After Sustainability

Abstract

It seemed like a good idea while it lasted, but we should have known it could not last. the era of sustainability is over. behind our shared cultural narratives of sustainability sits a fantasy about stasis, an imaginary world in which we can trust that whatever happened yesterday will keep happening tomorrow. It's been pretty to think so, but it's never been so. In literary studies, we name this kind of fantasy pastoral. Such a narrative imagines a happy, stable relation between human beings and the nonhuman environment. It seldom rains, mud doesn't clog our panpipes, and our sheep never run away while swains sing beautiful songs to coy shepherdesses. In this sustainable green world, complicated things fit into simple packages, as literary criticism has recognized, from William Empson's “pastoral trick” (115) to Greg Gerrard's “pastoral ecology” (56–58). This green vision provides, in Gerrard's phrase, a “stable, enduring counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of human societies” (56). That's the dream toward which sustainability entices us. To be sustainable is to persist in time, unchanged in essence if not details. That's not the human experience of the nonhuman world. Remember the feeling of being wet, like King Lear, “to the skin” (Mentz, “Strange Weather”). Changing scale matters, and local variation does not preclude global consistency, but the feeling of the world on our skin is disruptive. Our environment changes constantly, unexpectedly, often painfully.

Tools for Sustainable Fashion Design: An Analysis of Their Fitness for Purpose

“…Despite a general recognition in the literature of the need to do so, the frameworks proposed by Brezet [42] and Ceschin and Gaziulusoy [15] do not incorporate elements of the system such as resiliency, adaptability and circularity. In addition, sustainability is not static and must continuously evolve within a set of critical limits [43]. The fashion industry must therefore also be understood as a system with a set of critical limits and a natural sense of disorder.…”

“…The fashion industry has become incredibly complex, [40,57] unpredictable and subject to disruption. There is a need therefore to recognize that there is a natural sense of disorder in existing systems, rather than an idealized system that rests in a harmonious balance [43]. Thus, in the transition to circular economies and closed-loop systems, resiliency and adaptability must be a core consideration.…”

Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science. Hillary Eklund, ed. Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2017. viii + 296 pp. $70.

“…As Mentz suggests, "literary culture has always been fascinated with the interplay of stability and disruption, and literary attitudes toward change can aid us in reimagining ecological dreams." 25 By writing proudly of the effects of "good husbandrie," Carew reveals the constant inconstancy of terrain where salt, sand, and soil are mixed and compounded in ingenious ways in order to ensure the continuing depth of the harbors and the fatness of inland fields. In so doing, his writing can be seen to participate in the activities of composition that are so elegantly outlined by Frances E. Dolan in the opening chapter of this collection.…”

Literature and sustainability

“…Sustainability also raises a number of conceptual diffi culties. One worry is that it erroneously strives for some kind of stasis whereby the ecological present or past is extended into the ecological future ( Bloomfi eld 2015 ;O'Grady 2003 ;Mentz 2012 ). John P. O'Grady, for example, sees an 'obvious fl aw in reasoning' in sustainability ' s 'privileging of duration or permanence as a value' , which 'runs counter to' the 'fundamental principle' that nature 'is in fl ux ' ( 2003 : 3, emphasis in original).…”