What does sustainability look like? I know that the way we live and the landscapes around us aren’t meeting the diverseneeds of people and nature sustainably, but I also can’t really picture what lives and landscapes would look like if we were. Can you? 

I think the lack of a vision of a sustainable future is a major barrier to achieving one. It’s hard to get behind something that’s difficult to picture. So how do we come up with visions and paths that are well informed, realistic, inspiring, in a format that can be shared to get discussion and action going, and delivered at the speed they’re needed? No doubt there is no single answer, but I’m part of a small team experimenting with a new process we’re calling 24-hours to envision a sustainable future. 

The project is being run by Chris Sandom and Jo Walton from the University of Sussex and local illustrator and cartoonist Daniel Locke. Our idea uses the 24-hour comic, a long-standing international online event that challenges cartoonists and artists to create a 24-page, illustrated book in a single 24 hour sitting. Starting at 10am on 9 June 2024, in the Phoenix Art Space, Dan Locke and Chris Sandom are going to sit down and create a 24-hour comic that envisions a journey to a sustainable future for the South Coast of England. 

Register for free here.

To help us with this daunting task, we’re designing a process to bring together artists, authors, and game developers with those working to create a sustainable future over a series of workshops. The first one will explore how to imagine a sustainable future, the second one will imagine a journey to creating that future, and the third will work out how to tell that story in the form of a 24-hour comic. 

If a major barrier to creating a sustainable future is our inability to imagine it, we are fortunate that authors, screenwriters, gamers, and role players have been imagining compelling and plausible futures for a long time. Those working in science fiction often focus on the speculative future, imagining plausible possible futures. We think this is exactly the skill set we need to overcome this challenge. Our project will bring together those with a vision of a sustainable future and those with the skills to bring them to life. 

I think a sustainable future is a diverse one. Diverse people, culture, communities, and nature. I’m an ecologist and I have always been staggered by nature’s diversity. But reflecting that, I’m also impressed at how diverse people and culture are as well. Fortunately, I also think diversity creates diversity. Diversity in the way people live, eat, manage land, interact with nature, and everything else can help support create diversity of communities, culture and nature as well. 

To reflect the importance of diversity we hope that our project will not only produce a diverse vision, but we’re also working to create a framework that will allow others to create their own visions of the future in the form of a 24-hour comic as well. By doing that, we hope we can see where there are common themes and consensus, and where there are genuinely difficult tensions to work on and resolve. We also hope it will give more people a voice and a way of creating their own visions of a sustainable future. 

The 24-hour comic to envision a sustainable future will start on June 9 at 10am in the White Room of the Phoenix Art Space, 10–14 Waterloo Place, Brighton, BN2 9NB. We will be there until 16:00 producing the first half of our 24-page journey to a sustainable future. We hope you can call in to find out more, see how we’re getting on, and maybe participate in generating your own visions of a sustainable future.

By Chris Sandom, University of Sussex