immanence

It’s become a cliché for people in environmental, policy, and even corporate circles to talk about the “triple bottom-line,” or the “three pillars” or “three-legged stool,” of sustainability. Those “pillars” are almost universally understood to be the economic, the environmental, and the social (sometimes rendered, more trenchantly, as social justice). Some have argued that a fourth, the cultural, should be added (incorporating heritage, identity, well-being, and related indicators); occasionally, another fourth is proposed (such as “governance”). The point with most of these models is that society, economy, and environment (and sometimes something else) are seen as interconnected and interdependent, and that measuring the success of any one of them independent of the others may be a futile exercise. So far, so good.

But given the divergent uses to which this language has been put — many of them coupled with terms like “growth,” “development,” “capitalism,” and the like — critics have found sustainability talk to be vague and unsatisfying. (I won’t even get started here on “natural capital,” “ecosystem services,” and the other terminological sleight-of-hand intended to convince the powers-that-be that nature is good for capitalism.)

Sustaining life itself, and human life in particular, are of course laudable goals. But how do we know that the current economic system is even compatible with the long-term sustenance of life? And if it’s just a matter of developing indicators and measurements for gauging the success of one or another kind of corporate or governmental initiative, why should most people concern themselves with it?

I’ve come to see this exercise of distinguishing the elements of sustainability as a useful one, but only if the relationship between the elements is adequately historicized and clearly defined. That may be easier if they are rephrased into a simpler and more intuitive set of terms. The following is a first stab at such a revision of the basic terms. (Note: This post builds on my earlier thoughts on “Ontology, decoloniality, and the people-land nexus.” It is still very much work in progress.)

I start with the “youngest” of these “four sisters,” which I’ll be numbering in reverse, and will proceed to the elder and more fundamental ones. The deeper you go, the more “real” — and the more sustained and therefore sustainable — they become. Each of them is contingent — each is a project or task, which can succeed or fail depending on various conditions. But, significantly, there is a priority to them whereby the higher ones are ultimately more dependent on the lower ones than vice versa. In this, the model depicts a series of nested circles, each larger than the last. Or it can be thought of as a totem pole, which in its more traditional identification (in contrast to the popular myth of the “low man on the totem pole”) takes the lower figures to be more significant, as they hold up the others.

From the top, then:

(4) The Market  

By the early 21st century, it’s fair to say, neoclassical economists have succeeded in convincing politicians and policy makers around the world that “the economy” is and ought to be the bottom line according to which everything rises and falls. “It’s the economy, stupid,” has become a kind of bludgeon for measuring down everything else — it’s today’s highest trump card.

But it is actually the youngest of the four: the emergence of “the economy” as an autonomous system is at best only a couple of centuries old. Before that it was mostly a minor and small-scale player, identifiable within market transactions encompassing a local, regional, or sometimes international arena, but rarely free of various legal encumbrances, social obligations, and other conditioning factors. Its long-term viability is certainly not a given.

Ecological economists have tried to bring ecological processes back into economic calculations, or, more radically, have argued that the economy is inherently part of a larger ecological system and that the values found in the latter are more fundamental than the former. (They’ve had little success with either argument, but change takes time.)

For now, though, we can consider the capitalist market economy a real enough entity in the sense that most people do buy and sell things within a system of exchangeable currencies that is global in its scope and scale, that they will continue to do that at least for the near future, and — perhaps most definitively — that the players who shape the rules of engagement in this system are the most powerful people in the world.

The Market may rule today, but in the long run, as a system that is autonomous from the other three, one might say that it has passed its peak. If this is true, then we’ve likely not only passed “Peak Oil,” but also “Peak Capitalism.”

(3) The State  

By “the State” I mean a network of institutions and infrastructures by which a population and territory is managed, in a coordinated way, for the achievement of more or less understandable goals. This State goes deeper than the Market — maybe three or four centuries in its currently predominant form, though it has emerged here and there over the course of several millennia now.

