More on sustainability

In an earlier post on the subject of sustainability, I discussed the inherent hypocrisy of what individuals and organizations, particularly corporations, are doing in the name of sustainability (http://turn-stone.com/tag/sustainability/). In this post I want to explore other aspects of the sustainability movement, focusing this time on institutions of higher education.

Sustainability became a popular meme in this country about ten years ago. Colleges and universities, ever alert for a way to attract students and raise money through tuition, donations, and sponsored research, cannonballed into the Green water. They established academic programs, student groups, and faculty committees to focus on “sustainability.” There is even a national organization to coordinate these sustainability efforts among colleges and universities, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), complete with its own system to measure how well its member institutions are doing.

I am deeply suspicious of such higher education sustainability movements, particularly after having participated peripherally in some. I consider them akin to picking up beer cans along Ed Abbey’s highway that I mentioned in the earlier post—the problem is not the beer cans littering the side of the highway but rather the existence of the highway in the first place. University sustainability programs are basically irrelevant litter patrols along a monstrous ten-lane freeway. Even the term “sustainable” is suspect. It seems to be regarded by almost everyone as a meaning vaguely “green,” a pale and cynical equivalent of the environmental movements common in universities in the 1970s before idealism of that era gave way to blind materialism, STEM hoohaw, and the proliferation of MBA programs.

Of course, in its strictest sense, sustainability connotes an economy in which we live off the interest of the natural world instead of the corpus, a concept which, individually and collectively, is wildly impossible in this extractive society, one in which our natural world and its living things, including humans, are clear-cut and strip-mined to maintain a fatuous lifestyle of profligate irrelevance.

With no consensus on what sustainability really means and a tendency to ignore reality, colleges and universities have a lot of wiggle room to define sustainability for their own self-interest, which primarily comprises hustling grant money and publicity for their continued existence, while in the process of such, shilling students for body count numbers and tuition payments.

I was looking recently at the website of a well-known university sustainability program. The website lists research projects of faculty and shows photos of earnest, smiling students engaged in saving the world. The activities and stated mission of the program are generally benign, other than perpetuating the fable that by being environmentally conscious and deploying the latest technologies (e.g., by recycling, driving hybrids, installing photovoltaics, and adopting “smart” gewgaws) we can maintain our vacuous, consumptive lifestyle in perpetuity.

The program has a large staff as well as an impressive advisory board which includes the usual suspects: wealthy supporters, representatives from corporations which are locally active in “greenwashing,” and a few token ethnic minorities. Not represented on this advisory board, however, are ordinary people unaffiliated with any group or organization, the sort of everyman and everywoman who would have to adopt and live with any realistic sustainability program, the sort of people who struggle to make rent or pay a mortgage, those who fear for the loss of their jobs and who worry about the fate of their children.

One of the most entertaining and telling aspects of the program’s website, however, is the background and job descriptions of the staff. Most seem to have little idea of what true sustainability entails and instead seem to be pleasant, over-educated people who have donned costumes (of natural fiber, of course) for a theatrical production called “Sustainability!” or an episode of “Portlandia.”

For example, one “develops programs focused on scaling applied research and curriculum across the university, serves as a convener and connector for advancing collaborative actions for addressing complex sustainability issues, cultivates university-practitioner partnerships around topics of urban sustainability and ecosystem services,” etc. Another works “to catalyze university research in addressing the pressing sustainability challenges to society.” Then there is the one who works with students to “translate [students’] systems thinking and sustainability problem-solving skills they are learning in the classroom into resume-building job experiences.” Orwell would have a great fun with the vague syntax and empty buzzwords.

Sadly, what this university is doing in sustainability is typical of how our institutions of higher learning are addressing an existential threat to society. For the most part, colleges and universities are businesses whose mission is to attract students and funding, and to maintain a bureaucracy of administrators and faculty. While sustainability programs might help the bottom line and offer some feel-good publicity, they are at best only marginally relevant to the dangers posed by climate change, metastatic industrialization, and pillaging of the natural world to support that industrialization.

