... because we humans can only work for a future we can imagine.

Declaration of Interdependence for a Sustainable Future

UIA/AIA World Congress of Architects Chicago, 18-21 June 1993

Recognising that:

A sustainable society restores, preserves, and enhances nature and culture for the benefit of all life, present and future; a diverse and healthy environment is intrinsically valuable and essential to a healthy society; today's society is seriously degrading the environment and is not sustainable;

We are ecologically interdependent with the whole of the natural environment; we are socially, culturally, and economically interdependent with all of humanity; sustainability in the context of this interdependence, requires partnership, equity, and balance among all parties;

Buildings and the built environment play a major role in the human impact on the natural environment and on the quality of life; sustainable design integrates consideration of resource and energy efficiency, healthy buildings and materials, ecologically and socially sensitive land-use, and an aesthetic sensitivity that inspires, affirms, and ennobles; sustainable design can significantly reduce adverse human impacts on the natural environment while simultaneously improving quality of life and economic well being;

We commit ourselves,

as members of the world's architectural and building-design professions, individually and through our professional organisations, to:

Place environmental and social sustainability at the core of our practices and professional responsibilities
Develop and continually improve practices, procedures, products, curricula, services, and standards that will enable the implementation of sustainable design
Educate our fellow professionals, the building industry, clients, students and the general public about the critical importance and substantial opportunities of sustainable design
Establish policies, regulations, and pratices in government and business that ensure sustainable design becomes normal pratice
Bring all existing and future elements of the built environment their design, production and eventual reuse up to sustainable design standards.

Susan A. Maxman, President
Olufemi Majekodunmi, President
International Union of Architects American Institute of Architects

FLESH ON THE BONES

But let's just put a little flesh onto the bones of this possible world -- and I'll use my own community, St Kilda to do this. So let's just rewind ... I'm there at my computer again taking another early morning canter into cyberspace aboard my super efficient set of twenty first century chips (or whatever they're called by then) for a face-to-face chat with a few colleagues. My old friend in Wollongong of course, plus some fellow global villagers who live in Altamira on the Xingu River in the deepy forested Amazon Basin, Llasa in now-independent Tibet, and Aral'sk, a sustainable fishing town on the banks of the once-again wide blue Aral Sea. (You might remember that by the 1990s, the Aral Sea had been considered one of the world's greatest ecological and social disasters. Some authorities even predicted it would cease to exist by the end of the century because of the damage done by some mad megascheme to irrigate cotton and rice. )

Anyway the four of us are working together and have become very close friends in the process. While our meetings in cyberspace are very rewarding, they're not quite the same as being able to chat over a cafe table so I log out and cross the road to Angelo's cafe. Angelo sees me coming and is already at the espresso machine making my usual as I pull a chair out from under my favourite table. It's almost a daily ritual this, when I'm at home. Sometimes we have a chat, Angelo and me, and sometimes we don't. Sometimes I just sip my coffee and stare out the window! Angelo understands.

I used to have such moral dilemmas about drinking coffee at Angelo's though. I mean, there were such problems with how coffee was produced! Indeed there were problems with how all our food was produced. Usually it was by broadacre monocultural practices that were heavily dependent upon artificial fertilisers and insecticides, and more often than not, resulted in both soil erosion and salinisation. And then all the energy that was expended in production, packaging and distribution of what we ate and drank. And all the people in southeast Asia, South America and Africa who were exploited intolerably so you and I could enjoy cheap tea and coffee.

Now all those issues are problems of the past. Most of the food Angelo serves in his cafe is organically grown within our own bioregion now. Much of it, indeed, is sharecropped in what were once suburban back yards, but have now become small permaculture farms. In Melbourne we still have to import coffee to sip in our cafes, but much of that is produced by indigenous landowners according to their traditional agricultural practices in New Guinea and in independent East Timor.

In the last few decades, Melbourne has become one of the major manufacturing centres of the Pacific Rim though if you still think in terms of those old smoke stacks and pipes spewing out 'externalities', you'd never recognise it as such. Those old days of air pollution are well and truly gone. Manufacturing is all closed system production now. Hardly any emissions. Any 'waste' you create in one manufacturing process, you use as as a raw resource for another. Even our sewage one of the most valuable raw resources we produce. In the early stages of filtration, it is used to generate methane gas. Later the solids are collected and turned into fertiliser while the liquid is filtered through reed beds in local wetlands and used to irrigate city forests and gardens. We no longer have to worry about fecal contamination of our beaches and waterways as we did in the 1990s when sewage and other 'waste water' was just poured into our oceans and rivers. The wetlands attract the most prolific wildlife, especially birds, and have become a central focus of community life.

