TY - GEN
T1 - Hope after sustainability - tragedy and transformation
AU - Foster, John
AU - Heatley, Brian
AU - Andrews, Nadine
AU - Hannis, Mike
AU - Wilde, Lawrence
AU - Blühdorn, Ingolfur
AU - Hausknost, Daniel
AU - Ehgartner, Ulrike
AU - Gould, Patrick
AU - Hudson, Marc
AU - Moeller, Nina Isabella
AU - Pedersen, J. Martin
AU - Bathurst, Rachel
AU - Muers, Rachel
AU - Pihkala, Panu
AU - Carr, Katie
AU - Gough, Steve
AU - Scott, William
AU - Reed, Rupert
A2 - Johnson, Matthew T
PY - 2017/1/1
Y1 - 2017/1/1
N2 - 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 (UNFCC2009, 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).
AB - 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 (UNFCC2009, 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).
M3 - Special issue
SN - 2326-9995
VL - 7
SP - 1
EP - 191
JO - Global Discourse
JF - Global Discourse
PB - Bristol University Press
ER -