Orkydaceae (Or-kid-ah-S-ee-ehyi) is a variation of the taxonomic name of the orchid family: Orchidaceae. The choice of name came from noticing how a glint of sustainability bears a semblance to epiphytic orchids. The flower of an orchid is familiar but its epiphytic root-system is bizarre, it's not rooted in soil. Epiphytic orchids fasten themselves to a surface of a supporting plant (i.e. trunk, branch) and passively nourish themselves by gathering moisture from the air and acquiring nutrients from an accumulation of compost. The observation of a plant growing on a supporting plant is characteristic of epiphytes but, interestingly, epiphytes are commensuralistic, not parasitic. In symbiotic terms, commensalism is observed when an organism benefits while the other organism in the relation undergoes neither benefit nor harm; and parasitism is the result of an organism benefiting while simultaneously diminishing its host. The difference between these two symbiotic relationships display the glint of sustainability which allowed sustainability to be compared to a plant. To state the comparison in a metaphor alongside a simile: Sustainability blooms and is as delicate as an orchid. The name Orkydaceae voices the resemblance between sustainability and how an unassuming root system nourishes a plant to flower. Sustainability is not an orchid, yet epiphytic orchids are rooted upon preexistent branches and their bloom is akin to the vision of the establishment of sustainability within localities.
What is Orkydaceae?
About
Sustainability needs people to call attention to instances and practices that may appear mundane to outsiders but are characteristic of who local people are. A city - urban or rural - is divided into districts, wards, neighborhoods, blocks and streets but a locality is more similar to the notion of a world than identical to any section of a city. The reason Orkydaceae places its emphasis on localities comes not from the notion that there are inaccessible ideas prevailing over and above our day-to-day lives but that localities are the interactions people form with the world they are a part of. There is not a tangible core that a locality revolves around and makes it into what it is, rather, there is a possibility characteristic of and shared among local inhabitants. To conceive how this kind of intellectual sympathy–feeling–fills a locality, Orkydaceae notes how local-lifestyles embody the attitude: ‘this is the way it is here, and it is because of this that we are who we understand ourselves to be’. If Orkydaceae had a mantra it would read:
Budding desires
Will become
Blooming flowers
Budding notes that things will be locally distributed into the confines of a city, blooming resonates with the previous comparison of sustainability to the orchid-flower but, the transformation of desire into a flower is different, it is the conception of sustainability as locals becoming a part of, through active participation with, the spaces they inhabit. In regard to sustainable development, Orkydaceae flips development’s script: if there is to be Sustainability then - instead of continuing to develop the insidious idea of everyone living in one-world on Earth - Sustainable Development needs to give voice to the practices which have allowed the worlds that locals occupy to flourish.
