The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics

Chapter 12: Sustainability, Social Movements, and Hope

Chapter 12 Sustainability, Social Movements, and Hope Highly technical approaches to sustainability proliferated in the decade between the publication of the Brundtland Report and the end of the millennium. By 2001, Australian philosopher Aiden Davison was calling for an end to the contentious debates over sustainable development on the ground that these technical definitions simply promoted the idea that environmental problems were a domain for expert decision making and technological innovation. The idea that there might be something about modern life that needed deep reform in which many (if not all) people should participate had been driven from the field. Davison’s hope was that by turning the discussion away from sustainable development and toward sustainability as such, we would open a space in which more probing but ultimately more hopeful discussions of the question “How should we live?” might emerge. Like me, Davison draws heavily on the thought of Albert Borgmann in describing the way he hopes a conversation on sustainability might develop. Less than a decade later, sustainability seems to be on everybody’s lips. Has the conversation Davison hoped for now begun in earnest? One reason to be hopeful is that the influence of the Brundtland Report seems to have waned. Discussion now seems to focus on sustainability as such, rather than relying exclusively on the idea of economic development. One reason to be skeptical is the nonsubstantive manner in which the word sustainability often seems to be used. For many in business and politics, sustainability encompasses all that is good. Saluting sustainability is a way of saying “We want to be good” while avoiding any serious discussion of what that goodness might actually involve. This usage has also developed a theoretical underpinning in the form of social movement theory. More than fifteen years ago, Patricia Sustainability, Social Movements, and Hope 257 Allen and Carolyn Sachs were calling for us to think of sustainability as a “banner” under which a variety of causes can unite. Today, many people have given up attempting to sort out the various ways we might understand sustainability, notwithstanding my attempt in the previous two chapters. Indeed, they have come to think of sustainability as a banner that describes a broad and important social movement, one of the first to have nearly global status and also one of the first to take shape in the twenty-first century. Social Movements One version of the idea is that, like major social movements of the twentieth century, sustainability is a cause that has gripped a significant portion of society. In the first half of the twentieth century, an international labor movement resulted in the formation of trade unions and created a political shift in many industrial countries that substantially increased the influence of the working class. It was formed by men and women with diverse ideologies: communists, socialists, anarchists, and social democrats who (unlike the others) hoped all along for relatively modest reforms. In addition to the revolutionaries, some saw the need for better treatment of workers in religious terms, while others saw it as an evolution in our understanding of democracy. Still others had more narrowly and practically defined objectives in the form of improved wages or working conditions. The labor movement became effective because it was able to transcend the divisions implied by these diverse goals and ideologies, and its ultimate accomplishments may not have been envisioned by any of the individuals who participated in it. The civil rights movement in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s was similar, in that it represented the coalescence of many goals and ambitions shared initially by American blacks and increasingly embraced by white society. On the one hand, it was aimed at fairly specific political reforms, such as voting rights and the repeal of statesanctioned segregation. The philosophical basis for these reforms could have been drawn from the founding documents of the American republic , a thought expressed by Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) in the inspiring words of his August 28, 1963, speech in Washington: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” On the other hand, the civil rights movement unleashed 258 The Agrarian Vision a number of conflicting trends in the way black Americans thought of themselves and in the way blacks...