“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Want Not: Tonkinwise and Pinkus on Sustainability

Song Dong, Waste Not

“Want Not: A Dialogue on Sustainability with Images”: Cameron Tonkinwise and Karen Pinkus have this excellent dialogue up in World Picture 5, elegantly illustrated.


A sustainable future cannot be just a peacefully, resource efficient, clean and shiny once-and-for-all world. To sustain humans, it must contain its own challenges, its own diversities, its own changing dynamic.


I enjoy the use of Heidegger. He's brought in to underwrite the idea of openness to upgrades, repair, and and maintenance in urban design...how to live in a world of broken tools.

2 comments:

Henry Warwick said...

you don't have to build that complexity in - it comes for free. If you try to build a shiny new world, it will tarnish and create its own complexity.

Joe Clement said...

I love this kind of stuff. You hear so much about productivity and manufacturing as magic bullets to damn near everything. I have spoken about the desirability if not the necessity of switching to a maintenance economy on my radio-show, but there is very little already digested economic literature on maintenance-oriented divisions of labor.