Sustainability

This series examines how libraries, archives, museums, catalogues, metadata systems, and preservation practices produce absence by defining what can be recognized as knowledge, document, record, or memory. Rather than treating absence as a simple gap to be filled, the text analyzes it as a structural effect of classification systems rooted in literocentrism, colonial epistemology, scientific extraction, and institutional authority. Indigenous, oral, ecological, sensory, embodied, relational, and community-based ways of knowing often fail to enter memory institutions not because they lack rigor or meaning, but because the systems designed to receive them require fixity, authorship, textuality, standardization, and retrievability. What does not fit those requirements is reduced to folklore, anomaly, marginal note, metadata residue, or silence.

Across the series, the taxonomy of absence is developed through several interrelated cases. It begins with the silence produced by catalogues that cannot hold non-Western knowledge systems, then moves to the question of what counts as a document in the first place. Forests, rivers, tools, scents, sounds, rituals, baskets, plants, coral reefs, living archives, and community practices are treated not as metaphors for documentation, but as real knowledge infrastructures that conventional institutions have often failed to read. The series argues that a basket may be an ecological grammar, a tool may be a material argument, a reef may be a living archive, a scent may carry ritual memory, and a silence may be an ethical form of withholding. These forms challenge the textual and visual bias of librarianship and demand broader theories of documentation, description, access, and preservation.

The text also examines how absence is produced through scientific and biodiversity archives. Colonial fieldwork, herbaria, taxonomic systems, expedition records, and global biodiversity databases are shown to preserve certain kinds of knowledge while erasing the local guides, Indigenous experts, vernacular names, ecological relations, ritual meanings, and community protocols that made that knowledge possible. Metadata and taxonomy are therefore not neutral instruments of organization, but acts of translation, reduction, and governance. To curate biodiversity, the series argues, is also to govern epistemic territory: to decide what forms of life, language, relation, and authority become visible within institutional systems.

A central concern of the series is the limit of preservation itself. The text rejects the assumption that all memory should be stabilized, digitized, opened, or permanently stored. Living archives survive through performance, repetition, seasonality, repair, embodied practice, and community control. Some knowledge requires opacity, restricted access, impermanence, or refusal in order to remain ethically intact. In this framework, preservation cannot mean freezing knowledge in place; it must mean sustaining the conditions under which knowledge can continue to breathe, move, return, and regenerate. Libraries and archives must therefore learn not only to collect, but also to listen, abstain, return, repair, and sometimes let things remain unrecorded.

Ultimately, the series proposes a decolonial and ecological rethinking of memory institutions. It calls for a shift from classification to relation, from extraction to reciprocity, from accumulation to sufficiency, from universal metadata to situated description, and from custodial authority to accountable stewardship. The task is not simply to add missing materials to existing systems, but to transform the architectures that made those materials absent. The taxonomy of absence names the institutional mechanisms through which memory is flattened, silenced, or erased, while pointing toward forms of librarianship capable of recognizing knowledge in roots, reefs, tools, gestures, smells, sounds, silences, and communities that never needed institutional permission to remember.

This paper develops the concept of "library permaculture" as a systemic framework for rethinking knowledge and memory management institutions through the principles of permaculture and its extension into social domains. Building on the work of Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, the text situates permaculture as a holistic design philosophy grounded in the observation of natural patterns and their application to human systems, emphasizing resilience, adaptability, interdependence, and long-term sustainability. Moving beyond its agricultural origins, the paper explores the emergence of "social permaculture" as a field concerned with the design of socio-cultural systems, including communities, institutions, and infrastructures. Within this expanded framework, libraries, archives, and museums are conceptualized as complex, interconnected systems whose structures and functions can be reconfigured according to principles such as observation and interaction, integration, diversity, and responsiveness to change.

The study systematically examines the twelve principles of permaculture and their application to library contexts, proposing a reinterpretation of institutional practices in terms of energy flows, resource management, community engagement, and epistemic diversity. Libraries are understood as spaces that capture, store, and redistribute intellectual and cultural "energy," while also generating social, educational, and political "yields" that extend beyond economic metrics. Particular attention is given to the need for inclusive and community-driven design processes, the integration of diverse knowledge systems and cultural expressions, and the development of collaborative, participatory environments that challenge hierarchical and centralized models of knowledge production. The paper also addresses the ethical dimensions of library practice, including the risks of cultural extractivism, the importance of respecting local identities and languages, and the necessity of aligning institutional actions with broader principles of social justice and equitable resource distribution.

