The term "sustainability" has taken on varied meanings in the twenty-five years since it first came into use. In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development, headed by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, defined it as follows:

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts: the concept of ‘needs,' in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs

This definition appeared in the Commission's report Our Common Future, which was published fifteen years after the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm-the first in a series of international meetings on environmental concerns; fifteen years after the Club of Rome's seminal study The Limits to Growth; five years before the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which resulted in the document Agenda 21: The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development; and fifteen years before the last of the global United Nations environmental gatherings, Earth Summit 2002, which was held in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Because sustainability initially arose within the framework of international politics, it is a more pragmatic approach to overcoming social injustice and environmental ills than the idealistic ecological theories that include deep ecology, which stems from the writings of Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess; spiritual ecology, which puts a particular emphasis on the capacity to experience oneness with the planet; James Lovelock's Gaia movement; and social ecology, which emphasizes social organization and collaboration with nature

My own definition of sustainability follows in principle the statement in Our Common Future that "the strategy for sustainable development aims to promote harmony among human beings and between humanity and nature."3 However, I choose to put the Brundtland Commission's connection between the social and the environmental into a sharper political focus by substituting the term "social justice" for "harmony among human beings" and "environmental justice" for harmony "between humanity and nature." Sustainability and the methods of achieving it are inherently political and, thus, contestable. Therefore, its definition should emphasize the need for struggle to achieve sustainable goals.

The culture deficit

In the various meetings and declarations on sustainability mentioned above, discussions of culture were nonexistent. The closest the United Nations came to the subject was the 1995 report Our Creative Diversity, which sums up the deliberations of UNESCO's World Commission on Culture and Development. The commission took up problems of culture within the broad context of economic and social development and consequently had little to say about specific cultural activities such as literature, music, or art.

I was heartened to find the cultural question addressed in a recent essay by Hildegard Kurt, "Aesthetics of Sustainability," which appeared in a volume initiated by the German artist Herman Prigann.5 Kurt argues that questions about the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of sustainability have lagged behind the debates on the topic that originated in the natural and social sciences during the mid 1980s. Though she does not refer directly to themes of human injustice such as torture, disease, and poverty with which artists have long been engaged, she does criticize the art world's limited view of sustainability: "In the art world," she writes, "lively dialogue is often hindered by the error of seeing sustainability only as an ‘environmental subject' and not as a genuinely cultural challenge."

Kurt also highlights the lack of cultural considerations in the sustainability discourse. "Anyone trying to find out why sustainability is not attractive as the task of the century," she writes, "will come across the ‘culture deficit' inherent in the conception of the model. In fact you will largely look in vain for artists as protagonists of sustainable future development in the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21. And culture as an element in society, going beyond the arts and humanist education to include symbolic and aesthetic creative practice by individuals and societies, is scarcely mentioned either."7 Given that discussions of culture, and especially art, are missing from the ecology and sustainability discourses of large international organizations and populist ecological movements alike, how does one begin to think about art's relation to sustainability such that a new understanding of artistic practice might result?