{"id":9511,"date":"2017-12-01T12:46:37","date_gmt":"2017-12-01T17:46:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=9511"},"modified":"2021-03-26T13:07:55","modified_gmt":"2021-03-26T18:07:55","slug":"beyond-sustainabilitys-3-pillars-an-exercise-in-eco-political-ontology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/12\/01\/beyond-sustainabilitys-3-pillars-an-exercise-in-eco-political-ontology\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond sustainability’s 3 pillars: an exercise in eco-political ontology"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s become a\u00a0clich\u00e9 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<\/a>. Those “pillars” are almost universally understood to be the economic, the environmental, and the\u00a0social\u00a0(sometimes rendered, more trenchantly, as social justice<\/em>).<\/em> Some have argued that a fourth, the\u00a0cultural<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

Sustaining life itself, and human life in particular, are of course laudable goals.\u00a0But 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?<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.” It is still very much work in progress.)<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0But, 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<\/em> significant, as they hold up the others.<\/p>\n

From the top, then:<\/p>\n

(4) The Market\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But it is actually\u00a0the 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.<\/p>\n

Ecological economists<\/a> 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.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

(3) The State\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> to The Art of Not Being Governed<\/a> and especially his most recent Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States<\/a>. That can be supplemented with the work of historical sociologists of the state such as Michael Mann,<\/a>\u00a0Andrew Bard Schmookler<\/a>, and others.)<\/p>\n

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\u00a0global<\/em> 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<\/a>” for something like this global (and capitalist) state, but it’s not clear to me that their term for Empire’s antagonist<\/em>, “Commonwealth<\/a>,” is necessarily any less state-like (at least according to my definition).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

(2) The People\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0It preceded, by millennia, any recognition of a unified species being — a Homo Sapiens Sapiens<\/em> — 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).<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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).<\/p>\n

The form of “the People” that appears to carry more emotional weight these days tends to be the nation without<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

(1) The Land\u00a0 \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Finally, we come to the one that really matters. It is<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

It also hasn’t been a universal and timeless category for<\/em> 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<\/a>, have been organized polities consisting of dependently-layered relations of human people with other<\/em> kinds of people, “metaperson-others who rule earthly order, welfare, and existence.” That complicates my typology, but let’s not go there right now.)<\/p>\n

In that sense, it may be appropriate to say that a Land delinked<\/em> 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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The Land won’t go away until long after we<\/em> 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<\/em>, forthcoming from Punctum. More on that soon.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

These aren’t four “pillars,” then, but they may be four circles, each nested within and dependent on<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

A few further observations can be made here:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n