States emerged repeatedly over history, though perhaps rarely without resistance. Arguably, the necessity of managing people institutionally emerged only with the growth of sedentary, urban communities. (Foucault’s work on sovereignty and governmentality are relevant with understanding the modern state, but for the longer picture, it’s the work of James C. Scott that I would recommend as a first source: from Seeing Like a State to The Art of Not Being Governed and especially his most recent Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. That can be supplemented with the work of historical sociologists of the state such as Michael Mann, Andrew Bard Schmookler, and others.)

Like the Market (and partly because of it), today’s nation-state system has also passed its peak. But the functions of the State are hardly fading. Rather, they are becoming more networked, layered, globalized, and more written into the very fabric of our biopolitical and neurocognitive lives. One could say that as the territorially bounded state recedes in its control over the lives of its citizens, it is being replaced by a hyper-complex, networked, but essentially global state that is still emergent, perhaps only nascent. Whether this qualifies as a “state” or not isn’t clear. Hardt and Negri proposed the term “Empire” for something like this global (and capitalist) state, but it’s not clear to me that their term for Empire’s antagonist, “Commonwealth,” is necessarily any less state-like (at least according to my definition).

What is clear is that the State will change its forms, and may ultimately decline back into simpler forms. But, short of a total civilizational collapse, it’s not going away anytime soon.

(2) The People 

The organization of groups into identifiable collectivities, consisting of at least a few hundred people, but always with an understood sense of trans-generational continuity — incorporating ancestors, descendants, and other kinds of mediators — goes back about as far as humans remember. It preceded, by millennia, any recognition of a unified species being — a Homo Sapiens Sapiens — and it will likely continue after that recognition fades (at least in the case of a global civilizational collapse, which, after all, is one of the options for how the human era will end, as it inevitably will).

At some point, perhaps about four centuries ago, “the People” got attached to “The Nation,” and specifically to the sovereign, territorial nation-state. But there’s no inherent and necessary link there, and, as already suggested, that link is not likely to last. Most of today’s nation-states are, after all, artificial constructs of colonialism that are scarcely able to withstand significant shocks to the system (witness the impact of wars in Iraq, Syria, et al). And many of those that aren’t are either experiencing strong centrifugal pulls (as with Catalonia/Spain, Scotland/U.K., et al.) or struggling with globalization’s many forms (whether it’s the impact of trade deals and regionalization, as with the EU, or the flows of refugees, migrants, and other non-state forces).

The form of “the People” that appears to carry more emotional weight these days tends to be the nation without a state, the tribal (or mega-tribal) unit, or the specifically identified national group, such as “white” Americans, “real” Hungarians and Poles, and the like. In any case, as long as there are humans around, “the People” will always be a collectivity in process, no matter how fraught that process gets. And if push comes to shove between them, it will typically outweigh the allegiances making up the State or (certainly) the Market.

(1) The Land   

Finally, we come to the one that really matters. It is matter, organized and realized in its many relational flourishings. However deep you go — anthropologically, archaeologically, geologically — the Land has always been there. It’s changed over time, with glaciations and warmings and all the rest; and it is highly variable geographically.

It also hasn’t been a universal and timeless category for people. For Indigenous peoples, The Land and The People have often been considered a single, undelinkable entity: Land+People, or some variation of that kind of admixture. (Arguably, it has also always been something like Land+People+State, in that even the “simplest” of societies, as Marshall Sahlins recently argued, have been organized polities consisting of dependently-layered relations of human people with other kinds of people, “metaperson-others who rule earthly order, welfare, and existence.” That complicates my typology, but let’s not go there right now.)

In that sense, it may be appropriate to say that a Land delinked of its people is a secondary, later invention. At the very beginning, there was Land+People (which sometimes looks more like Land+People+State, or maybe Land+People+State+Economy).

