, making those daily choices that lead toward sustainability. Their success is in small part an accident; in far larger measure it is by design. They have respect for the world that supports them, and that has resulted, so far, in their longevity. We know that now because we can look back through history and see it, but every month, every week, every day of that long history, even in times of abundance, the culture was in jeopardy, teetering in the balance, its future seen but dimly, and then was shaped deliberately, with respect and hope, to keep it on a path that could sustain it.
Does that mean that life was perpetually stressed, anxious, and filled with drudgery? No. Occasionally, yes, of course, but not continuously. People learned to trust their observations and their actions, and they learned over and over, as their environment evolved around them, what it took to live in harmony with all creatures and the land. People also had confidence that if they followed the culture’s wisdom, modifying it based on their own, more recent observations, then they would survive. Indeed, they followed the principles of sustainability, as Larry noted, but the principles lay in the worldview—that we must carefully and respectfully observe the world around us. That principle in the worldview informs the good practice that grows from it as the culture learns to express the worldview. There were times enough of plenty, and celebrations to honor those. Times of want were reduced as a new culture found its way and developed its wisdom with regard to the land and its food sources and as it developed rituals and practices to ameliorate times of hunger and need.
Sustainability for the oldest surviving cultures was never a present reality, settled, fully grasped and realized, assured. It was, and remains in our own culture, always contingent. It remains to be seen in a future we can only dimly discern. The sustainability worldview sees that it is better to live in a mutually respectful world than one filled with greed, anger, antagonism, hatred, and indifference that stem from inappropriate actions. Eskimo wisdom tells us we cannot afford to have the salmon turn their backs on us; therefore we must treat the salmon with respect. That respectful attitude toward the world starts with us, and it has to be nourished by our own interior mind and spirit.
Whether we want to define sustainability or not, it is hard to argue with the second part of Larry’s thesis, that sustainability operates from a system of principles. One can quickly see that a society that gives precedence to cash, credit, or capital economics, or believes in economic determinism, is bound to be out of balance, lacking harmony, facing a short-term future. A culture that elevates humans to a status greater than the ecosystems that form our habitat, that sees the earth only as a means to personal or corporate wealth, is out of whack and has a foreshortened future. And any culture that elevates the environment to a status that prohibits humans from participation, as some wilderness advocates now hold, is also doomed to a short life.
The first principle of a sustainable culture is self-cultivation. I do not mean the self-fulfillment that contemporary Americans seem so desperate for but cultivating the self, not for the sake of the self but so that there is something in us for others. That “something” in us is the capacity for respect, for engagement, for paying attention. This is not the kind of respect that we want to grant every idea these days, as if the notions of equality and respect have to mean that every idea, wise or foolish, has equal weight or merit. Rather, the respect that is an operating principle of a sustainable culture includes genuine respect for every essential aspect of every relationship in our human culture, and those relationships clearly include our connections to ecosystems, other critters, and the soil. We are not born with a facility for respect. A capacity for respect may be innate, but to become fruitful it has to be cultivated by each of us. Such capacities grow through reflection, thoughtfulness, and a desire for wisdom, and when properly nourished they become the pathway toward the elimination of prejudice and poverty, toward the implementation of social justice and care for the environment, all essential ingredients of a sustainable culture.
Walter Rosenberry, a Denver teacher and friend, talked to me once about Samuel Sewall, a Puritan who fought against slavery. Sewall wrote in 1700 that black people should “be treated with a respect agreeable.”2 He meant, of course, a respect agreeable to blacks as well as to whites. Like Walter, I love that phrase. It fits so much more than just our attitude toward other races and cultures. It’s appropriate for all of us who love our homeland and want to see it persist in spite of our numerous assaults upon it. It’s appropriate, too, for those of us who love our culture’s ideals, if not always its practices. To accord our land and all its creatures a respect agreeable; to accord our rivers a respect agreeable; to accord our communities, whether small or large, sprawling, and urban, and all their complex components a respect agreeable; to accord our small, local economies a respect agreeable; to accord our everyday discourse, our public and political rhetoric a respect agreeable—those are tasks worthy of the best in all of us.
The person who first drove this point relentlessly home for twentieth-century culture was Albert Schweitzer. He took respect a step further. He wanted us to inculcate “reverence for life” as both a personal and a cultural goal. He included in that reverence the lowliest and most obnoxious creatures. No matter our place in the food chain, one characteristic of every creature is the will to live, Schweitzer declared. That is our common heritage, our link to every other animal and to plants as well. That will to live deserves not only respect but reverence for the most fundamental force that links every creature in the world.3
Another principle from which sustainability operates is attention, our paying attention to the world, being wholly present to it all. This is a principle that ramifies through every aspect of a sustainable culture. I remember a cattleman in Colorado talking about how he knew when to rotate cattle from one paddock to another so that the grass could come back. “I spend a lot of time down on my knees, looking at the grass,” he said, squinting up at me from his position on those knees. “You have to pay attention all the time.” That is the kind of attentive respect that allows the grazing animal, the plant life, and the humans who depend on it to thrive. I told him that poets say paying attention is where poems come from. He grinned and said, “I’ll be damned.” Then he added, “Sounds right to me.”
Martin Buber, the Jewish mystic and philosopher, saw being fully present as one of the essential ways that humans have of paying respect, of treating each other as “Thou,” with a capital T, rather than “it,” a thing or object: neutral, useable, demeaned, and ultimately disposable. We show our respect for another by being engaged, fully present with the other. Buber asks us to extend that courtesy to nonhuman creatures as well.4
Working from these principles in our own lives, and getting the culture to operate from these principles, is a task that will lead to a new story about a sustainable culture, a story about respect that all creatures, including us, can live with. When we understand that story and teach it to our children, we will have learned enough to respect ourselves as well as our culture, to respect the myriad things around us, and to respect both the present and the future. Then we may find ourselves at home, in our place, at last.