Chapter 11: Sustainability Without Depletion
Chapter 10 ended by asking whether the shared world festivals help create can continue without exhausting the people, relationships, places and living systems that make it possible. Earlier, wellbeing was described as a capacity that exists at personal, relational-collective and organisational levels. Sustainability adds time and repetition. It asks whether these capacities can be maintained through successive festival cycles without exhausting the people, relationships, organisations, places and living systems on which they depend.
This does not make wellbeing and sustainability identical. Wellbeing can be distributed unequally. The comfort of audiences may depend on invisible exhaustion backstage. A stable organisation may externalise costs to freelancers, residents or ecosystems. Present wellbeing may be purchased at the expense of future capacity. Sustainability asks whose wellbeing is being sustained, across what period, and at whose or what cost.
Financial continuation is necessary for most festivals, but it is not sufficient evidence of sustainability. A festival may balance its budget while losing trust, knowledge and people. It may increase attendance while weakening the place that hosts it. It may protect cultural heritage as a product while reducing the agency of those for whom that heritage is lived practice.
Human sustainability concerns workload, health, boundaries, learning and the ability to remain in cultural work. Relational sustainability concerns trust, reciprocity, conflict and repair. Organisational sustainability concerns authority, knowledge, resources and the capacity to adapt. Cultural sustainability concerns living transmission, reinterpretation and access. Ecological sustainability concerns material use, mobility, energy, waste, biodiversity and the carrying capacity of place.
These dimensions interact. Ecological change affects working conditions and communities, while organisational pressure can narrow attention to short-term delivery and push both human and environmental responsibility outside the frame. An ecosystem approach resists treating any dimension as an external add-on.
The central question is therefore not simply whether the festival can continue. It is what and who is being depleted in order for it to continue. Depletion may appear as fatigue, turnover, cynicism, damaged trust, lost local legitimacy, degraded space, reduced biodiversity or the disappearance of knowledge held by people who can no longer afford to participate.
CONCEPTUAL LANDING
- Sustainability ≠ Continuing at any cost · Sustainability = The capacity to continue without exhausting the people, relationships, places and living systems that make continuation possible.
Pause for Reflection
- Think of your last edition that was considered successful. Recall one small sign that did not fit that picture, such as someone who did not return, a tired partner or a practice quietly dropped. What might that sign tell you about what your festival’s continuation is using up?
Care contributes to sustainability by making interdependence and cost visible before breakdown. It creates feedback routes, protects limits, distributes responsibility, supports repair and asks whether plans are realistic. It also remains responsive when conditions change. This is not softness. It is the organisational capacity to perceive what continuation actually depends upon.
Making depletion visible is not sufficient; an organisation must also develop the capacities through which responsibility can be carried differently over time. An organisation cannot continue responsibly if essential knowledge, judgement and care remain concentrated in a few overfunctioning people, or if support repeatedly prevents others from learning to carry appropriate responsibility. Sustainable care distributes opportunities to learn as well as burdens to carry. It protects highly capable people from becoming invisible infrastructure and ensures that challenge is accompanied by authority, support, recognition and recovery.