New Home, New Title, New Feature

It’s been slow-going, but our culture is too obsessed with instant gratification anyway, right? Moving leisurely but moving nonetheless, this little venture is making some progress toward the goal of becoming a genuine magazine. Today, two developments are particularly notable — our new name and address.

First, the new location. We’ve now found a home

at Permaculture.net through the graces of its author and editor, Greg Peterson. Permaculture is one of the most crucial applications of systems-thinking today and a concept that’s been at the heart of this magazine since its inception — which could hardly be more evident given its original name, permaCulture. While we’re interested in systems-thinking beyond its direct application to the sustainability of human cultures, any other applications must inevitably come around to have something to do with sustainability, no matter how unintuitive the connection may seem, since every earthbound system is connected to every other one. For these reasons, we’re absolutely thrilled to be associated with a site with which we have so much in common.

At the same time, given the magazine’s intention to use the systems perspective as broadly as possible, not to mention the desire to distinguish it from its host website, it seemed worthwhile to adopt a new name. Thus, what was launched on September 14, 2001, as permaCulture has now been dubbed Sostenuto, a name with many appropriate connotations. We hope you’ll visit the Why “Sostenuto page to learn about them.

There is also a third new feature of the magazine, and you’re looking it. We’ve established sost., a column from the editors of Sostenuto. This is the standard abbreviation for the musical term from which this magazine gets its name. In addition to its economy (through abbreviation) and its humility (through lowercasing), we like that it has to do directly with the essence of this magazine. The line between opinion and fact is a blurry one — this is true with systems-thinking in general and especially so of the writing here in Sostenuto. We hope that adopting this name for our regular column will underscore both this fact (as opposed to opinion!) and the unique nature of the magazine’s content.

Further developments on the horizon for the next few months include additional staffing and contributors as well as site redesign and reorganization. We hope you’ll come back regularly as we add more features hopefully worth seeing.

The Editors

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