On October 12, “Sustainable Mount Airy”, one of the Neighborhood Sustainability Groups in Philadelphia organized a Playback performance on the theme of Sustainability.
Playback Theater is a form of Improvisation Theater where the actors combine spoken word, dance, music, storytelling, and physical theater in an improvisational form that can be serious, deeply moving, and often hilarious. The content of the performance comes from audience members telling their real life experiences, stories, and dreams.
In a Playback Theater Performance, the relationship between audience and actors is facilitated by the Director whose role it is to engage and elicit stories from the audience. That day, each member of the audience was asked to define what sustainability meant for him or her. Here are a few of those definitions:
Sustainability means…
Living, thriving, continuing using the resources, talents, know-how of the community.
Public Schools that attract and retain young families.
Carring from one generation to the Next
A beautiful Earth with humans, plants and animals still on it, 10,000 years from now.
Our appetite is causing the extinction of 200 species a day.
How can we claim this right?
How can we curb this appetite?
Answer: Fewer humans consuming fewer resources
It’s recognizing there are just 26 letters in the alphabet and seeing what can be done with just 14:
S-U-S-T-A-I-N-A-B-I-L-I-T-Y
Sustainability is having enough for a really long time
1 – Living today in a way to enhance the resources of the environment and not deplete those resources.
2 – Jobs
Sustainable well being means each of us asking how we are contributing to the resources all of us need to live. Land, Labor, Capital, Time and Knowledge are the five resources all humans need to live.
1. Profound relief – that the species I am part of goes on for more generations.
2. Gratitude that the aboundance of life of our planet is protected.
Sustainability – the web of interconnectedness between humans, their institutions and the natural/physical world – ordered such a way that each entity is seen in conjunction with other and all function as a totality.
What does Sustainability mean to you?
