Kultur: Der verdrängte Schwerpunkt des Nachhaltigkeits-Leitbildes

The sustainability debate suffers from a chronic cultural deficit. Beginning with the Rio documents until today, the cultural factor tends to be overlooked and is in general structurally underestimated. Nonetheless, the sustainability model, as far as it implies a fundamental revision of acquired standards, values and practices in all areas, from politics to the economy to the environment, contains a genuine cultural core. Sustainability requires and produces culture - as a shaping mode of communication and activity through which value orientations are developed, reflected and changed, and interests weighed up. What else but culture could provide the energy to fuel the harmonizing of often contradictory interests in the "magical triangle" of economy, ecology and social issues? With increasing cultural integration of the sustainability idea in the living conditions of modern industrial societies, there will be better chances to strike a decisive spark of life for ecological reorganization from the idea and the understanding of sustainable development, in contrast to the current state of confusion. Against the background of the decreasing importance of environmental politics and the current crisis of environmental communication, we are trying to bridge the gap between the rather unconnected fields of environment and sustainability on the one hand and culture and cultural politics on the other.