Hope after sustainability – tragedy and transformation

Claims to sustainability are everywhere, from the sides of motorway juggernauts to the spin of a UK government arguing for airport expansion in London while notionally signed up to its carbon emissions targets. Scarcely a week passes without the launching of some initiative on sustainable cities, or sustainable agriculture or sustainable something else. In universities, modules and courses referencing sustainability abound. Research money flows generously (well, comparatively so) for projects purporting to increase our understanding of the concept or its applications. Meanwhile, academic and other voices raising awkward questions have been all but inaudible in the approbatory hubbub.

Until just recently, that is – but latterly, there has been a sea-change. It is no longer completely out of court for thinkers and scholars concerned with environmental issues to argue that the ‘sustainability’ discourse and policy paradigm have failed, and that we are moving into a new and much bleaker era. Take sustainability (for the sake of a working definition) to be the condition of so governing human usage of the planet’s natural resources that succeeding human generations can go on into the indefinite future depending on these resources to provide them with levels of well-being at least equivalent to our own. The argument is beginning to gain traction, then, that turning the aspiration towards this condition into a set of policy options represents a strategy which has had a good run for its money since the 1980s, but should now be recognised as well past its use-by date. A recent policy review paper in the journal Society and Natural Resources (Benson and Craig 2014) is bluntly entitled ‘The End of Sustainability’. Authors as diverse as Clive Hamilton (2010), Tim Mulgan (2011), Kevin Anderson (2011), Dale Jamieson (2014) and myself (Foster 2015) write with the working assumption that climate change on a scale lying unpredictably between the seriously disruptive and the catastrophic, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has characterised it (UNFCC 2009, since when the outlook has not improved), is no longer something we must find ways of avoiding, but something we are going to have to live with. And if climate change of that order is indeed coming, then all bets about sustaining other aspects of our natural resource usage are off (hence the recent almost overwhelming focus on this single, dominating issue). Parallel to this recognition is the rise to prominence of the ‘anthropocene’ trope (e.g. Hamilton et al. 2015) with its defining acceptance that human beings have decisively altered the atmosphere and set in motion a now-inevitable mass extinction as drastic as any produced by Earth system changes over geological time.

Why, on this account, has sustainability failed? It has failed, of course, to be faithful to the motivations of 1960’s and 1970’s ecological protest which it was supposed to translate into mainstream political terms – but that faith it was never going to keep, as soon as it adopted the anthropocentric language of economics and of the planet as a set of resources. For some, it has failed because it thereby hitched its waggon decisively to liberal consumer capitalism, which, since the global banking crisis, looks to some rather hopeful eyes itself to be (independently) failing. But the real argument is that the trouble goes deeper. The sustainability aspiration has failed on its own terms, it hasn’t enabled us to make even a plausible start on governing our natural resource usage by the appropriate criteria, and this is for reasons inherent in the aspiration itself.

Retrospectively, indeed, one can surely see how impotent that aspiration was always going to prove. Constraining immediate needs (or desires) to serve future needs, the identification and measurement of which were all to be carried out under pressure of the immediate needs and desires supposedly to be constrained, could never have offered us anything but a toolkit of lead spanners, capable only of bending helplessly when any serious force was applied. Is it any wonder, then, that we have continued to find the nuts and bolts of unsustainable living so stubbornly unshiftable?

In mainstream political discourse, however, such questions remain resolutely unasked. Here, there reigns an almost complete lack of acknowledgement of the possible paradigm failure of sustainability. In the world of the United Nations and other international and national policy fora, less and less promising environmental and climate prospects are met only by a more and more firmly fixed grin of willed optimism. A recent monitoring report for the EU’s Sustainable Development Strategy, for instance (Eurostat Press Office 2015), claims that in respect of sustainable consumption and production, demographic changes and greenhouse gas emissions, changes in headline indicators mark developments that are ‘clearly favourable’ – although only willed optimism could celebrate the last of these without a glance in the direction of China or India. And since then, of course, we have had the Climate Change Conference in Paris, latest in a long line of last-chance saloons, where ‘targets’ were agreed which are avowedly aspirational, not legally binding, and don’t add up to keeping below the crucial 2°C threshold even if they could be delivered: an achievement comparable, as Brian Heatley (2017) points out in the first paper here, to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles which rounded off World War I by laying all the necessary groundwork for World War II. This latter-day Parisian débâcle is nevertheless hailed worldwide as a triumph of UN diplomacy – except, of course, by the new US President, whose scepticism however expresses crass ignorance rather than insight.

