Since the summer of 2012, I’ve been involved in a project at UC Santa Cruz that is an attempt to get scholars from different disciplines who study sustainability to collaborate and forge a shared vocabulary for common solutions to our collective challenges. The project collects sites where different logics of sustainability—market forces and utopian impulses, for example—overlap, intersect, and collide, which serve as inspiration for research into what sustainability really means, and for whom. The project grew out of UCHRI-Funded Multi-Campus Work Group drawing in scholars from UC Santa Cruz, Davis, San Francisco and other institutions in Northern California, as well as community activists from a variety fields.
We’re launching the web portion of the project—which I am the editor for and helped to conceptualize and design—with an event on June 1 at UCSC. Please join us for an afternoon of talks by members of the work group, covering subjects such as the Whole Earth Catalog and the architecture of Sym van der Ryn, the “Google Bus,” green urban planning, the SF gentrification crisis, and environmental justice in the Central Valley. Check out the project site to learn more about our members, and explore sites and keywords related to various “sustainabilities” throughout Northern California.
critical-sustainabilities.ucsc.edu
Kristin M. Miller 