What is sustainable?
I don't mean what does the word mean, I mean what ACTIONS and LIVES are sustainable.
In my day job, I run a program for University students about sustainability. Each year I recruit 25-30 students and teach them about leadership, action and community, then give them a small grant to go out into the big wide world and make it more sustainable. For me - sustainability is maybe the most important thing and, as we see crazier weather and are barrelling towards a 3+ degree warming by 2100, the status quo just isn't good enough.
With this in mind, it's pretty obvious to anyone that we, collectively, have to change, and it's pretty obvious to anyone that a person like me - well off in a globally rich country - are the people that will need to change a lot. While I want companies and the richest to change the most, it would be a bit naive to assume that I can live my life unchanged, unfazed and unchallenged and see the world continue as a safe and stable place to live.
I find it frustrating when I talk to some of my friends, who are more business or profit inclined, that they seem to be obsessed with the reasons change is hard and the status quo is good. Of course there are lots of great things about the way we, especially in Australia, can live, and yet it's also beyond crystal clear: we need less C02 in the atmosphere. Until that number starts and continues to drop we're doing the wrong thing. How we get there may be complex, nuanced, hard and we certainly don't have a clear path forward but, at the end of the day, we change or we cook ourselves.
I've been thinking more and more about my own life and how it feels like I could do a bit more. One of my favourite concepts is that the most important things should be the easiest to actually do. In a previous email I noted that going overseas is starting to get quite dull for me - it just doesn't excite me. This is a good example of where easy can be more sustainable. Let's unpack that a bit.
A plane trip to Paris - which I will take in October - is approximately 2x my yearly allocation of carbon. Factor in the return flight and we're at 4x. Add my trip to Vietnam soon, my earlier trip to Singapore and flights I've taken to Hobart, Sydney and Adelaide (as well as the rest of my life) and this is absolutely not on. Especially for something I'm dragging me feet on - why kill the world out of a sense of obligation?
I think, after I get back from Paris, I will try not flying overseas for as long as possible, though maybe NZ doesn't count. There's plenty to see here. After all, I've had a lot of travel in my life - perhaps it's ok this season is closing for awhile.
More interestingly, as an artist there are a lot of opportunities to move towards circularity. Circular economies are places that have no waste - essentially any waste generated by one activity becomes fuel for another. A great example is, say, a garden. Over-ripe fruit and pruned branches become compost for the garden. Tomato vines, when the season is over, become compost and soil.
In my art and publishing practice I'm starting to work out what circularity could look like. For me, there are two big opportunities: one is learning how to make paper to completely remove waste, the other is local reusing.
Paper is a material that can be made from a range of things: wood pulp, textile pulp, paper shreds, fresh grass, animal dung, etc. The interesting thing about paper is also that it is at the heart of my work as an artist: it is what I print exhibitions on, it is what I make books out of. For example, my work in the desert provides me with an opportunity to make paper from paper offcuts, old notes, research sheets, packaging from publishing, invasive weed fibers, old fence posts and many more things.
Publishing can provide me with a whole opportunity to collect and gather paper offcuts and potentially turn these into book covers, stationary, posters, etc. For example, I launched a t shirt earlier this year and it was a bit of a flop - so over summer I'm learning to turn cotton waste into pulp and then into paper, I hope I can use that paper to print posters, book covers, etc, in 2024.
Local community, too, is an opportunity for reuse. In my little townhouse there's about 30 other families living and a number of apartments nearby. How much cotton, paper and bubble wrap are these people throwing out? Perhaps if I offered to reuse the bubble wrap I could divert it from landfill and reduce my own purchase of new wrapping. Of course that doesn't solve the larger problem (when a customer receives it they'll discard the bubble wrap), but it takes ONE purchase out of the chain and halves the waste. Similarly, if I'm able to convert cotton waste and paper waste into new paper, perhaps there's an opportunity to build new products for exhibitions, book making and stationary that are a reduction in waste.
Over the next few months, maybe the next year, I'll be excited to share with you what I'm doing in this space. In September I'll make my first paper, and by Christmas I hope to have made one prototype book from reused and recycled materials.
Of course if we come back to the global problem - do these actions solve this? Well, of course not, because it's not just me causing it. However, at the end of the day when I go to sleep I'll know that I'm doing SOMETHING more than I could. I have larger dreams to create a sustainable art hub in Melbourne, but hey, I have a lot of dreams and most don't quite get there, but I think that's ok. I'd rather be striving than accepting shit as it is.
In OTHER news:
Same Page Art book fair is on this weekend - I'll be there and will have some new products, come by and say g'day. There's food and music at this one so even if you just feel like some lunch and a chit chat.
I'm teaching a book binding workshop in October (and on my birthday), sign up here.