DI Digest Idea 1 July 96

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1.	Pop Sustainability
	What do a novel about a gorilla and a painted truck in Pakistan have in common? Both reject the notion that SD is the stuff of academia alone. And both use creative media to bring ideas of sustain-ability to the public at large. In Ishmael, novelist Daniel Quinn uses the metaphysical musings of an ape to make readers question whether the historical transformation from 'Leaver' to 'Taker' cultures (the reference here is to patterns of escalating resource use) is sustainable. Likewise, at the Karachi School of Art, students borrowed a popular medium of Pakistani folk culture - 'truck art' - to bridge the gap between fine art and popular culture. The painted panels featured images of war and peace and of common environment and development concerns - and the truck drew crowds wherever it went. On his latest rock album, Bruce Springsteen laments the poverty of modern television culture in his song, 57 Channels (and 'Nothin' On). Peter Menzel and a team of photographers traveled the world to capture a unique picture of material consumption across different cultures - by asking normal families to pose outside their dwellings with all their possessions. The result is a snapshot of the wide disparities that exist between industrialized and non-industrialized nations. Finally, 'Earth-works' artist Agnes Denes planted a 'designer' tree plantation on a human-made mountain this year in Finland. The result is Tree Mountain, a bizarre forest installation of unnatural symmetry that serves as a constant reminder of the blurring boundaries between humans and nature. Where academic treatises fail, people the world over are using other media to get through to people.'Cultural creatives' with an artsy bent are weaving a seamless thread of sus-tainability consciousness into the fabric of popular culture. (Also see DI #3 on Culture Jamming). [popular culture takes on sustainability]
	cultural creatives n. the fast-growing segment of society determined to find new, more sustain-able ways of communicating and relating to nature and other people half-adults n. people who refuse to accept the responsibilities normally associated with growing up (see Not Hot below)
	Bly, Robert. Sibling Society. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996. 319 p. Menzel, Peter. Material World: A Global Family Portrait. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995. 255 p. Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael. New York: Bantam, 1992. 263 p.
NOT HOT -	A Society of 'Siblings' and the Death of 'Common Stories'
	Author Robert Bly says people in the Industrialized World are a bunch of babies. They've got so many choices today - what toothbrush to buy, what to be when they grow up - that they needn't bother committing to anything in particular. In many senses, the argument goes, they feel their lives still lie ahead of them as they live out prolonged adolescences and longer life-spans to boot. In another context, Vaclav Havel put it like this,''We live in the postmod-ern world, where anything is possible and nothing is certain.' In the recently published book Sibling Society, Bly tells us times are tough now for young people because everything's on 'fast forward'. The challenge remains how to 'get with the program' and grow up. Bly recommends embracing the 'common stories' and values of the past - as a sort of glue that binds cultures together across generations. Havel agrees, placing a priority on stories that empha-size Humanity's place in Nature. 'The only real hope of people today is probably a renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in the earth and, at the same time, the cosmos,' he says.
*Virtual Ideas*	Ishmael goes ape on-line