Images of sustainability

My desire to paint has been dormant for a couple of months, until I came up with another pretext to paint. The pretext was the prospect of family visiting during the month of November, and an old screen room divider that desperately needs to be turned into a lovely thing. So I have spent a day sanding and priming the divider, and am now faced with the prospect of 6 new blank surfaces, each measuring 17” x 63”, that need to be filled with living imagery.

This prospect is sending me back to favorite art books. The idea of two panels of 3 each suggests a narrative framework for the paintings. An internet search on the subject of Japanese screens led me to an exhibit done by the Asia Society of New York in 2004 on Japanese folding screens created from the mid-sixteenth century through the late seventeenth century. These screens were apparently created with themes depicting the social and cultural ideals of the time.

This is just a little exciting because I have been thinking about issues of sustainability, paying special attention to how we communicate about such topics as global warming, transportation sustainability, and food system sustainability. I have noticed how rare it is to hear or see anyone with a visionary perspective about the kind of sustainable society we would like to create. I am inclined to believe that people who could think in this way would be highly useful to all of us. Artists can try to create visions of a sustainable society, in the same way as the screen painters of 16th century Japan. Writers and community organizers, techies, inventors, teachers, homemakers and engineers can also describe and try to live out such visions.

I think we all need to engage in as much positive visionary thinking as we can. The planet is going to continue, regardless of how much destruction we humans wreak on it and one another. It seems likely to me that future generations will be living in a world that is hotter, drier, with less biodiversity and greatly reduced fisheries. We could rely a lot less on single occupancy vehicles. Central cities could become more viable and the expansion of automobile dependent suburbs could slow. As the cost of transporting finished goods increases, local and regional farming and manufacturing could regenerate.

The environmental doom and gloomers have their role. It would be great if elected officials and leaders would pay attention to their warnings. I think it is counter-productive for those of us who can see some positives in our future changed world to spend too much time listening to the pessimists. This is not to say the pessimists are incorrect in their assessments. I hope that some people will be inspired to great constructive action when they learn that the fisheries will be depleted by 2048.

For most of us, however, this news is disempowering. The street level activists in Minnesota and Oklahoma who want to do something about the oceans will be left depressed and wringing our hands at the future prospects. Those who are already tuning out the news will turn away more emphatically. Strategically, if we really want to change the world, we need to give much more voice to the positive visions. This gives the activists something concrete to do, it lures the disempowered back into engagement, it gets more of us creatively involved in the continued unfolding of our evolution.