Most of the energy we need is generated from renewables, primarily solar and wind power. The range of new technologies and improvements on old ones that have emerged over the last few decades would have been impossible to even imagine in the '90s. These innovations mean that most communities can produce their energy requirements locally. Many households and businesses, for example, produce more solar power from their rooftops than they can consume in a day and so feed their excess into the local grid. Per capita energy consumption has dropped by over 80% in the last few decades because of good solar design, extraordinarily energy efficient appliances and the assistance regional authorities have given in retrofitting older buildings with new insulating materials and solar panels.

The integrated and consultative approach to local and regional planning instituted in the 1990s has meant that waste management, transport, energy, and water systems have been relatively painlessly transformed to serve the needs of our region's people. One of the nicest things is that we are no longer dependent upon cars. Those who need or want one can lease them from the manufacturers who now have a legal obligation to recycle the parts once the lease expires. We're all so well serviced by public transport now that cars are considered an unnecessary luxury by most people.

Melburnians grew to love their tram system last century and, for sentimental reasons, we've kept some of the antique rolling stock. Those old trams used to run on electricity produced by burning fossil fuels. In particular, brown coal. As you might remember, the combustion of fossil fuels was one of the primary sources of greenhouse gases. Neither the coal nor oil industry have survived the transition to a sustainable economy but many other industries have grown or emerged to replace them including the labour intensive industries associated with renewable energies as I've mentioned, plus those associated with waste collecting, sorting, recycling and composting.

But people want much more than good public transport, efficient waste management, clean water, clean power and 'jobs'. We want to live in communities that guarantee us rich personal lives. This demand for diversity and complexity and intimacy in community life on top of all the other environmental, aesthetic and safety concerns, presented our older urban planners, architects and engineers with challenges they had never been forced to consider before. But they coped!

As well as rethinking our cities and towns, we've rethought those old ideas about 'work' too. It was obvious to anyone who had the eyes to see, that people have always wanted much more from life than a 'job' and 'a wage.' So we've developed systems to redistribute our collective wealth in ways that are more affirming and empowering and equitable now. We've cured those old social diseases of 'unemployment' and youth alienation and our policies to nurture social diversity within communities, means that many of the other social tensions of the past have dissipated too. Without those conflicts, our society is much more socially sustainable. Our political structures reflect our changed thinking: they are more democratic and more representative of the whole population than they used to be.

Despite the regional population growth and development, most of our significant natural ecosystems have been preserved and returned to good ecological health. We've even been able to reconstute some of the ecosystems that had been destroyed and now these too are part our urban landscape. Living so much more harmoniously with nature seems to have precipitated a kind of spiritual renaissance. Young people say they feel a special bond with the earth and so make pilgrimages to other places to help heal the damage done to the planet over the last few hundred years. They see themselves as Earth's custodians and feel part of nature not separate from it they say. It's an identity that transcends old nationalistic and class and religious divisions and is a powerful uniting force in the world

Is that the sort of future you'd like to live in? It's a very idiosyncratic and simplified image of the future of course, but it helps me integrate, at a personal level, some of the practical complexities of what sustainability is all about. And to me, this image of that Other Place we inhabit simultaneously with the present is really very appealing. Infinitely preferrable to Fred Pearce's 'Postenvironmental Adventure', or most of the other scenarios that are being imposed upon us daily don't you think? And to me, it's a future that makes you want to be there.

But are there any models from the past for such a society? Well, if there are, then I haven't found them yet. I'm beginning to believe that there are no other cultures we can turn to for help in meeting the social and ecological challenges we now face. There are however, many other cultures that have something to teach us.

For most of our existence as identifyably human beings, we have been what enthnographers, anthroprologists and archaeologists call hunters and gathers. Or more correctly, 'gatherers and hunters' since women, traditionally the 'gatherers', provide around 80% of the food in these economies.

Scholars tend to agree that when it comes to quality of life, our traditional hunting and gathering days were the best we've ever had. Archaeologists use the term 'affluent' to describe the life style of the people who lived thirty thousand years ago around Lake Mungo, a now dry lake bed in south western NSW, for example. Of course, there are still people in northern and central Australia and in many other parts of the world, who maintain hunter-gather traditions. To these people, 'work' or 'a job' or 'a career' are incomprehensible and/or extraordinarily silly concepts. And the idea that we are somehow separate from nature is simply absurd.

A great deal of fascinating ethnographic and archaeological 'work' has been done with hunter-gatherer groups by 'outsiders'. Amongst the most revealing has been with the San people, some of whom still survive in the Kalahari region of southwestern Africa. While we might call this part of the planet a desert, the Kalahari ecosystem is actually very varied and rich with 85 species of plants that humans can eat and 54 species of edible animals, although the San apparently only regularly hunt (or hunted) 17 animal species. Their most reliable food is a nut called the mongongo, an extaordinarily rich source of protein and carbohydrate which grows on a small drought resistant tree. One day an anthropologist naively suggested to a San that it might be easier to grow food rather than hunt or gather it. The San looked at this stranger in disbelief. Why should we plant when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world? this person said.