The paper concludes by positioning library permaculture as a transformative approach that redefines the role of libraries within contemporary socio-ecological crises, advocating for adaptive, locally grounded, and regenerative institutional models. It emphasizes the importance of small-scale, context-sensitive solutions, the valorization of marginal and peripheral perspectives, and the capacity of libraries to respond creatively to ongoing environmental, technological, and social changes. In this sense, library permaculture is presented not merely as a methodological proposal but as a critical orientation that challenges dominant paradigms of sustainability, development, and knowledge management, proposing instead a model based on interdependence, resilience, and the co-evolution of institutions and communities.

This paper proposes a conceptual and methodological transposition of permaculture principles into the field of librarianship and knowledge and memory management, framing libraries as complex socio-ecological systems embedded in broader territorial, cultural, and political environments. Drawing on the work of Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, particularly the design principles articulated in Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002), the text reinterprets permaculture not as an agricultural technique but as a systemic approach applicable to social institutions. It challenges dominant sustainability discourses — especially those centered on technological efficiency and "green" institutional branding — by introducing a framework grounded in observation, interaction, resource optimization, self-regulation, and long-term resilience. Within this perspective, libraries are understood as dynamic systems that process flows of information, energy, and social relations, requiring designs that respond to local conditions rather than externally imposed models.

The study develops a series of twelve principles adapted from permaculture design and applied to library contexts, including observation and interaction with communities, the capture and storage of informational and social "energy," the pursuit of meaningful yields beyond quantitative metrics, and the implementation of self-regulating systems informed by continuous feedback. Additional principles emphasize the use of locally available and renewable resources — both material and epistemic — the reduction of waste through cyclical processes, and the critical evaluation of resource management within conditions of scarcity, particularly in Latin American contexts marked by structural inequalities. These principles collectively redefine innovation as the capacity to respond to constraints using available resources, rather than the adoption of externally driven technological solutions, and foreground the political dimensions of library design, including questions of territorial relevance, cultural specificity, and epistemic autonomy.

The paper concludes by positioning library permaculture as a critical alternative to institutional models shaped by extractivist logics and globalized standards, advocating for a reorientation of librarianship toward practices aligned with degrowth, sufficiency, and community-based knowledge systems. It frames libraries not as neutral service providers but as active participants in socio-ecological systems, whose sustainability depends on their capacity to integrate environmental awareness, social responsibility, and contextual intelligence into their structures and operations. In doing so, it advances a vision of libraries as resilient, adaptive, and locally grounded infrastructures capable of sustaining both knowledge and life within increasingly constrained ecological and economic conditions.

This paper critically examines the concept of sustainability as applied to libraries, situating it within the broader socio-economic and environmental crises generated by contemporary capitalist and extractivist models. Moving beyond technocratic or institutional definitions, the text frames sustainability as an ethical and political problem rooted in global systems of production and consumption that externalize environmental degradation and social exploitation. Through the analysis of cases such as the fast fashion industry — documented in The True Cost (Andrew Morgan, 2015) — the paper exposes the structural mechanisms by which wealthier societies sustain their standards of living through the displacement of ecological damage and labor precarity to the Global South. These dynamics are connected to dominant discourses that normalize exploitation under the guise of development, revealing how narratives of economic growth obscure the material conditions of inequality and environmental collapse.

Within this context, the paper interrogates the role of libraries as institutions embedded in these same systems, questioning the adequacy of prevailing sustainability frameworks that focus on "green practices," technological efficiency, or institutional resilience while leaving underlying structural issues unchallenged. Drawing on critiques of the "green economy" advanced by authors such as Barbara Unmüssig, Wolfgang Sachs, and Thomas Fatheuer, the text highlights the systematic exclusion of human rights, social justice, and democratic participation from mainstream sustainability agendas, including those promoted by international organizations such as UNEP and OECD. It argues that such approaches reproduce the same logic they claim to reform, privileging economic growth and market-based solutions over equitable resource distribution and ecological limits, and thereby failing to address the root causes of environmental and social degradation.

The paper concludes by proposing a redefinition of sustainability grounded in principles of sufficiency, equity, and collective responsibility, emphasizing the need to radically transform patterns of production, consumption, and institutional practice. For libraries, this implies moving beyond symbolic or incremental interventions toward a critical engagement with the socio-environmental systems in which they operate, including the reconsideration of their own roles in knowledge production, dissemination, and legitimization. Sustainability is thus framed not as a managerial objective or a set of best practices, but as a fundamental reorientation of values and priorities, centered on the principle that the survival of all must take precedence over the continued pursuit of improved living standards for a privileged minority.