Introducing Sustainable Publishing

This issue began with the question of what constitutes sustainability within scholarly publishing. Looking back over the gestation of this special issue, we had to grapple with increasingly existential variants of this question. What does sustainability look like when forest fires are approaching your home? When your university is facing cutbacks and programs are at risk of being closed down? When government agents are arresting people in their homes and on college campuses? When political extremism is rising? When so-called generative artificial intelligence is intensifying water and energy usage, while pumping out fever-dream irrealities, endless affirmations, and race-to-the-average information? When…? When…? When…? How many crucial issues hang on this one concept, sustainability? What might it mean to reconsider this term in contemporary editing and publishing practice? In an effort to rethink our work as academics, editors, and readers of published material, we came together to collaborate on this experimental issue hosted by The Goose and Imaginations. The Goose is the official, open-access publication of the Association for Literature, Environment and Culture in Canada (ALECC). Straddling academic and creative genres, The Goose publishes long-form academic articles alongside creative nonfiction, poetry, multimedia, and visual arts. Imaginations is an online, open-access journal of cross-cultural image studies. The journal publishes work that thinks about, with, and through images broadly construed. Together, members of our editorial teams have been thinking collaboratively about what we call sustainable publishing. In this context, sustainability names the terrain of both its resonance as a social and ecological concept and its capture by corporate and institutional branding campaigns that paint a green façade over otherwise categorically damaging operations—including the defunding of education in the service of fiscal “sustainability” and fantasies of “green” AI. This special co-published issue represents a snapshot of some of those conversations as well as a place for others to join the discussion about publishing practices for the 21st century.