[extract]

The emergence of sustainability as a key concept in worldwide debates happened precisely in those years around the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. The Brundland Report commissioned by the UN to examine the connection between the environment and development was published in 1987 and brought the influential definition of sustainable development as: ‘how to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ However, it was not until 1992 that the Earth Summit in Rio provided the first global forum at which the connection between ecology and social justice was made clear. Concomitantly, the division of the world crystalised along the lines of the ‘economic development’ of the South and the ‘economic growth’ of the North, superseding the ideological divide between East and West. The year of the Rio Summit also marked the end of the optimistic period following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as countries were confronted with the hard realities of international Realpolitik and the socially corrosive effect of the rapid marketisation of the former East.

Perhaps it was the disintegration of the ideological polarities of the Cold War that made it possible for the notion of sustainability to emerge in the context of a global understanding of ecological and social crisis. Reflecting on the changed relationship of humans to nature on the occasion of the Rio Summit, conceptual artist Gustav Metzger drew attention to the way in which the Cold War had for decades provided a pretext for ignoring the systematic ruination of nature: ‘Under the cover of darkness – the manipulated perception of a threat coming from the Eastern Block – the emergence, or one could say construction of the Cold War, the West put everything into the melting pot. Production expanded; ceaseless invention took place. There came the rise of the military industrial complex… The Information Explosion occurred, the Personal Computer was launched. And all the while, the earth was overrun with waste and poisoned.’

[For full text see publication Art and Theory After Socialism (2008)]