But because the second term (sometimes mixed with the others) has taken so many different forms, and because the “+” is such an important variable, I think it’s best to acknowledge that “Land” comes first and “People” only second. It is still there today, you can go out and feel it — usually through a haze of imagination and fantasy, but not without some participation of an extra-human, geo-territorial, actively agential real world. Arguably, it only takes a little time and effort in surviving without the multi-layered trappings of urban, technological modernity for anyone to get a sense of their dependence on, vulnerability in relation to, and sheer presence of The Land. And then in those moments when it hits with a heavier hand — earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and the like — it becomes undeniable.

The Land won’t go away until long after we have gone away. That may be the ultimate trump card. If the Anthropocene signifies the epoch of human geological dominance on the planet, it also signifies that epoch’s fate as a layer among layers, to be covered by others in the inevitable passage of time. (That, and how we deal with it, is the main argument of my book Shadowing the Anthropocene, forthcoming from Punctum. More on that soon.)

These aren’t four “pillars,” then, but they may be four circles, each nested within and dependent on the next one in the sequence. These circles are networked configurations that take work to build and just as much work (if not more) to maintain. And there is an ontological ordering and priority to them. The categories are loosely connected to disciplines recognizable within academe — “Land” to biology, “People” to culture, “State” to politics, and “Market” to economics — but the names are changed to make it easier to see that they are not somehow equal to each other, but are nested in an ontologically significant sequence of relations and dependencies.

A few further observations can be made here:

1) There are many cognate, related, or “adjacent” terms that could be proposed in place of one or more of these four terms, but each suffers some deficiencies of its own.

• For “market” there is of course “the economy.” Above, I use both, but I find the the former to be more embracing.

• For “the state,” there is “government,” “governance,” “law,” “institutions,” “empire” (in Hardt and Negri’s sense), “society,” and much else. The strength of using “state” is that it denotes a certain historical development with an identifiable provenance, and that its institutions are fairly clearly distinguishable from the informal networks and relations that constitute the next category.

• For “people,” one could substitute “culture” (but that’s too broad, diffuse, and anthropological), “ethnos” (too Greek), “civil society” (too specific, its meaning derived mostly from its relation to “the state”), or simply “society” (too abstract and diffuse, and potentially too overlapping with “state”). “People” captures the positive sense in which the term is often employed — as “the people,” which is more than mere “society” (or the “masses”) in its sense of affiliation and political agency. (Examples of this use can be found in phrases like “the people will rise up,” “government of, by, and for the people,” and so on.) Arguably, these uses are products of a later stage, but they are understandable in terms of the earlier, pre-state stages. In any case, “the people” is always a work in progress, negotiated through the messiness of everyday social relations.

• And for “land,” one might propose “environment” (which is either too anthropocentic, if it’s meant to refer to “the environment” that surrounds humans, or too diffuse and localized if it refers to the environment of any single organism), “ecology” (too scientific, and therefore not historically deeply rooted), “nature” (too abstract and diffuse), or “the earth/Earth.” Arguably, the latter works, but when capitalized it suggests something more planetary in scale, and when not capitalized it suggests something more like “ground” or “soil” than the more geo-territorial and “scaped” feel of what is implied by “land”

As a simple formula, then, “market,” “state,” “people,” and “land” may not be bad.

2) If we take seriously the principle that being lower-on-the-totem-pole equates with being more fundamental and therefore more real, then it follows that the higher ones are more expendable. It’s quite possible to imagine times and places where humans have lived fulfilling lives without anything like a “state” or a “market.” It’s less easy to think of such situations where there wasn’t some understanding of “the people” or “the land” — though one could argue that we live today without a widespread understanding of the Land. The argument is, however, that markets and states are not essential — that they may one day (again) go away — but that the Land ultimately is essential, so that no matter how eclipsed it becomes, it can be expected to eventually reassert itself. The question for the long term is whether “people” will continue to assert itself.

This also suggests that State and Market are not the necessary follow-ups in a universal sequence. They are one sequence, but we could be talking about others, such as “Land–Village–City–Nation–Globe” or “Land–People–Technological Systems” or something else. Many other things have been built on the same foundations of Land and (perhaps) People.

