Sustainability Book ~ Introduction
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It is interesting indeed to go back and look at 10 years of publishing HopeDance (actually it’s 11 but last year we were so busy we had no time to do a book or a party!). Of course I would love to compile everything we published and present it to the public. Well, most of it is available online so I must be crazy in the head to expect readers may want to have an anthology of the best of these 10 years. And especially since only a handful of people who answered our current survey were interested in purchasing the anthology! It’s not the first time I’ve done things that were not part of the norm, or popular. The first years of my “publishing career” (1980-1990) were publishing a magazine that “exposed consensus reality.” Not a real popular pleaser-type of topic!
And then again this is not about me. Many people worked hard at writing reports, essays and analyses that found print in HopeDance. I feel a need to keep their words and vision alive in a traditional book form. And due to POD (publishing on demand) technology, I don’t have to kill many trees to produce these books. Actually the book you have in your hand is 100% post consumer fiber. I can print 25 at a time and not thousands of copies. Also, and more importantly, we decided on printing only the articles that got praised or were talked about or created some debate or were outrageous, or pieces that were so outside-of-the-box that they needed to be included in this anthology, the best of HopeDance’s 10 years.
It’s subject, Sustainability, is indeed timely. Currently the word is on the tongues of most people (unlike 10 years ago!). My intention is to give people an appreciation and an understanding that this movement has a lineage (way before I got hooked in the mid-90s). And with the green-washing going on within the corporate world, whose bottom line is still greed (because the policy is embedded in their corporate legal structure), it is vitally important to spread awareness of true sustainability to many sectors of society. Just take a look at our Table of Contents and you will see the breadth of issues we have covered over these past 10 years: Food, Housing, Energy, Conflict Resolution, Globalization, Peace, Livelihoods and a plethora of others. Even though it is vitally important to have publications that focus on one specific issue, it has been our inclination and goal to hang a wider net to include a vast array of the essential parts of the total picture. A total picture might be elusive, but we have attempted to connect the dots. I think this generalist approach (in a time of global transitions from ideologies of separateness and atomized, insular topics to ones of collaboration and interdependence) is quintessential. Thereby collaborators between seemingly unrelated groups and industries are crucial at this time.
Bob Banner
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