Sustainability is not just about how we use the bounty of the earth, the bounty we discount and degrade by the sterile term “resources.” Sustainability is about responsibility—responsibility to the natural world, responsibility to each other, responsibility to our children and their children and theirs.

Sustainability will not be achieved through college and university programs or “institutes”—or from governmental initiatives or self-serving corporate publicity schemes for that matter. Rather it must evolve locally in each community through the acts of individuals, neighborhood associations, religious groups, and organizations that have a stake in the welfare of that community. Sustainability will not be advanced by higher education bureaucrats whose job is “to catalyze university research in addressing the pressing sustainability challenges to society.” The real catalysts for sustainability are worshipers who answer the call to conscience in their churches, mosques, and synagogues. The real catalysts for sustainability are social workers who understand and address the challenges of those in distress. The real catalysts for sustainability are teachers who have the courage to be subversives in the classroom, to explain the peril of our situation and the folly of our current way of life. The real catalysts for sustainability are business owners and community leaders who have lost their tolerance for mindless flag-draped, Babbitt boosterism, who are willing to speak out and say that “good” is more than profit, that people are more than customers. The real catalysts for sustainability are doctors and nurses who in caring for their patients seek alternatives to the broken “heath care” system driven by greed and depersonalization of the ill. The real catalysts for sustainability are ordinary people who think about what kind of life they want for their children and grandchildren and then speak out to neighbors. The real catalysts for sustainability are those people who understand the peril facing our species and who are willing to do something to address the situation.

Yet, those people are miniscule in number compared with those who are totally ignorant the situation or who are too apathetic to care. I wish I could be hopeful that the few who know and care will triumph, but I am not. I fear for my children and theirs, and for all who come after for they have inherited the scouring, bitter wind we will have unleashed (Proverbs 11:20).

7 thoughts on “More on sustainability”

  1. Such a negatron, Tom…! =:o) As I have said previously – Intelligence in the absence of wisdom will ultimately prove an evolutionary dead-end. For myself, I intend to go out like Slim Pickins in the last scene of Dr. Strangelove.

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  2. Well, I googled Dr Strangelove & Slim Pickins & still don’t know what happened in the last scene, but I’ll deal with that later.
    What I can say is that I went to to the 50th anniversary party for the Whole Earth Cataog & Co-Evolution Quarterly last night & feel really energized by it. Great of course to see so many people I worked with 38 years ago, but also fun to see the way people with little money inspired so much change & enthusiasm. Whether it had lasting affects depends on who you talk to, but I am again re-inspired in a way I haven’t felt since the election…

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    • I did not know that you worked with that crew! You probably realize that my email address is from the WELL, one of the first on-line communities, which was set up by Whole Earth. I joined the WELL in 1989, a long time ago and in a universe far removed from the one I am in now. I still keep my WELL email address, though, for which I pay $12 a month.

      I like the creativity and interesting perspectives of the Whole Earth crowd. I sense, though, that many of its followers are too techno-utopian for my taste these days. As my posts here point out, I think that we as a species are in deep kimchee, a situation brought on in large part by our inability to understand, much less use wisely, the technologies that we have developed. Put another way, cheap energy and blind applications of technology have allowed us to dig ourselves into a deep hole that is about to cave on us. Therefore, the wise approach is to apply the first rule of holes: when you find yourself in one, stop digging.

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      • Yes, “Dr. Strangelove” is a fine, fine film, a classic worth watching every few years. Slim Pickens as Major Kong is excellent, as the scene in that link shows, and his portrayal seems representative of the general type of character he played. BTW, the navigator/bombardier in that scene is played by a young James Earl Jones.

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        • Off topic, but another fine film is “The Devils” directed by Ken Russell and staring Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave in the screen adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s 1952 book “The Devils of Loudun”, a work of non-fiction about the Catholic Church during the time of Cardinal Richelieu and the reign of Louix the XIII, a priest (Oliver Reed as Father Grandier) accused of being in league with the devil and consorting with a convent full of Ursaline nuns (a cloistered order). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPConeKY3WA

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  3. Sustainability, without seriously considering how to shift away from a capitalism which is based on continually diminishing resources for the benefit of particular share holders, will not bring about solutions to the climate crisis we are facing.

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