The Artistic Director of Mo`olelo Performing Arts Company (), a professional, nonprofit theater company in San Diego, Seema Sueko, emailed me to find out more about the Sustainability Partnership and shared their own initiative.
It exactly reflects the development of the sustainability ethic across disciplines and activities.
Their staff and Board educated themselves about environmentally friendly and sustainable practices:
Mo`olelo’s work is very much about building community, yet, ironically, many traditional practices in the performing arts are hurtful to the environment — from the amount of paper we use for scripts, to the energy needed to light a performance, to the woods and paints used on sets, so we decided to explore how we in the theater industry could take responsibility and address the inefficiencies of these practices.
They met with local environmental professionals and created and published “GREEN Theater Categories & Sustainable Guidelines.”
This ethic reflects the simple reality that everyone and everything we do has an impact. Taken together, cumulatively, those impacts are degrading and destroying nature.
The good news is that we can all do something about it.
We all can take responsibility for integrating an ethic of attitudes and practices that reduces those impacts and restores, rather than degrades resources.
This is the foundational ethic needed for building a sustainable civilization.
— CAROLYN CHASE