The nearest the official policy world comes to recognition that we actually won’t prevent (above all) unsustainable climate change, is in the increasing volume of talk about mitigation rather than prevention. But for all that, denial is plainly still at work. How do you mitigate a set of outcomes which can only honestly be described as tragic? What, for example, could conceivably mitigate the loss of countless millions in sub-Saharan Africa to ultimately-anthropogenic drought, famine and disease? The very question is a kind of obscenity, which we screen out by making ourselves believe that somehow, technological intervention will ensure that things won’t after all be anything like so bad. Cognitive dissonance is still powerfully operative here, even as the willed optimism begins to falter.

It is at this critical juncture in thought and practice that we have brought together the explorations and anticipations comprising the present Special Issue of Global Discourse. If there is still a case for sustainability – if it still offers us, in some transformed or revitalised version, a graspable policy handle on our collective plight – that case has now surely to be made in full acknowledgment of all the accumulating evidence of deep-seated paradigm-failure to date. But if we really take ourselves to be living in the irreversible aftermath of that failure, the issue of ‘what next?’ must be honestly faced, and the hard questions no longer shirked. What options for political and personal action will remain open in a tragically degraded world? What are the conditions of habitability of such a world? How will economic and community life, political and social leadership and education be different in such a world? What will the geopolitics (of crisis, migration and conflict) look like? Where does widespread denial come from, how might it be overcome, and are there any grounds for hope that don’t rest on it?

The following papers divide (roughly equally) between those arguing that the sustainability paradigm can still be redeemed, and those which start to ask questions premised on its being irredeemable. As editor, I have done little more than arrange them to compose a suite of variations on the themes just identified, counterpointed by the brief critical responses from reviewers of each article which it is Global Discourse’s excellent habit to include. Papers and responses are drawn from a deliberate diversity of perspectives, including both academic and non-academic contributors as well as some who would probably claim to be both. Some of the contrasts generated between these diverse perspectives are, equally deliberately, fairly stark – as for instance between the interpretive frameworks of environmental social science and of Christian theology, or the assumptions of practical policy-making and those of the philosophy of tragedy. The main intention in setting up both the diversity and the contrasts has been to jolt expectations, perhaps spring new alignments, and in any case provoke debate.

The first movement, as it were, of this suite of variations concerns policy. Brian Heatley, a former senior British civil servant and current Green activist, leads it off with an excoriating analysis of the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference and the resoundingly hollow claims for it which have followed. The consequences of this culminating expression of the sustainability paradigm, he argues, will require us to abandon not only material ‘progress’ but also the at least notional universalism which has hitherto characterised it. The second claim is one which Nadine Andrews (2017), who works on psychosocial factors in the environmental domain as a Science Officer for the IPCC, challenges in her response while accepting Heatley’s general account. Mike Hannis (2017), however, a researcher in environmental ethics and politics and also a sustainability activist, distinguishes between ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’, suggesting that it is only the latter which has failed as a policy framework, the former having never really been tried. Attempting it is still possible, he insists, if an ethic of human flourishing can inform new principles of social organisation. The response by Lawrence Wilde (2017), Emeritus Professor of Political Theory at Nottingham Trent University, accepts the spirit of this approach but seeks to rescue the idea of ‘development’ for a Sen-Nussbaum style ‘capabilities’ model.

Then comes a movement unified, if somewhat loosely, under the broad head of culture and value. Ingolfur Blühdorn (2017) of the Institute for Social Change and Sustainability in Vienna traces the socio-cultural history of what he identifies as the current deliberate ‘sustaining of unsustainability’, in which the now non-negotiable values of ‘liquid modernity’ – essentially, individual consumerist self-realisation – are accommodated to the imminent breaching of recognised ecological limits which they entail. In this ‘politics of simulation’, which Blühdorn seeks to distinguish from mere denial, we consciously organise ourselves to pursue what we also know we cannot go on having. In his response, Daniel Hausknost (2017) of the Institute of Social Ecology, Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt, raises some issues with the historical basis of this analysis. Our understanding of the dynamics of simulation, he suggests, needs complementing by attention to the way in which global-systemic issues such as climate change have remained intractable – to address them effectively requiring a challenge to the capitalist state’s essential legitimation strategy of ever-increasing material prosperity.

