This paper focuses on one of the new members of the European Union, Estonia, and its contemporary culture as a resource for sustainability. What emerges, for example from the work of Estonia's most prominent writer and essayist Jaan Kaplinski, is a distinctly anti-European and, in important and complex ways, singular contribution to the definition of cultural sustainability: culture is not only imagined as a repository of accumulated ecologically productive knowledge but also as a survival strategy in its own right that is subject to the 'logic of nature' as it is understood, in Estonia, at the margins of the 'new Europe'.

Thomas Salumets holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University (1985). He is a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, President of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS), and co-editor (with Sander Gilman) of the novels of F. M. Klinger. He is the former chair of UBC's Comparative Literature Program (1995-1998). He served as editor of the Journal of Baltic Studies (1998-2001) and Acting Head of the Department of Germanic Studies (2000-2001) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His areas of special interest are modern German literature, colonial and postcolonial Estonian literature, literary didactics, and figurational sociology (Norbert Elias). Deep Ecology and Life course research are among his present central concerns; he is currently working on a biography of the contemporary Estonian poet, essayist and Nobel Prize nominee Jaan Kaplinski.