In current conditions, however, insofar as humanity is moving toward a complex and global civilization (I’m being optimistic here), some form of Market and of State seem indispensable. They may be historically posterior to “the People”, but they are also significant and complex achievements, whose virtues, faults, and variations are worth debating. So the four-term model is useful for current and anticipatory purposes.

3) Since this model privileges Land above all others, and People over State and Market, one could ask what the value is of distinguishing the latter three (People, State, Market) when compared to simpler dyads like “Nature and Society,” “coupled human-natural systems,” or “social-ecological systems” (the latter two have become commonplace in interdisciplinary fields like “sustainability science“, environmental sociology, and their cognates). The latter dyads are arguably clearer at delineating what’s really at stake — i.e., the relationship between human social systems (as inclusive of all the things that make up the People, the State, the Market, and more) and the natural world.

A problem with these dyads, however, is that they wipe away any sense of the importance of social equity, justice, or (even) social sustainability. In principle, a totalitarian system could be just as good at “coupling” with nature as an egalitarian one. While the Land-People-State-Market model doesn’t directly specify social equity as a relevant factor, its focus on “the People” can be elaborated to make this point more or less clear. “The People” suggests something more like “social solidarity” than “justice” — a solidarity that encompasses a broadly shared contract among the different classes or sub-groups making up a society. “Society,” or “human systems,” suggests neither. Distinguishing “the People” from “the State” and “the Market” also provides an easily understandable reference to the historical posteriority (and therefore greater contingency) of the latter two, which terms like “society” or “social systems” do not.

(And if we take Sahlins’ argument to heart and see societies as different as the Chewong, Inuit, Min, and Pintupi to be “political states” involving relations with “meta-personal” beings such as gods, spirits, ancestors, earthquake and sky people, and the like, then it may still be worth distinguishing a “people” whose bonds to us are those of lateral kinship and those whose relationship to us is as governing or more distant superiors. But that’s an argument for another day.)

4) Michael Pollan has summarized his insights into food with a simple haiku-like formula: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” Is there a simple but value-based formula that we could derive from the above four “circles”? How about this:

“Secure the Market,
maintain the State,
sustain the People,
love the Land.”

By “securing” the Market, I mean something like keeping it on a leash, while letting it do what it does best, within reasonable limits. Keep it securely fastened to the goals we intend for it: facilitating trade and exchange of goods, providing incentives for innovation, and so on.

The State ought to be maintained in that its functions, to the extent that they help us, require an ongoing labor of maintenance. If we are to live with a State that performs the functions we assign it, we need to take care of that state. Better that than that the State take care of us.

The People deserve sustenance in the sense that there are things that any social order requires that need to be sustained, kept up, and protected (even if the forms that “the People” take can be highly variable and contingent).

Finally, of the four, it is the Land that deserves most respect for what it is in itself. Asking for “respect” may be sufficient, but “love” takes it a bit further. We can, of course, continue to think that land is malleable, valueless stuff — that it should be bought and sold and squeezed and bled for all of its commodifiable value, and that it can be reorganized and even completely remade into something of our own imagining. But have any human societies done that on a large scale for any length of time without serious repercussions? Have any been sustained for more than, say, a few centuries?

Of the societies that have lasted longer than that — say Pharaonic Egypt, or Aboriginal Australia (in its plurality and complexity, since the term really refers to a continent-full of networked societal relations) — have any not had a sense of the land (including water, weather, and other elements) as something needing ongoing maintenance, respect (if not reverence), and usually the intercession of forces that would mediate on their and our behalf? Keeping in mind our long history on this planet, asking that the land be respected and even loved seems reasonable enough.

Sustainability, by this definition, is really reserved for the bottom two rungs on the ladder: People, ourselves and others; and Land, which encompasses all the other others that we rely on, interact with, learn from, and hopefully flourish alongside of. But attaining anything approximating “sustainability” today will require working through the functions of the State, which will need to be appropriately maintained (and reassembled at more appropriate levels of globally, regionally, and locally nested co-governance), and the Market, which will need to be secured, if not reined in, from its current state of overreach.

Thoughts appreciated.