Offering an intriguingly different take on some of the same phenomena, Ulrike Ehgartner and her colleagues Patrick Gould and Marc Hudson from the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester (Ehgartner, Gould, and Hudson 2017) draw on the work of the twentieth-century German philosopher Günther Anders for an account of the human relation to modern technology which lies behind either simulation or (as others might see it) willed denial. The concept of ‘apocalyptic blindness’ which Anders originally developed for a then-new atomic age is here suggestively applied to the slow-motion holocaust of climate change and ecological degradation. Responding, Nina Moeller of the Oxford Department of International Development and independent researcher John Martin Pedersen (Moeller and Pedersen 2017), both involved in front-line social-ecological work in the Ecuadorian Amazon, offer a perspective on this ‘blindness’ from a world which, they argue, still remains outside the capitalist ‘rule of machines’.

The movement shifts in closing to a different and initially rather distant key with the paper by Rachel Bathurst (2017) of the Lincoln Theological Institute, also at the University of Manchester, which explains sustainability paradigm failure from a frankly Christian perspective, appealing to a theology of the divine intentions for Creation. This alternative, and perhaps now to many people quite remote, mode of thinking has nevertheless the great merit of suggesting powerfully how far from utilitarian naturalism we might actually have to go in order to find a framework which does justice to both the integrity and the sensed preciousness of the whole world, humankind included. Rachel Muers (2017) of the University of Leeds reinforces this intimation with some cogent questions about the role of humility.

A transition less discordant than might perhaps be expected then takes the reader into a third movement concerned with education. Panu Pihkala (2017) of the University of Helsinki, who is also a Lutheran pastor, argues that environmental education needs to deal with ‘eco-anxiety’ in a way that lets ‘a certain sense of tragedy’ into the frame. Avoiding acknowledgement of the seriousness and intractability of the environmental and climate crisis for fear of seeming negative only encourages disavowal, which drives anxieties underground. The new, quasi-therapeutic roles of an honest environmental-educational approach would involve awakening students from false hope, admitting and confronting anxieties, renewing a sense of present wonder and cultivating energies that can act in uncertainty. This constitutes a very demanding task for educators, who have to go through all this for themselves first, but it is one they can’t any longer shirk. Katie Carr (2017) of the Cumbria Development Education Centre, herself a practising environmental educator, responds sympathetically, but notes just how wide is the gap between this aspiration and anything which the formal education system (whether or not it addresses environmental and climate issues) now takes itself to be doing.

By contrast, Stephen Gough’s speculative and wide-ranging paper (Gough 2017) considers education from both a Darwinian and an institutionalist perspective. He makes the disturbing, but on reflection compelling point that education, as a formative element in launching the expansion of human economies must always have been inextricably linked to unsustainability. If so, then contemporary educational attention to recovering from that condition can perhaps be seen as our evolved species mode of being both resiliently separate from and actively embedded in the natural world. William Scott (2017), responding, picks up on this to emphasise that schools (and by implication, education generally) are always shaped by society faster than society can be shaped by schools, so that maybe the best we can hope for from environmental education is the creation of space for improved choices, whether or not people are then inclined to make them.

The final movement, understandably after all this, is essentially about hope. It assumes a quasi-antiphonal form: the paper by Rupert Read, philosopher and Green politician, responded to by myself, is followed by my paper which includes some discussion of Read, to which his response then includes a response to my response to him. This extended dialogue arose in part accidentally, but works in the reading better than it maybe sounds in the description. Read’s argument (2017a) is twofold. Firstly, we can legitimately hope that climate disaster, which we must now expect, will bring with it the compensation – he is bold enough to call this a prospective ‘great gift’ – of enabling new kinds of local community to be born. Secondly, however, this retrieval of a strong local focus is still compatible with caring passionately for the welfare of future generations distant in both space and time. I challenge in my response (Foster 2017a) the way this latter claim is argued, and in my own paper (Foster 2017b) offer reasons for viewing the process of value-transformation which disaster will entail as genuinely tragic rather than in any sense compensatory. While this transposes hope into a different mode, I suggest – hope as value-creativity – it does not eliminate it, but rather strengthens the chance of hope’s being what we actually emerge with.

