Remember when you were a kid, and
you could transform your backyard, your sheet-draped table, or your tree house
into the most fantastical imaginative place you could think of? And once you
established this this world, this situation, you could keep sailing on that
creative wave, inventing complex scenarios about kings and queens and wizards
and elves? Of adventure, struggle, laughter and joy?
Maybe you didn’t steal as many
plots and ideas from The Hobbit as I
might have, but I’d bet you spun together some very creative adventures, and
still continue to tap into that creativity.
In reading about issues of
sustainability, I remember seeing a graph of the various “ages” of our human
history; we’ve seen the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, on up through
the giant leaps of the Industrial Age. Now we have the esoteric Post Industrial Age. Despite the
dedicated attempts of my history professor tor try to drive me to utter
boredom, a spark of interest lit up when I thought about that term. The Post
Industrial Age. I’ll admit, by itself it’s not particularly interesting or very
descriptive. But it implies possibility. Maybe we can’t really describe this
age very well because we are in an intersection of possible paths forward. This
is what sparked my intrigue, my imagination, the same stuff from where I was a
kid.
What happens next? What if we go here and this happens? Adventure, struggle, mystery. What would world will
we find, make destroy, regenerate, inherit?
Using our imaginative process to
project out a positive path forward into this possibility serves as a key
element in tackling the ongoing issues around sustainable development. So often
I read the climate change reports, about the dwindling Southwest water
supplies, about the blunders of Industrial Agriculture and become overwhelmed
in the mountains of bleak data. Or I read the various lengthy plans and
strategies with quantified, analyzed, and scrupulous findings that promote
sustainable solutions, but become numbed by the dry and dusty communication.
And then I read about projects like
Patricia Johanson’s Garden Cities, or
Nils Norman’s Edible Park, or wonder
for myself what a sustainable future would look like, and I become captive to
that creative process; I become engaged, because they offer me an opportunity
to directly interact with these fictionally tangible ideas.
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| Patricia Johanson, Cabbage City, from the Home and Garden Commission, 1969 |
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| Patricia Johanson, Animal Garden:Sheep, from the House and Garden Commission, 1969 |
Sustainability stems in many ways
from a kind of utopian ideal, defining a state of balance and harmony within our
human and land communities. But maybe this sustainability stuff isn’t an end goal
or a finish line with green flags waving; like Norman’s Edible Park, maybe sustainability lays out a set of ideals and
provides a framework for activating the process
of sustainability. By allowing us the time to wonder how we could work the
process of those ideals better, visioning gives inspiration, creativity,
wonder, adventure, laughter, and joy.
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| Nils Norman with Permacultuur Centrum Den Haag, model for Edible Park, 2010 |
