 |
www.hopedance.org
|
| <back | home What's Up with For The Future by Richard Bruce Anderson Bob Banner, publisher of HopeDance, emailed me that his readers might like an update on For the Future, the non-profit organization I’m involved with. I decided to take up his challenge by writing something from an inside perspective — what it’s like to be part of a unique organization. First I ought to start by describing our organization. We call For the Future a think tank; that’s a rather ornate description, but the closest one we’ve been able to come up with. Our focus is on the collision of the ever-growing human enterprise with its inevitable limits. It goes without saying that this historic event presents challenges in every area of life, and we’re not trying to deal with every challenge at once. But we find that this global focus gives us stimulus and direction, and allows a great deal of room for creativity. Our mission is to stimulate discussion and action that might help our nation and our community deal with the crisis, or at least make its effects more tolerable. That’s the short form of what we are. But in an enterprise of this kind, who we are is equally important. We call ourselves Fellows, a traditional, if rather grandiose, title in the think-tank business, but we’re really just people, four individuals from widely differing backgrounds but with a significant personal history of connection and involvement. I come from an academic background, while Sri Subramanian is a software engineer, Larry Saltzman a programmer and permaculture expert, and Linda Buzzell a therapist and career counselor. More important than our personal backgrounds, however, is our history of working together. We’ve been members of a Simplicity Circle for the last six years, and we’ve seen each other grow and change as we’ve challenged the consumer culture in our personal lives. That long experience of working together is the foundation of For the Future, and it allows us great flexibility, based on great trust. The advantage of being a think tank is that flexibility. As Fellows, we’re free to pursue any idea we can come up with. If we need help in organizing an event or meeting, or comments on a manuscript, we can call on each other. And we meet regularly as For the Future and in our Simplicity Circle (which includes other close friends), to give each other updates and new information and ideas. As far as an update on our activities (the ostensible reason for this rambling), we’ve found ourselves taking advantage of our flexibility to push initiatives in a variety of directions. I’ve been finishing a book (Waking Up from the American Dream: Living a Happy, Healthy Life in Our Unhealthy Consumer Culture). We’ve been writing and publishing articles and letters (one of Linda’s articles for HopeDance was featured on the Utne web site, and several of Sri’s articles have appeared in the Santa Barbara News Press). Linda and Larry have been organizing an interesting event called "Beauty Is as Beauty Does: The Marriage of Visual Appeal and Sustainability," [see Linda Buzzel’s report below this article] designed to stimulate a dialogue between the justly renowned designers of Santa Barbara’s lovely architecture and landscapes and the pioneers of organic and sustainable building and planting (HopeDance is cosponsoring this event). Larry and Linda have a long and successful history of creating new organizations, and that’s been an important focus of their activities. Linda recently founded a new professional organization, the International Association for Ecotherapy. Larry and Linda created the Santa Barbara Organic Garden Club, and they are also organizing a group with a focus on local agriculture as a response to the upcoming crisis that will arrive with the peak of world oil production. That rapidly-approaching event (commonly called "peak oil") has been a major focus at For the Future since last November, when For the Future co-sponsored an important conference with HopeDance called "Overconsumption, Oil Depletion, and the Inevitable Road to Sustainability," which featured Richard Heinberg as keynote speaker. For a fuller description of current as well as future events, see our web site at www.forthefuture.org. Fortunately, we’re not confined by a master plan and action items of a typical think tank, thereby giving us the freedom to play with new ideas. But the potential drawbacks to this style of activism are obvious: lack of focus and continuity, and limited effectiveness in pushing change in any single direction. Nevertheless, we believe that shaking the dice and thinking outside the box are valuable activities. Somehow good things keep happening, new things come into being. Will it continue to work? Is it the right thing to do? We don’t know. But we know we’re going to keep doing it. m Richard Bruce Anderson is Senior Fellow at For the Futur. He can be reached at rba@forthefuture.org. BEAUTY IS AS BEAUTY DOES: THE MARRIAGE OF VISUAL APPEAL AND SUSTAINABILITY by Linda Buzzell-Saltzman The Sustainable Small Cities project of Santa Barbara think tank For the Future recently (June 14) hosted a community discussion on whether beauty and sustainability can coexist in Santa Barbara. The well-attended event (around 70 people) held at the downtown library was co-sponsored by HopeDance magazine, The Sustainability Project, The Santa Barbara Permaculture Network, The Santa Barbara Organic Garden Club and The International Association for Ecotherapy. Part of the impetus for holding this event was the increasing conflict between beauty and sustainability issues in Santa Barbara. The June 9 issue of The Independent featured two writers who mentioned community concerns about weeds in pesticide-free parks, the potential ugliness of solar panels on red-tiled roofs and possible damage to Gaviota Coast views from proposed offshore wind-energy platforms. Beauty is a core community value in Santa Barbara, inspired by our exquisite natural surroundings and also embedded in the city’s history and codes. Sustainability has also become an increasingly important local community value here. Of course in Chumash times, both beauty and sustainability were always a way of life, but more recently, the city has lost sight of the necessity for local independence and sustainability, in spite of the fact that Santa Barbara is an innovator, in many ways, in the modern environmental movement. But now that the planet is running out of cheap fossil fuels and is facing accelerating climate disruption, sustainability is an urgent necessity. As the Community Environmental Council slogan puts it, Santa Barbara must become "fossil free" as soon as possible. But are these two values of Beauty and Sustainability compatible? Is it EITHER/OR or can we have both? One thing is clear: superficial "prettiness" is no longer enough. For Santa Barbara to be a truly viable city in the future, beauty must find a way to combine with sustainability. True beauty isn’t just skin deep — a lovely surface covering a multitude of dark secrets — but must also be deeply healthy for people and our environment. Beauty is not only an aesthetic value, but a quality of daily experience that we need just as we need clean air and water.
The speakers addressed a number of important questions: Do we need to re-educate our eyes to appreciate natural beauty? Do sustainability folks need to learn aesthetics? How can Santa Barbara become a truly, deep-down beautiful city that is also sustainable? |