In this KLIMER session, we will discuss Ada Arendt's contribution to the forthcoming De Gruyter Brill Handbook of Cultural Sustainability. The chapter observes that sustainability discourse is clear about what should be sustained and for whom, but says little about who does the sustaining or what happens when sustaining fails. The author argues that both silences are historically recent. Before the concept of sustainability was coined in the fiscal forestry of the eighteenth century, keeping woods, waters and arable land productive was understood and practised as care, in the form of husbandry and tending.
Drawing on this history and on the development of care theory, the chapter proposes that sustainability should be understood as practised care, and it distinguishes between three modes of that practice. The first, holding on, covers the everyday work of maintenance and repair. The second, holding open, concerns transmission across generations and the effort of keeping a resource or place available for those who come after. The third, letting go, describes the accompanied relinquishment of what cannot be kept, such as a glacier that has already melted.
The chapter will be circulated in advance. Everyone is welcome to join the discussion, and no prior reading in care ethics is needed.