What is Creative Sustainability?

"Creative sustainability is creative expression that recognizes, explores, and supports universal interdependency of all phenomena, be they animate or inanimate, internal
or external."
     Britta Konau, Curator, Center For Maine Contemporary Art

"Coming up with visions of sustainability that sound like as much fun as digging turnips with a stick is easy. Creative sustainability is that vision of sustainability that combines environmental limits with a new definition of human happiness."
     H. Emerson Blake, Executive Director of the Orion Society

"Creative sustainability is figuring out what works better than what corporations say works best. It is native genius."
     Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

CREATIVE SUSTAINABILITY?
Aurora borealis scooped from
the sky, then locked in glass bulbs
to make our bedrooms glow in
diaphanous green ribbons of light?
Pterodactyls regrown from DNA,
coaxed by flocks of sandhill cranes
& white pelicans to drag sun shields
through the burning greenhouse air?
A trained pit bull in every back yard,
sweetly crunching bottle-mountains,
cans, plastic jugs, word-weary laptops,
metaphors of want & want & want?
A Yucca Flats for carbon capture, a
Sing Sing for oily appetites, jail time for
Hummers, river thiefs, ax murderers of
old growth & the only home we have?
     John Calderazzo, Colorado State University

"Sustainability is not a problem, a condition, or a program; it's a way of life, a relationship in which humanity and the rest of nature become, in the words of Thomas Berry, "mutually enhancing presences to each other." In this respect, sustainability resembles love, health, or peace. Pursued with deliberate imagination, it becomes a life practice for both individuals and communities. Think of sustainability as a type of infinite game, in which the goal is not to win (which would end the game), but to keep on playing forever. In practical terms, sustainability must always manifest itself in some place with some people; it always has a local, personal flavor. And because conditions and people change, sustainability always appears dynamic and evolving. It involves learning and transformation: this is where creativity comes in. You can't have sustainability without imagination."
     John Tallmadge, author of The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City

"Creative sustainability exists in the human arcs of splitting logs for firewood. My earliest fall memories are of renting a hydraulic log splitter and running it with my father as long as the light held out, all weekend long. When the splitter had to be returned, we'd use wedges, mauls, axes. Then Dad would go inside to work on his word processor, writing short stories for his MA program. In college, I ran the same type of machine to pile oak & maple for the largest wood-fired kiln in North America. Then go inside to mess around in the pottery studio or work on some poems.
Energy plus labor--the act of creation. Or as Gary Snyder quotes Ezra Pound, translating Lu Ji: "When making an axe handle the pattern is not far off." Splitting our words, stacking them neatly; burning, passing on."
     Kyhl Lyndgaard, University of Nevada, Reno

"Creative Sustainability: Dynamically transcending this highly analytical world to follow creative pursuits in infinite forms."
     Dimitri Keriotis, Yosemite Community College

"Creatively sustainable systems are ones in which all living creatures can meet their basic life requirements indefinitely into the future. This means that we establish practices that are neither extractive nor are they simply maintenancelevel; they must be actively regenerative of the resources we need to survive and thrive."
     Lisa Fernandes, Portland Maine Permaculture

"How to Do Creative Sustainability:
Consider these words: imagine, create, sustain. Stir well: create able, sustain image.  Add ask, learn, try. Then heart, worth, good.
Post Thoreau's reminder: "the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." Ask, what's real? The problem, limits, available energies?
Ask, what matters? What do we need? What is worth wanting?
Toss the rules. If you need them, they'll show up again.
Wander. Dream. Mull. Unfocus. Take walks in places where you don't have to pay attention --but where moments of attention reward you with surprise or pleasure.
Collect insights, both blinding and fleeting. Let them grow.
Use your left brain. Then your right. Left. Right. Left, right.
Ask, what will feed my energy, mind, heart, imagination, play?
Assemble a team of doers. Talk, eat and drink together, have fun.
Do something. Take a break. Do something more."
     SueEllen Campbell, author of Bringing the Mountain Home

"Creativity is the capacity for hard work, imagination and openness to new ideas, the capacity to see fresh connections between chance phenomena, to being open to accident and mistake and the unexpected as a means to new breakthroughs and solutions. The capacity for simplicity and elegance, for improvement, efficiency and beauty, for invention and enthusiasm. Creativity brings people together and encourages dialog, recognizes contribution and celebrates innovation. Creativity lightens the spirits. Creative Sustainability would be applying the fresh reach of creativity to the development of valuable new forms which change conditions for the better, make the world smarter and bring clarity and happiness!"
     Alan Crichton, Co-Founder of Waterfall Arts

     "I see it in the eyes of the child running to the front door of the before school daycare that allows her mother to get to work early so that she can be home when the after school program must return her child to her.
     I hear it as she is buckled into her car seat and in excited giggles offers her mother bright sheaves of crayoned paper as if it were grateful tribute .
     I smell it in the child's clean overalls and in the scent of soap on her face as she hugs a friend.
     I taste it in the salt of her exhausted tears when her mother has no strength for another story.
     I know in my heart that such love is our planet's only hope."
     Bruce Pratt, author of Boreal

"Creative sustainability marries the ideas of maintenance and evolution. It encourages a healthy present as well as an expansive future and invites a diversity of approaches to the flourishing of all life. In my own life this concept allows me to identify the conditions that both sustain and evolve my whole person. For example the food that encourages thriving not just surviving, the intellectual stimulation that expands consciousness, and the beauty that expresses my spirit. Creative sustainability also allows my small community to honor the differing ways in which we work towards healthy interdependence that is a delight as well as a necessity."
     Lily Fessenden, Director, Division of Environmental Studies, Lesley University