Sustainable This, Sustainable That: New Materialisms, Posthumanism, and Unknown Futures

Abstract

mornings in the unknown future. Who shall repair this now. And how the futuretakes shapetoo quickly. The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving—Jorie Graham, “Sea Change”Conserving This, Conserving ThatJust a few lines from jorie graham's poem “sea change” evoke anxiety about unpredictable futures that arrive too soon, in need of repair. The abrupt departure of a sense of permanence may provoke the desire to arrest change, to shore up solidity, to make things, systems, standards of living “sustainable.” Having worked in the environmental humanities and in science studies for the last decade and having served as the academic cochair of the University Sustainability Committee at the University of Texas, Arlington, for several years, I have been struck by how the discourse of sustainability at the turn of the twenty-first century in the United States echoes the discourse of conservation at the turn of the twentieth century, especially in its tendency to render the lively world a storehouse of supplies for the elite. Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt's head of forestry, defined forests as “manufacturing plants for wood,” epitomizing the utilitarianism of the conservation movement of the Progressive era, which saw nature as a resource for human use. By the early twentieth century Pinchot's deadening conception of nature jostled with other ideas, such as those of aesthetic conservation and the fledgling science of ecology. Pinchot was joined by the Progressive women conservationists, who claimed, as part of the broader “municipal housekeeping” movement, that women had special domestic talents for conservation, such as “turning yesterday's roast into tomorrow's hash.” Many Progressive women conservationists not only bolstered traditional gender roles but also wove classism and racism into their conservation mission, as conservation became bound up with conserving their own privileges. The anthropocentrism of the Progressive women conservationists is notable. As a participant in the First National Conservation Congress stated in 1909, “Why do we care about forests and streams? Because of the children who are to be naked and bare and poor without them in the years to come unless you men of this great conservation work do well your work.” During their conventions the discourse of conservation was playfully and not so playfully extended to myriad causes, including conserving food, conserving the home, conserving morals, conserving “true womanliness,” conserving “the race,” conserving “the farmer's wife,” and conserving time by omitting a speech (Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground 63–70).

Sustainability for Whom? : The Politics of Imagining Environmental Change in Education

“…Evidently, this is a definition that is open to interpretation, depending on, for example, how the present and future are understood, as well as what one includes in the notion of generations and in the notion of needs. The problem of defining sustainable development in practice has been discussed both in critical environmental research in general (see e.g., Bradley 2009;Alaimo 2012;Henriksson 2014) and in critical educational research in particular (see e.g., Bonnett 2002;Ideland and Malmberg 2014;Ideland and Malmberg 2015;Hasslöf 2015). Evidently, educational practice, with its raison d'être and historical trajectories, accentuates certain things as important while leaving others behind (see e.g., Gyberg 2003, 17-18).…”

“…An important assumption for this study is that we live in a more than human time (Whatmore 2002, 146), which requires theoretical and analytical tools that take into account that our realities are shaped by both human and nonhuman practices and existences (see e.g., Åsberg 2012;Åsberg 2013;Oppermann 2013;Neimanis 2013;Neimanis, Åsberg, and Hedrén 2015). While environmental issues tend to be framed as affecting us all, many feminist scholars have pointed out the importance of questioning this assumption by asking what is at stake for whom (Haraway 1992;Plumwood 1993;Alaimo 2012;Macgregor 2013). As a way of re-politicizing sustainability education, this study directs attention to the question of which relations are considered important, and to the ways in which subject positions are formed by sustainability education.…”

“…Biesta's work is situated in an anthropocentric tradition, but his critique of humanism can be used to develop a non-anthropocentric approach to education. Anthropocentric assumptions make human activity and survival the focus for sustainability issues (Alaimo 2012). As a result, sustainability risks evoking "an environmentalism without an environment, an ecology devoid of living creatures other than human beings" (Alaimo 2012, 562).…”

“…It is important to clarify the difference between these modes in order to investigate the extent to which education can handle them and include and make room for subject positions and agency that lie outside the realm of the human world. The analytical categories of unpredictability and the unknown have been developed with inspiration from Stacy Alaimo's (2012) critical essay Sustainability This, Sustainability That: New Materialisms, Posthumanities, and Unknown Futures, where she asks whom the contemporary sustainability discourse in education and academia cares for. Alaimo holds that sustainability invokes a human-centered future and an epistemology that is linked to technological fixes and management plans, creating the ecological problems as "out there, distinct from one's self" (Alaimo 2012, 561).…”

Human–animal relations beyond the zoo: the quest for a more inclusive sustainability education

“…Anthropocentric perspectives place human activity and survival at the centre of sustainability issues (Alaimo 2012). As a result, the ecological systems, of which humans are part, are seen as passive and under human control.…”