Read (2017b), in then concluding this exchange, makes a surely unanswerable point, on which the whole special issue can fittingly end: if we aren’t in control and don’t really know what’s coming, we also can’t know that our creativity won’t be enough to take us through it.

The upshot of bringing all these papers and responses together is, I trust, a lively ongoing dialogue with (as in all genuine exchange) some fierce disagreement, some unanticipated convergences, multiple loose ends and no clear conclusion in sight. Indeed, probably the only thing on which all the contributors are tacitly united is that maintaining this kind of dialogue about these very difficult issues is, in our present situation, an urgently pressing intellectual responsibility. It is one which we hope that our readers will recognise, embrace and now take forward.

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Notes on contributors

John Foster

Nadine Andrews is a doctoral researcher at Lancaster University investigating psychosocial factors influencing adaptive responses to ecological crisis. She has been Science Officer with the Technical Support Unit of IPCC Working Group 2 since September 2016. Nadine also teaches mindfulness and nature connection courses, and uses these approaches in her independent coaching and consultancy practice.

Rachel Bathurst is a Postgraduate Researcher in the Lincoln Theological Institute at the University of Manchester. Her early career was spent as an ecologist in the UK and abroad and as an statutory ecological advisor to local authorities in South Wales. Rachel has spent most of her career in Natural England, the statutory body for nature conservation in England, in which she held policy specialist roles in planning and development, and lead specialist positions in climate change and energy policy and sustainable development, finishing as a senior specialist in Strategy. She is also a licensed Lay Minister (Reader) with the Chester Diocese in the Church of England.

Ingolfur Blühdorn is Professor for Social Sustainability and Head of the Institute for Social Change and Sustainability (IGN) at the University for Economics and Business in Vienna. A political sociologist and socio-political theorist, his work explores the legacy of the emancipatory social movements since the early 1970s, their participatory revolution and the transformation of emancipatory politics over the past five decades. His theory of post-ecologist politics, the concept of the politics of unsustainability and the model of a modernisation-induced metamorphosis of liberal representative democracies into simulative democracies has been taken up internationally and inspired new work in a variety of research areas.

Katie Carr is the Director of Cumbria Development Education Centre, a charity which supports educators across Cumbria to critically engage with development and sustainability issues, in order to embed education for a fair and sustainable world. She has worked with teachers and school leaders for over ten years, developing and promoting approaches to learning which are based in empowerment, democracy and sustainability and believing that ‘how we do things is more important than what we do’.

Ulrike Ehgartner, Patrick Gould and Marc Hudson are doctoral students at the Sustainable Consumption Institute of the University of Manchester. Ulrike is researching discourses on environmentally and socially responsible consumption, Patrick the relationship between markets and culture in food supply chains, and Marc the co-evolution of the climate change issue and the strategic responses of the US and Australian coal industries.

John Foster is a freelance writer and philosophy teacher, and an associate lecturer in the department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, UK. He has been a sort of environmentalist for nearly forty years, and is a former Parliamentary and local election candidate for the UK Green Party. His relevant publications include Valuing Nature? (ed.) (Routledge, 1997), The Sustainability Mirage (Earthscan, 2008), and After Sustainability: Denial, Hope, Retrieval (Earthscan/Routledge, 2015).

Steve Gough is Professor of Environment and Society at the University of Bath. He has wide experience of educational management and practice around the world, including a period of ten years spent working in South East Asia. His enthusiasm for practical conservation of the environment has grown through his participation in geographical expeditions to Papua New Guinea, Northern Borneo and Northern Norway. He has researched and published extensively in relation to education and the environment. His most recent book, published by Routledge, is Education, Nature and Society.

