School of Sustainability Graduate Culminating Experiences

Across the world, music festivals draw in millions of fans and generate billions in revenue (Fesicket Writers, 2018). While the festival scene is extremely popular, stakeholders are beginning to take notice of its negative impacts. When improperly managed, festivals damage natural systems, miss out on opportunities to support and engage with their fans, and exclude local businesses. The movement for sustainable music festivals has already begun, but it is still far from being the industry norm. Only a select few festivals have embraced sustainability as a core value while many others are still making no effort to mitigate their impacts. Even though many drivers are pushing for the transformation of this industry, the unaddressed barriers are holding organizers back. Sustainable Sound: Festival Guide has been created to educate organizers on how to plan and operate sustainable music festivals. It is based on tried and true methods to create holistically sustainable events. In this context, a holistically sustainable event is one that does not damage natural systems, protects and engages with its fans, and is economically positive. Various case studies from some of the world’s most sustainable festivals will also be highlighted throughout the guide. According to M3F, The Cosanti Foundation, and ASU’s CSSI, Sustainable Sound offers important and easy to understand information that festival organizations can use to improve the sustainability of their events.

Globally we are struggling to match the need for development with the available resources. Kate Raworth’s (2012) developed the idea of a “safe and just space” as a balance between the planetary boundary approach and ensuring a level of basic needs satisfaction for everyone. O’Neill et al. (2018) argue that countries are currently not able to provide their populations with basic needs without concurrently exceeding planetary boundary measures. While attempts have been made to get people to change their habits through moral self-sacrifice, this has not been successful. Kate Soper (2008) argues that a change towards sustainability will only be possible if an alternative to high consumption is offered, without trade-offs in well-being. Technological improvements are often thought to end up providing solutions to the problem of overconsumption, but as Jackson (2005) shows convincingly, this is highly unlikely due to the overwhelming scale of changes required.

‘Alternative hedonism’ (Soper 2008) is a philosophical approach that has been proposed to solve this dilemma. By changing what humanity pursues to be less focused on consumption and more linked to community interaction and living healthy, fulfilling lives, we would simultaneously reduce stress on the globally limited resources and sinks. By developing and understanding satiation points – the point beyond which well-being no longer increases because of increased consumption - affluence that wastes resources without improving well-being could be reduced. This paper explores how ‘alternative hedonism’ and the development of ‘satiation points’ could be helpful in getting humanity closer to the ‘safe and just space’. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges that taking up of ‘alternative hedonism’ would entail.

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is a non-profit organization that prides itself in “responding to the world’s worst humanitarian crises”. Through its New Roots program, IRC is using an aquaponics urban garden incubator site “to train refugee farmers in aquaponics agriculture and good business practices in the United States.” The site is an example of the conversion of brownfield into “healthfields” and sustainability and resilience initiatives including the Year of Healthy Communities Program-2017, the Maricopa County Food Systems Coalition, and other community health initiatives that involve major partners including the City of Phoenix.

Entering into the next development phase, IRC wants the site to be an opportunity for demonstrating some of the most innovative approaches to water reuse while contributing to a sustainable food network in the neighborhood and in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. One component created to support this goal is an intervention manual identifying water-sensitive design strategies and ways to scale or transfer to other IRC sites. As such, my project identified and framed guidelines for the selected strategies to use in addition to steps for scaling, transferring, and creating a “location” where all of this information could be held for future reference. The manual content was created around each strategy which included identifying general legal practices in Phoenix related to each strategy, defining key terminologies, detailing water budgets, and research gaps to overcome.