The Traps and Politics of Sustainability

“Sustainability” has become the buzzword of twenty-first century environmental politics and of global efforts to address the current environmental crisis. The term frames environmental damage and ecological instability as problems for human life, pointing to extractive, productive, and consumption practices that are problematic not because of their negative effects on the Earth System but because they produce environmental conditions that jeopardize our ability to meet our needs (both now and in the future).

Ultimately, the puzzle that international discussions about sustainability are trying to solve is that of how to secure indefinite production and economic growth in a world of finite and environmentally contingent resources — meaning that sustainability deliberations are not meant to identify or help address a pressing environmental problem but, rather, an economic one.

Understanding sustainability as an effort to subordinate the natural world to economic interests helps us identify four important and environmentally counterproductive ‘traps’ of sustainability talks: a humanist one, a technocratic one, a capitalist one, and a geopolitical one.

The Humanist Trap

At a loosely philosophical level, sustainability talks are supported by problematic humanist visions of the natural world as a storehouse of resources readily available for human use. Accordingly, discussions about sustainability revolve around questions of how to continue to use the natural world for increasingly demanding human ends.

This humanist narrative presupposes and promotes a false sense of mastery over the natural world that frames the Earth system and the non-human world as things that we can use indefinitely to meet our needs (e.g. through scientific and technological developments) while downplaying the risks and unforeseeable consequences of humans’ interactions with the natural world (geoengineering being a good example of this).

The Technocratic Trap

In a way that is consistent with the humanist trap, Stacy Alaimo tells us that the concept of sustainability allows us to take refuge in the idea that we can fix the world in such a way as to ensure it will keep providing for us.

The idea of ‘fixing’ the world is particularly important here — not only because it points to an anthropocentric bias on the basis of which we dub the world ‘defective’, ‘malfunctioning’, or ‘in need of fixing’ when it cannot continue to provide for our increasingly high energy and high consumption lifestyles, but because it rhetorically prioritizes technocratic solutions to problems that are grounded in wider social, cultural, political, and economic realities.

More specifically, sustainability talks have a tendency to reduce environmental politics to matters of technocratic deliberations that prioritize shallow STEM-based solutions rather than matters of, say, exploitation and environmental justice. Because of this, it is not surprising that sustainability projects and policies are particularly appealing to businesses and governments.

The Capitalist Trap

Sustainability talks also lend themselves very well to greenwashed market-based solutions that further secure and legitimize capitalist expansion while obscuring the deeper economic interests that inform sustainability proposals. As Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright put it, “climate change appears to capital as an opportunity: trade in emissions permits (“cap-and-trade”), “green” business, nuclear power, corporate leadership, carbon capture and storage, green finance, and ultimately, geoengineering.”

A clear example of this is the expansive market of ‘green’, ‘ethically sourced’, and ‘sustainable’ goods, which encourages counterproductive consumerist solutions to environmental problems while turning a blind eye to harmful extractive and productive practices (e.g. the pollution and ecological disruption that accompanies the mining of minerals needed to make batteries and ‘clean’ energy) and to the exploitative — and often murderous — realities that makeup global chains of production (e.g. unsafe and slave-like working conditions).

From the perspective of capital, the main concern is not how climate change will affect the stability of complex ecosystems or the general wellbeing of life on Earth but, more narrowly, how droughts will affect agriculture, how shifting sea and salinity levels will affect the fishing industry, how wildfires and insect populations will affect forestry, how pandemics will affect production chains, etc.

Think, for instance, of large economies like China and the United States (under the incoming Biden administration), which now have their eyes on ‘clean’ energy — whose production will require intensive extraction of critical rare earths and minerals like cobalt and lithium, and a corresponding laxing of environmental protections and regulations to speed up production. Not to mention that state-led ‘green’ projects like these also require further investment in fossil-fuel-dependent infrastructure (e.g. China’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative).

At the end of the day, projects like these are not meant to alleviate ecological problems but produce blueprints and toolkits for managing the world’s resources in more reliable and profitable ways. As such, the main concern here is not that of effectively tackling environmental problems but that of delaying them (e.g. decarbonization) or of continuing to profit despite the possibility of climate-based disruptions (e.g. by reshoring production).

The Geopolitical Trap

These humanist, technocratic, and capitalist traps of sustainability talks hide an important geopolitical challenge for twenty-first century environmental politics: the world’s reliance on global institutions and international corporations claiming to operate on behalf of all human beings.

This is a problem that is particularly evident in the workings and failures of today’s international institutions and environmental treaties. For instance, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) regularly fails to strike meaningful environmental agreements between nations because of its inability to produce binding regulations or to ensure the full participation of today’s most environmentally damaging countries (e.g. China and the US). These structural limitations have resulted in international treaties with little practical power and in vague calls for each country to ‘do their part’ (as they see fit and with no enforcing mechanisms in place).

Because of this, institutions like the UN appear only positioned to strike meaningful international environmental agreements under conditions that further consolidate the political and economic dominance of today’s biggest polluters — with these countries taking on the role of leading a ‘green’ global restructuring (a leading role that is legitimized not only on democratic grounds by virtue of being part of a global agreement but also by their technical and scientific authority, and their “panopticon-like capacity to monitor the vital granular elements of our emerging world: fresh water, carbon emissions, climate refugees, and so on”).

The Politics of Sustainability

This geopolitical trap of sustainability deliberations shows that we cannot rely on North-led efforts to meaningfully address today’s environmental crisis (regardless of how ‘sustainable’ these countries claim their new extractive, productive, and consumption practices will be).

These countries will not abandon the capitalist and petroleum-based model of economic development that has made them what they are today. Nor will they support environmental projects and policies that could jeopardize their high energy consumption patterns or their dominant position in the global economy. At the end of the day, it is precisely for this reason that ‘sustainability’ is their preferred course of action. But sustainability will neither solve our current environmental crisis nor close the social, political, and economic gap that separates the global North from the global South.

Because of this, I put my faith not in humanist, technocratic, capitalist, and geopolitically skewed sustainability-based solutions but in the anti-capitalist and anti-humanist struggles of the global South and of subalterns and indigenous populations worldwide. A solution to our current environmental crisis can only come — quite literally — from the ground up.

Sources:

Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Mann, Geoff, and Joel Wainwright. Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future. London: Verso, 2018.