Mike Hannis is Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University, UK, currently working on the AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project ‘Future Pasts’ (www.futurepasts.net). He also holds an honorary research fellowship in environmental politics at Keele University, and is an editor of The Land magazine. He lives in a self-built off-grid cabin in Somerset, and has been researching and experimenting with sustainability for over twenty years.

Daniel Hausknost is a senior researcher at the Institute of Social Ecology of Alpen Adria University in Vienna, Austria. As a political scientist, his research focuses on the political barriers to (and preconditions for) purposive societal change, such as the transition to sustainability. He is particularly interested in the co-evolution of the fossil energy system and the modern democratic state, in non-normative conceptions of state legitimation and in theories of transformation. He is also currently investigating the existence and nature of a structural ‘glass ceiling’ to transformative change in contemporary democratic societies. He holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations from Keele University, UK and an MA in Politics and Philosophy from the University of Vienna, Austria. He has published in international outlets like Environmental Politics and Ecological Economics and a monograph on the structural barriers to a sustainability transition in liberal democracies is forthcoming with Routledge in 2018.

Brian Heatley is a former senior civil servant. He has worked amongst other things on policy, finance and planning for major government training programmes, and earlier on support for small businesses, the privatisation of British Telecom and on the regulation of the financial sector. He has Masters degrees in Mathematics and History. He was a co-author of the Green Party of England and Wales’s 2010 and 2015 General Election manifestos.

Nina Isabella Moeller is currently Independent Social Research Foundation Fellow at the Oxford Department of International Development. She has worked in Latin America and Europe – amongst other things as a consultant to indigenous federations, NGOs and the FAO. J. Martin Pedersen is an independent researcher currently working on real food systems and seed commons, Amazonian medicine and microbiology. He has a PhD in Philosophy.

Rachel Muers is Senior Lecturer in Christian Studies at the University of Leeds, and has previously worked at the University of Exeter and at Girton College, Cambridge. Her research and teaching are on modern Christian theology and ethics. Her books include Keeping God’s Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (2004), Living for the Future: Theological Ethics for Coming Generations (2008), Testimony: Quakerism and Theological Ethics (2015), and with David Grumett, Theology on the Menu: Asceticism, Meat and Christian Diet (2010). She is a member of the World Council of Churches Commission on Faith and Order.

Panu Pihkala is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Theology. His main research interests are the role of spiritual issues in environmental education, the history and modes of Christian environmental theology, and climate change, religion, and communication. He is a member of the Centre of Excellence on Reason and Religious Recognition in Helsinki. The author of several books in Finnish, his first monograph in English will be Early Ecotheology and Joseph Sittler (LIT Verlag, winter 2017) which probes new ground by combining environmental history and theological studies. As an ordained Lutheran pastor, Pihkala has been engaged in religious environmentalism for years, and since 2011 has served as the chairperson of the Finnish section of the NGO A Rocha – Christians in Conservation.

Rupert Read is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. A specialist in Wittgenstein, he has written and edited a number of influential books on the subject. Aside from this, Rupert’s key research interests are in environmental philosophy, critiques of Rawlsian liberalism, and philosophy of film. His interest in environmental ethics and economics has included publishing on the problems of ‘natural capital’ valuations of nature, as well as pioneering work on the Precautionary Principle. Recently, his work was cited by the Supreme Court of the Philippines in their landmark decision to ban the cultivation of GM aubergines. Rupert is also chair of the UK-based post-growth think tank, Green House, and is a former Green Party of England & Wales councillor, spokesperson, European parliamentary candidate and national parliamentary candidate.

William Scott is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Bath where he was director of the Centre for Research in Education and the Environment, and founding editor of the journal Environmental Education Research. Bill researches the role of education (viewed broadly) in sustainable development, and blogs at blogs.bath.ac.uk/edswahs/.

Lawrence Wilde is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory at Nottingham Trent University, and author of Thomas More’s Utopia: Arguing for Social Justice, published by Routledge in July 2016. His previous book, Global Solidarity, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2013. He is author of Erich Fromm and the Quest for Solidarity (2004), Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (1998), Modern European Socialism (1994) and Marx and Contradiction (1989), and, with Ian Fraser, co-author of The Marx Dictionary (2011).