HOW DO WE GROW TOGETHER?

Artist collective 98B COLLABoratory's 'Growing Together' shows us that sustainability begins with nurturing our communities.

- By AJ RAYMUNDO

I'm fairly convinced that "ecological" and "sustainability" have become recurring keywords across different disciplines and spaces. I see it everywhere: in the arts, non-profit initiatives, startups, government projects, and elsewhere. Last year, in my junior year of college, I spent an entire semester taking a class about sustainability.

Of course, it's easy to think of them as mere buzzwords, especially when the capital further appropriates them to the point that they have become, to an extent, meaningless utterances, like generic labels pinned onto anything mindlessly as to signal virtue.

But, on the other hand, the surge of these topics in both the alternative and the mainstream is indicative of the times we're living in. There is nothing clearer than the fact that ecological decay is more pervasive now than ever, with the ongoing climate crisis dictating much of how we live – and, perhaps, how we conceive of our future. Think of how, at some point in the year, four typhoons hit our country in only 10 days, an unprecedented phenomenon that has greatly affected our countrymen in ways we thought were unimaginable.

What the continuous string of ecological damages tells us, it seems to me, is that the concept of resilience has become a cliché.

Things fall apart in light of the decay, and thus we ought to reckon that it's impossible to wiggle our way out of such pressing issues by mere virtue of "resilience."

Acknowledging this is not to lose spirit but rather a call for collectivism towards sustainable futures by nurturing and forming solidarities with the communities we belong to. Disasters one after the other remind us that – to borrow the words of the anthropologist Anna Tsing – if we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope.