Sustainability: A Good Without Light

Curtis White

I have a disclaimer to make before I begin my comments for you.

I am not an ecologist. I have no expertise in urban planning or

making cities sustainable. I am a generalist and a humanist. In

fact, I am the worst sort of generalist, a novelist. Which means

that what you should expect from me is not edifying scientific

analysis, but a good story.

Actually, telling stories is not something that should seem

strange or unfamiliar to environmentalists. Beyond our

dependence on scientific studies and analyses, we are always

telling stories that have to do with the “why” of environmental

devastation. Why is this happening? What does it say about

human nature? Or America? Whether we know it or not, such

questions are an invitation to metaphysics. Metaphysics is that

branch of philosophy, at one time the queen of philosophical

pursuits, concerned with what is beyond the merely phenomenal.

If a forest is clear cut, this is something more than a single rather

stupid incident. It is part of a general practice that is social,

political, and economic. And behind that practice is what ancient

philosophy called a logos: a construction of both spirit and mind.

And so we ask, “What logos is it that produces such a thing as

clear cutting?”

We environmentalists are surprised and maybe a little

embarrassed to learn that when we try to answer this question we

are indulging in metaphysical speculation. Nonetheless, we often

do try to answer this question. The forms this speculation has

taken will be familiar to you. There is biological speculation:

humans are destructive by nature. There is Christian speculation:

humans are greedy, i.e. sinful. There is sociological speculation:

humans are locked within social structures and are unaware of

what they do. And there is the most common, and most

metaphysical, political speculation: environmental destruction is

the consequence of two hundred years of the “political economy”

of capitalism.

The story I am in the process of telling has elements of all of

these metaphysical tales. It comes under the rubric of the Barbaric

Heart. In my thinking, all of the above metaphysical explanations

are either informed by or are a response to the Barbaric Heart. The

natural mode of reasoning for the Barbaric Heart is simple enough

to describe. It was the logic not only of the ancient northern

hordes, clothed in animal skins, but of the Empire and the Western

civilization that followed as well. For the Romans, virtue simply

meant success, usually military success. Valor. That was the heart

of Romanitas. This was their barbaric assumption: our prosperity

is dependent on violence. Or, as the great Roman hero Cincinnatus

said, in some perplexity, since he just wanted to work his farm,

“We are somehow fated to enjoy the favor of the gods in larger

measure when warring than when at peace.”

That was Roman virtu. Which is a way of saying that the

Barbaric itself is a form of virtue, especially if you think that

winning, surviving, triumphing, and accumulating great wealth are

virtues (as, in order, athletes, Darwinians, military commanders,

and Donald Trump do).

But virtues are not things that God has described for us.

Virtues are specific to cultures and rarely are they exclusive. They

are always challenged by contrary organizations of virtue. Barbaric

virtues have been challenged by competing ethical organizations

like the Stoic virtues of honour, integrity, simplicity, loyalty, and

moderation, or the Christian virtues of selflessness, compassion,

reverence, humility, faith, and hope. There have been other

articulations of virtue as well. Humanism and the Enlightenment

advocated the virtues of fraternity and equality before the law,

challenging the barbarity of royal despotism. Romanticism created

“intimations” of the virtue of a transcendental relation to Nature,

challenging the early brutality of unfettered European

industrialism. The environmental movement has used all of these

strategies at one time or another.

The virtues that have attempted to confront the Barbaric

Heart are the virtues of one form or another of what I’ll call for

lack of a better term the Thoughtful. And the Thoughtful is

concerned with articulating a sense of the whole. In his “Second

Philippic” against Marc Antony, Cicero chastised him for

surrounding the Senate with his armed men. “Why do your

henchmen listen with their hands on their swords?” he accused.

For Cicero, Antony represented the City of Force, while the Senate

represented the City of Reason. Cicero’s interest was in “the

brotherhood of the entire human race.” (Cicero, 22)

To see that what is most important is a “whole,” a

brotherhood or a “natural league,” requires an ability to think

beyond the immediate. In whatever form, the Thoughtful attempts

to arrest the Barbaric in its activities and say, “Wouldn’t it be

better to think about being human in this way?” Or, for

environmentalists, “Wouldn’t it be better to think about our

relation to the natural world not as an opportunity for exploitation

and profit but as life-giving interdependence?”

The Barbaric Heart is perfectly capable of seeing the

attraction of the ideals that Thoughtfulness offers. Unfortunately,

it has very little to offer on its own beyond the self-evidently

immoral argument that if it is allowed to continue its violent ways

(as if it were asking), the benefits of that violence will eventually

“trickle down” to you. Its options for contending with alternative

articulations of virtue are few. First, obviously, it can simply kill,

imprison or banish their advocates. Roman emperors persecuted

not only Christians but Greek philosophers, the Stoics. In CE89,

the Emperor Domitian banished philosophers from Rome.

Second, it can adopt a strategy of delay, as we see in the

work of corporate lobbyists, rightwing media pundits, and the

dishonest products of corporate-sponsored think-tanks. For the

purposes of self-defense, it will don the garb of its enemies, claim

thoughtfulness for itself, and insist that its actions are in the name

of freedom, democracy, Christianity, etc. Thus the profitable work

of Fox News, Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Sowell, the Weekly

Standard, and the venerable National Review. It’s a rather

shameless ploy, but when you consider that it’s employed by

people whose first instinct is violence, it’s a major strategic

advance.

But the third and shrewdest strategy of the Barbaric Heart is

to reason in this way, “I will always have the option of violence

because that after all is what I am. My efforts at denying the

arguments of the Thoughtful through my own claims to being

thoughtful will go on, of course, so long as there are well-educated

hypocrites to do the work. But it seems to me that if I must have

an enemy, the best thing I could do would be to invent that enemy

myself and in my own image.”

This, as you can see, is some very sophisticated barbarity.

How have we seen this strategy at work within mainstream

environmentalism? I believe its primary vehicle is the notion of

sustainability. Sustainable agriculture. Sustainable cities.

Sustainable development. Sustainable economies. Sustainability

seems for most of us as close as we can come to wisdom.

Henceforth, we’re told, it’s going to be a green collar world. As a

recent television advertisement tells us: Where is a perfect world of

clean water and air, no land fills, and 100% recycling? A Suburu

plant in Indiana! Never mind that it’s producing low mileage

SUVs like the Outback. Through advertisements of this kind, the

Barbaric Heart assures us that it has had a change of heart, and it

can now be trusted to play nice.

In truth, the point of sustainability is the idea that the

economic, political and social systems that have together produced

our current global environmental calamity do not need to be

replaced. The point of sustainability most often seems to be to

preserve—not overthrow—the very system of Barbaric virtues that

has created this great threat to the natural world in the first place.

In fact, what sustainability means, deprived of its mint-green cloak,

is “stay the course,” in George W. Bush’s diction.

But I want to be quite uncompromising in saying that the

logic of sustainability is also a sort of thoughtlessness. It

participates in the yearnings and willfulness of the Barbaric Heart

in spite of itself. The logic of sustainability, as a sort of program

of carefully calibrated amendment (“Sure! We can make coal clean

and still maintain our Lifestyle.”) is not an answer to our problem

but a surrender to it. It is, as Simone Weil put it, a “good without

light.”

Thoughtlessness isn’t no-thought; it’s thought that maintains

realities that real thought would prohibit.

What is most menacing about the logic of sustainability is evident

to anyone who wishes to look into its language. It will

“operationalize” sustainability. It will create metrics and indices.

It will create “life-cycle assessments.” It will create a

sustainability index. It will institute a “global reporting initiative.”

It will imagine something called “industrial ecology” and not

laugh. Most famously, it will measure carbon footprints. What the

so-called sustainability movement has accomplished is the creation

of “metrics,” ways of measuring. It may not have had much

impact on the natural world, but it has guaranteed that, for the

moment, thinking will not be about spiritual and social renewal

(another Great Awakening) but will be restricted to “technical

interpretation.” In short, to this point sustainability’s signal

accomplishment has been to bring calipers to the head of a

songbird.

But what is most thoughtless about the logic of sustainability,

especially as it has emerged through the Kyoto and Bali

international agreements and protocols, is the assumption that it

should allow for continued “economic growth” and

“development.” In short, sustainability assumes that the reasoning

of economics—of economics as a form of scientific reason—must

continue to provide the most telling analyses of and prescriptions

for any future model for the relationship between human beings

and the natural world.

But what if the thinking of economics is merely another

vestment for the Barbaric Heart?

The idea that economics will aid us in thinking through the

problem of the destruction of the natural world, will aid us in

managing the earth’s “carrying capacity,” commits us to the

assumption that our world ought to be governed and guided by

technicians. It is part of the thinking that says, “If only the

politicians would listen to what we scientists have to say! The

scientists will save us if only we’d listen to them, respect their

authority, follow their instructions.” Or, as the website Ecogeek

puts it, “We’re in a bit of an eco-mess, but we’ve got the brains to

lick any problem.” In short, for the Ecogeek technical innovation

will save the planet. They can maintain this while gloriously

ignoring the fact that the world we presently inhabit was conceived

by science, designed by engineers, and implemented by

technicians. It starts with the rapidly beating heart of the four-

stroke engine inside your automobile, and then radiates out in what

is laughably called urban planning (the strip mall, the commuters,

the traffic jams, the capitulation to our own machines), and then

what is disturbingly called transportation (the sterility of the

interstate highway, the fantastic waste and increasingly fascistic

experience of jet travel), and then the global energy infrastructure,

burning off methane waste, spilling its toxic cargo on land and

shore, and destroying the people who have been cursed with “oil

wealth.” And of course looming over all of this, guaranteeing it, is

the grim visage of the warrior, the global oil police known as the

military.

What I want to suggest, not to put too fine a point on it, is

that the act of trusting to these experts is to place faith not in the

subtle capacities of the engineer, but to indulge in the primitive

longing of the barbarian in his moment of despair. After a period

of truly grand slaughter and plunder, the barbarian discovers with

an audible “uh-oh” that the legions have regrouped, they’re

moving forward in an orderly and powerful way and it’s going to

be murder and mayhem in the barbarian camp for a while. The

barbarian has been shown that his willfulness and violence has

become the equivalent of self-defeat. That is his inescapable

reality even if it’s one he is constitutionally incapable of

understanding. The waters are lapping at the shores of Manhattan

Island. What science should be saying now is not “why were we

not listened to, respected, followed,” but “we have wittingly taken

common cause with the barbarians and participated in the making

of this world, and it is clear now that this making was also our

collective unmaking.” And yet like the barbarian in his moment of

anguish, who thinks that the only possible response to his situation

is to be even more violent next time, our technocracy thinks that

what will cure technological disaster is more and smarter

technology.

In the end, the great difficulty that we environmentalists have

with those forces of destruction that we see around us is not with

their sinfulness or greed, not with their stupidity, and not with their

part in an international capitalist conspiracy. The truly daunting

task before us has to do with their sense of their own virtue. With,

in short, their happiness. I’ll repeat, the greatest difficulty faced by

the environmental movement is the happiness of those social

forces that are at the source of most environmental problems.

These communities, if one can call them that, believe that they are

prosperous because they are virtuous, and they are happy because

they are prosperous. Very many people are happy with the

American business model, they are happy with their cars, and they

are happy with the array of cheap consumer goods available to

them at the mall, and they are ecstatic with their computers and

home entertainment systems. We can explain to them that those

consumer goods are connected in a very compelling cause/effect

line to China, global energy consumption, pollution, and the reign

of genocidal regimes like that in the Sudan, but such an account

seems to them truly metaphysical. Our challenge is to provide a

metaphysics (or a narrative, if you prefer) that provides a different

and compelling way of thinking about who we are and what an

alternative form of happiness could look like. That is a mostly

terrifying suggestion to people who already think they are happy.

People do not easily abandon happiness because someone says

they ought to, or that there is a superior form of happiness down

the road. For example, the promotion of “localism” is a tough sell

because it looks to most people like a return to the social realities

of the nineteen thirties. Walking, growing your own food, and in

general living more humbly.

The problem for environmentalists, people who do follow the

causal chain of consumer culture to the Sudan, people who find the

idea of local, self-sustaining communities and simpler lives

attractive, is how to maintain a commitment to this thing the

United States of America. Because, frankly, to many of us it looks

increasingly on any number of fronts like the enemy. It would

seem to be the fondest residence for the Barbaric Heart since the

Roman Empire.

There’s an old Italian folk tale, told by Boccaccio among

others, that goes something like this: A Jew once told a Christian

friend that he wished to convert to Christianity. He sensed that it

was the true religion. But before he converted he wanted to visit

Rome in order to see first hand how Christians lived. This idea

horrified his friend because he knew what sin and hypocrisy he’d

see there, so he tried to dissuade him from the journey. Never the

less, the Jew went. On his return he said to his Christian friend

that he would convert because, truly, Christianity must be the

greatest religion. To believe in a religion that endures such

debasement of its own ideals takes the very greatest faith.

