Just Landing: Sustainability in a Fractured World

There is certainly no shortage of visions, technologies, practices, or policies aimed at making our societies more ecologically sustainable. A plethora of legal experiments (rights of nature), new technologies and bio-based materials, indigenous perspectives and practices (buen vivir, ubuntu), alternative socioeconomies (solidarity economy), policy innovations (green new deals), novel multi-stakeholder platforms (e.g. Food Policy Councils), progress in modelling (e.g. climate science), notions of human and planetary health, and visioning through arts and culture are all available. Clearly sustainability remains a shared concern for many and a fertile ground for cultural, social, political, technological and economic experimentation. And yet, ‘sustainability’ does not seem to land well in our societies. Promising technologies and materials are not adopted, green transition policies are resisted, new consumption practices are not accepted, and narratives of just sustainable futures fail to resonate within society. In times of war and rising social tensions, sustainability has slipped from the front pages and disappeared from political agendas. 'Sustainability’ is often associated with doom and gloom narratives that fail to inspire action. It is challenged and delegitimised by rising populist and authoritarian forces worldwide. Or it simply feels less urgent, less existential than the wars waged ever more closely to our (Utrecht University’s) home.

This festival wants to examine how we can make sustainability land in our societies. What would it take to make sustainability 'arrive’ and ‘take root’, and what can ‘landing’ mean in the first place? What may it look like in different contexts? How can such a landing be ‘just’ so that sustainability is embraced bottom-up and appeals broadly? Can such ‘landing’ be facilitated by exploring different imaginations and different practices of being with the land? Can we (re)imagine what it means to live more sustainably with the land? How can we do ‘landing' differently than via extractivist relations to land? Can a different care for land in our societies also help the idea and practice of sustainability to land? This festival sets out to learn from diverse experiences with these questions. It will explore the ways in which sustainability ideas, practices, technologies, and policies land in our societies and what it takes to transform ideas and policies into lived, shared practices.