Marjetica Potrč

Rural Practices, Future Strategies

2007

Sustainability in the twenty-first century is based on local solutions—which usually embrace some pre-modern method—and local practices. Such endeavours focus on building small-scale resilient communities that practice a sustainable way of life as they tackle such critical challenges as high oil prices and global warming. Culture is one of the essential pillars of durable sustainability (others are the environment, economy and society). Culture and small-scale “sustainable territories” provide the foundation for living on the edge of catastrophe: communities are disillusioned with the globalised profit-driven capitalism and face serious questions about how to survive in the unsettling era that is approaching. Are we looking at a new kind of geopolitical sustainability? Most important in this radical reinvention of communities is a “change of culture”, i.e. changes in the way we do things. Sustainability is political, if we understand politics as the process by which groups of people make decisions.

Courtesy of Collection Lah, Ljubljana

BESEDILO

Marjetica Potrč

Survival Strategies and Community Building in Post-Capitalism

The text was first published in VOLUME 18: After Zero (Amsterdam) (Winter 2008): pp. 100–111, www.volumeproject.org. [PDF]