So, our discovery that American culture is the home of the

Barbaric Heart should not inspire Anti-Americanism but a truer

Americanism. An America whose primary commitment is to the

Thoughtful. What I have advocated elsewhere is a renewal of the

distinctly American virtues of pragmatism and transcendentalism.

I offer these remedies not because of a merely antiquarian fetish

with our past, but with the intent of making history work critically,

in the interest of life, in the present. Pragmatism and

transcendentalism have always been our homegrown responses to

the violent world of the Barbaric Heart. Pragmatism offers the

renewal of a democratic world in which the offering of reasons is

paramount, and the best reasons prevail. Transcendentalism, as

developed by Emerson and Thoreau, offers the renewal of a world

in which nature is a source of joy, not profit, and the primary way

in which we humans discover our relationship to God. But that is

a much longer argument for another day.

From “Planetizen” The Planning and Development Network

Media Density Discussions are Needed for Cities Brent Toderian16 April 2008 - 11:54amTagged:

* Architecture * Community / Economic Development * Energy * Environment * Government / Politics

* History / Preservation * Infrastructure * Land Use * Landscape Architecture * Urban Development / Real Estate

Can any North American city have a meaningful public discussion about sustainability, about its "green-ness" or ecological footprint, without having the challenging but necessary public discussion about the city's density?

Many are still trying to. Many freely trumpet smart growth and sustainability without the tension and trouble that comes with discussing the "d-word" openly, and thus avoid the necessary heavy-lifting. Few politicians, and embarrassingly not enough city planners, are willing to tackle the density issue publicly, as it is still what Sustainable Urbanism author Douglas Farr calls the "3rd rail" of sustainable city building.

There is, however, great commonality in thinking in expert circles that density done well is a critical component to reducing a city's carbon footprint. The vast majority of our city's greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings and transportation, both of which are powerfully determined or influenced by the city's density patterns.

But of course, what we've called "density done well" is not easy. What does that mean? How can it be done, with design, amenity, infrastructure, and neighbourhood voice? Here, the public weighs in loudly, and rightly so.

And as for the willingness of cities to put the issue front and centre, witness Vancouver. Density has been part of the dialogue for decades, and the public by comparison to most cities, is astute on the issues.

But since the launching of the EcoDensity Initiative in June 2006, the density discussion has been front-and-centre like never before. My previous posts have documented some of the steps, controversies and dialogue, which ramped up since November 2007 with two and a half months of consultation on the second draft of the EcoDensity Charter and Initial Actions (54 additional

workshops or meetings with public or stakeholder groups to be exact, between Nov 27th and Feb 26th), followed by 7 nights of public delegate presentations to Council on the second drafts from Feb. 26th until early April.

The videos of our many hours of presentations and discussions at Council can be found on our EcoDensity website, and its been fascinating to see how they've been poured over, commented on, debated, by bloggers and media alike - the closest thing to reality tv I've been involved with in my career. Many for and against EcoDensity have commented that they have learned a tremendous amount during (and even enjoyed) the many evenings of public presentations and Council questions, much of it about what density done well could and should mean.

One of the most interesting results of this year and a half engagement though, has been the surprising number of media articles in our city and region about density and its link to sustainability. As most city planners will attest to, it is usually very difficult to get the media interested in planning matters. Although that is somewhat less true here in Vancouver, we have arguable been in a flurry of media attention with few past equals (although observers who have been here longer than I, may challenge that suggestion).

Not every reporter, pundit or letter-writer has agreed, and

as one would expect, and there have been pieces both positive

and negative to the Initiative. Headlines have ranged from "The

Price of EcoDensity" and "EcoDensity Raises Fears of Crowding

without Amenities" to "The Argument for Density: Livable,

Affordable and Kind to the Climate". A key point in the media

back-and-forth came later in the game, when after running many

articles and letters with varying perspectives, the Vancouver Sun

in March 2008 ran a definitive op/ed from its editorial board

endorsing the Initiative, entitled "Vancouver Neighbourhoods

needn't fear the Impact of EcoDensity Plans."