So what is Sustainability anyway?
There is nothing new about Sustainability – the fact that it is officially being brought under the cover of the Indigo Umbrella to take its rightful place alongside Science and Spirituality is merely an acknowledgment that this is where it should have been since the start.
Each month I produce a newsletter for the members of the Indigo tribe, and there is usually a mid-month update too. In a recent newsletter, one of our long-standing Indigos, Margaret Tyzack-More, a wise woman of the tribe in this lifetime (and in many others, I feel sure) and a long-time champion of Sustainability, wrote this piece for us:
Well now class, what does this much used buzz word really mean? Looking at the etymology we find it comes from Latin.
SUB TENERE from below to hold
SUSTINERE to hold up, sustain
The Oxford English Dictionary also has this as one of its meanings. The way ‘sustainability’ is used today seems to mean many things. What does it mean to you? Answers on a postcard please to Judy Sharp, Under the Indigo Umbrella, Sussex.
One could use the musical analogy of a held, sustained note as in Oh… Oh…Star of wonder, Star of Light… as opposed to Santa’s short Ho! Ho! Ho!
To be a little more grounded, what are we sustaining? What do we want to sustain? First and foremost, are we sustaining Life? From a medical science point of view we most certainly are. For the rest of it we can heartily congratulate ourselves on the superb job we are doing sustaining the destruction of Earth’s biospheres, every aspect of that which is and maintains Life. In a word, Ecocide.
On our own patch we are rolling out the concrete carpet of hundreds and hundreds of new build houses, no gardens to speak of but with several cars per home. Treble whammy: flooding elsewhere from rain run off and air pollution from all those cars on the roads. The third is the heavy, house footprint squashing out shelter and food for the furred and feathered, not to mention flora and fauna. You could see it as a mini local ecocide. .
Enough of that. Good news of the natural kind. Beavers in Sussex! The Knepp Castle Estate to the west of the A24 just south of Horsham are introducing beavers into their pioneering wilding project by working with the land not against it. They are establishing “a functioning ecosystem where nature is given as much freedom as possible.” The wilding years at Knepp have seen extraordinary increases in wildlife. Very rare species like turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons and purple emperor butterflies are now breeding there.
