The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics

Introduction: Sustainability and Agrarian Ideals

h01> Introduction Sustainability and Agrarian Ideals How can we make our society and our lives more sustainable? What would it mean for us to try? When Thomas Jefferson assumed office as the third president of the United States, he faced a sustainability crisis of his own. The new republic was straining to recover from debts incurred while opposing the British in the Revolutionary War. Although historians of the United States seldom mention the fact, many colonials chose to relocate their businesses after the Revolution, seeking a more stable economic and political environment. The United States’ chief international ally was France, which had endured a decade of revolution itself. Jefferson not only had to find some way to rebuild the economy of the new nation; he also had to do it in an manner that would fend off predatory European states still looking to recolonize the North American continent, should the government of the United States falter. What is more, events in France had demonstrated how experiments in democracy could abuse power as well as how they could fail. Could the American experiment in democracy survive? Was it sustainable? Jefferson would not have used the word sustainability to describe his challenge. His sustainability crisis was primarily political, whereas ours is environmental. Jefferson’s response may serve as a model for us nonetheless. The urge to live sustainably is fast becoming a theme for contemporary politics and environmentalism, and it is easy to forget how recently sustainability entered our vocabulary and our mind-set. Our Common Future (also known as the Brundtland Report) brought the phrase sustainable development into widespread circulation in 1987. The report was the product of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), an international working group that hoped to define a new consensus to guide thinking on global environmental is- 2 The Agrarian Vision sues in general and on economic growth in developing countries in particular . It sparked an intense conversation among economists, ecologists, and other development specialists about the need to conceptualize global development processes in a way that was attractive to both industrialized and industrializing nations. Today, sustainability has become a byword for many people who never heard of the Brundtland Report. They are concerned about both local and global environmental issues. They have begun spin-off conversations about sustainable cities, sustainable growth, sustainable energy policies, and even sustainable architecture in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Responses to climate change may be the leading focus in the coming round of policies intended to achieve sustainability . Reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have shown that the trajectory of global growth in energy use simply cannot continue. The efforts of former vice president Al Gore have brought both the processes and the likely impacts of climate change to the attention of a broad public. People have recognized that our world is at risk from rising sea levels, the flooding of coastal areas, probable declines in farm production, and shifts in ocean currents that could make the planet virtually uninhabitable. Awareness of these challenges is growing. This book emphasizes the philosophical and conceptual side of those challenges. The unsustainability of the patterns inherited from the twentieth century is taken for granted, and I do not try to prove it. My primary audience is people who have learned the first lesson of environmentalism and are ready to move ahead. Most of them will agree that our current ways of understanding the moral basis of sustainability are inadequate. Current modes of ethics conceal the complex way that norms of human action both shape and are shaped by the natural world. In doing so, they force conversations on sustainability into an awkward vocabulary incapable of expressing the sense in which sustainability is a moral ideal. Moral ideals illuminate human aims and aspirations while remaining open-ended or even vague in their details. They orient our thinking even while requiring considerable specification before they can be acted upon. Far from being utopian or fanciful, moral ideals connect us to the hopes, aspirations, and wisdom of ages past, even while leaving room for discovery, innovation, testing, and revision in the future. Jefferson drew on nearly forgotten ideals related to farms and farming in resolving his Introduction: Sustainability and Agrarian Ideals 3 own sustainability crisis. My claim is that those lost ideals provide an apt starting point for fashioning our own concept of sustainability. The way past...