According to anthropologists, collecting mongongo nuts and other food sufficient to sustain the community, occupies on average, only 1-3 hours of a San person's day. The men might hunt for five or six consecutive days then not lift their spears for another two or three weeks. The women are the ones who make sure there's enough food for everyone to eat every day but even for them, there is plenty of time for what we might call 'leisure activities.'

In the context of this workshop, it's worth noting that a traditional San community is sustained, in terms of daily food requirement, by the labour of only 60% of the people 'working' only a few hours a day. The elders are not expected to hunt or gather, and neither are the young people, or not until they marry. Men usually undertake this important rite of passage when they are around 25 years old; women at around 20. This means that 40% of the population is what we might call 'unemployed,' a ratio that is common to most if not all hunter/gather societies. Rather than being dismissed as nonproductive and a drain on society's resources, the elders and young people are valued for all the other contributions they make to the community. Food resources are shared with them equally.

It is very difficult, however, to argue that traditional hunter-gatherer societies are, or were 'sustainable' in the contemporary sense of the word but I won't go into this here. It's worth nothing however, that, as Jared Diamond suggests in 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee', these cultures generally spent thousands of years getting to know their physical environments and over that time, adapted their cultures to fit. Who knows what localised disasters they precipitated before they made the appropriate adaptations.

In some parts of the world, those cultural adaptations led to radically new ways of manipulating the environment and so began the slow process of domestication that we now know as agriculture. Some of the most ancient agricultural sites anywhere in the world are, incidentally, just across the Torres Strait in Papua New Guinea, which was once joined to the Australian mainland.

So far, most agricultural practices have a very poor 'sustainability' record. Even ten thousand years ago, villages were being abandoned in southwest Asia because of land degradation associated with deforestation and inappropriate agricultural and pastoral practices.

It's worth remembering that Europe, southwest Asia and all the islands in the Mediterranian were once heavily timbered. By the sixth century BCE, only remnants of forest remained in Greece, that heartland of 'Western' civilisation, for example, and the slopes of Attica were so degraded that only olive trees, grapes and wild herbs could grow. By the fifth century BCE Athens had to import most of its grain and timber. Eventually this dependence on other people's natural resources led to war and to the collapse of Athenian imperialism. A story that has been repeated time and time again throughout history.

We can go back to the Sumerian civilization which emerged along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq as another lesson in what not to do. Writing was invented in the temples of Sumer over five thousand years ago, probably by the women priests who served a female deity, and so we are able to read contemporary accounts of how 'the earth turned white' The Sumerians probably blamed their goddess for their salinity problems rather than the irrigation systems they depended upon to produce their food. And where is Sumer now?

Another 'great civilisation', the Mayan, emerged in the lowland tropical jungles of what is now Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. The Mayans were also literate and the texts they left behind tell a story of almost continual warfare between the large armies that supported the ruling elites. The food surplus necessary to maintain the armies and bureaucrats was intensively produced on terraced slopes and on small artificial islands in the swamps. As the population increased, more forest was cleared and the whole system became more vulnerable.

As Clive Ponting notes:

The first signs of declining food production are evident in the period before 800, when the skeletons from burials of the period show higher infant and female mortality and increasing levels of deficency diseases brought about by falling nutritional standards. A reduction in the food surplus on which the ruling elite together with the priestly class and army depended would have had major social consequences. Attempts were made to increase the amount of food taken from the peasant cultivators, leading to internal revolt. Conflict between the cities over the declining resources would have intensified, leading to more warfare. The fall in food supplies and the increasing competition for what was available led to very high death rates and a catastrophic fall in polulation, making it impossible to sustain the elaborate superstructure the Maya had built upon their limited environmental base. Within a few decades the cities were abandoned and no more stelae erected to commemorate rulers. Only a small number of peasants continued to live in the area. The deserted fields and cities, buried under dense jungle, were not found again until the nineteenth century.

After 1600 Easter Island society went into decline and regressed to ever more primitive conditions. Without trees, and so without canoes, the islanders were trapped in their remote home, unable to escape the consequences of their self-inflicted, environmental collapse. The social and cultural impact of deforestation was equally important. The inability to erect any more statues must have had a devastating effect on the belief systems and social organisation and called into question the foundations on which that complex society had been built. There were increasing conflicts over diminishing resources resulting in a state of almost permanent warfare. Slavery became common and as the amount of protein available fell, the population turned to cannibalism.

The Easter Islanders, aware that they were almost completely isolated from the rest of the world, must surely have realised that their very existence depended on the limited resources of a small island. After all, it was small enough for them to walk round the entire island in a day or so and see for themselves what was happening to the forests. Yet they were unable to devise a system that allowed them to find the right balance with their environment. Instead vital resources were steadlily consumed until finally there were none left.

[Page history: created and first published on www.ecoversity.org.au as part of Painting the future real (1995-97), the prototype for Redreaming the plain (1998-2002); taken off-line in 1998 and re-posted in its original form in July 2004 as a web archive. For more information contact redreaming@rmit.edu.au.]