Green Aristotle

Just as tree rings can be used to age a tree, the accumulation of translations of Aristotle’sNicomachean Ethics dates the bookish man.  I, for example, have accumulated one translation for each of my five decades.  As we move along perhaps you will notice that I am not a seasoned Aristotle scholar, merely an interested student of the Ethics (my model is Joyce not Nussbaum).  When I informed my friend and DePaul University colleague Professor Will McNeill who has written extensively on Aristotle (especially in relation to Martin Heidegger’s work) that I was ruminating on a sustainability ethic based upon the Nicomachean Ethics he peered at me above his bifocals and thundered “Aristotle never used the term ‘sustainability’.”  McNeill is persnickety on such matters.   However, I am interested in this project for a few reasons, not least of which is to put my several translations to good use.  Sustainability is a newer term, but it is one that gathers up several perennial questions: how to endure in a recognizably inconstant world; how to sensibly discharge commitments to oneself and to others; how to be good.  There has been a tendency in recent presentations of sustainability solutions to resort heavily to innovations in the technical aspects of both the natural and social sciences rather than to examine how sustainability’s perennial themes have been taken up in disciplines that have examined them the longest.  We may have explored the conditions of the sustainable life for a quarter century, but philosophy has examined the good life for a couple of millennia.  Undoubtedly the humanities have secured a place in discussion of sustainability, and undoubtedly these disciplines and practices are influential, nevertheless humanists are a rarity in governmental sustainability committees, and this absence may be consequential.  Perhaps I am wrong; perhaps you’ll correct me.  

The full piece is here at 3quarks.com

The Humanities and the Sciences Squabble for Sustainability’s Soul: First Thoughts

Chicago Wilderness is an environmental consortium with a mission to restore biodiversity and improve the quality of life for people living in the Greater Chicago area.  Their vision is to include one third of Chicago and the surrounding areas in an interconnected network of lands and waterways in order to provide a healthy and sustainable region for people and nature.  Although the sustainability goal of the consortium is focused on environmental outcomes, nonetheless there is recognition of the need to integrate this goal with the economic and social developmental plans for the region. Therefore the 260 member institutions of this sustainability oriented organization includes local, state and federal agencies, large conservation organizations, cultural and education institutions, volunteer groups, municipalities, corporations, and faith-based groups.  Together these organizations commit to four key initiatives: restore nature to health, protect green infrastructure, mitigate climate change, and leave no child inside.  Projects are undertaken through four teams:  education, natural resources, science and a sustainability team.  Representation in team leadership and in working groups are drawn from a range of professions: land managers, research social scientists, ecologists, conservation biologists, planners and so forth.  Many, though not all of course, are scientific in nature.  Few, in contrast, are drawn from humanities.  That is not to say that there are no individuals in the consortium with training in humanistic disciplines; indeed many may have.  Rather what I am contending here is that these individuals are not engaged in the work of Chicago Wilderness in their role as humanists, not, at least, in the way that the scientists are engaged in project work qua scientists.    

The sciences and humanities are often depicted as playing complementary roles in imagining a sustainable future.  However, there may be a competitive edge to their proposed usefulness for planning environmental sustainability.  Which provides the more powerful tools; in turn which should be provided with more resources when plans are being developed?

In some circles there is a perception that the sciences have failed in their task of securing the future.  For instance, In The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge, philosopher Bill Vitek and ecologist Wes Jackson interrogate the value of science in facing our current dilemmas.[1]  Their critique of science points to the supposedly unfortunate scientific legacy of the Enlightenment, shaping, as it did, the patterns of thought that facilitated an aggressive exploitation of the Earth’s resources, the large-scale despoliation of habitat, and the loss of diversity both organismic and cultural.  Such a critique can be extended by implicating the sciences in an ongoing complicity with the technological systems that perpetuate environmental problems thus endangering the health of planet and people.  Now Vitek and Jackson are not advocating the humanities as substituting for the sciences in sustainability studies.  Rather they ask: “Why not go with our long suit and have an ignorance based worldview.”  “We are”, they go on to say, “betting that there is an important paradox in all of this: knowledge and insight accumulate faster in the minds of those who hold an ignorance-based worldview…Darting eyes have the potential of seeing more.”  Though, as mentioned, the humanities are not proffered here as the intellectual corner stone of sustainability thinking, whatever else that might be, it certainly ain’t the sciences.  Nonetheless, one might ask whether the resources for designing a sustainable future are not in fact better excavated by the humanistic disciplines rather than dictated by the intellectual traditions of the sciences that created the problems. 

Humanities in Environmental Long-term Planning for Sustainability (HELPS!)

My post requesting assistance in unearthing case studies where the humanities were directly engaged in sustainability planning in cities around the world fell on somewhat deaf ears.  Just let me quickly follow up and renew my call for help.   If the humanities can be broadly defined as “the study and interpretation of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts” how are humanists *directly* engaged with the work of sustainability in urban settings? I am not saying that they don't but I do want specific examples of how.., any takers?

A Role for The Humanities in Environmental Sustainability?

I am writing a piece on the role of the humanities (let’s say philosophy, literature, religious studies, linguistics, performing arts etc) in fashioning environmental sustainability solutions in cities around the world.  Eventually, I intend to work on this more systematically and develop a suite of case studies, but for now it would be useful to get some input from you on what projects come to mind.  Specifically, I want to learn of projects where the humanities had or are having an impact on implementation of sustainability, even if this is an indirect impact.

I should perhaps point out that I don’t have any real hypothesis here other than an expectation that sustainability benefits from an interdisciplinary approach.  Nor do I think that such approaches are uncommon - I merely want to assemble a roster of projects.  

If you care to comment here or email me a lhenegha at gmail I’d also like to hear on the degree of difficulty encountered in tying to mesh these more humanistic approaches with one emanating from the sciences.

Your help appreciated!

UPDATE 29 August: An update on this project is posted here

Hope, resilience, sustainablity

Written at the Black Earth Institute Annual Meeting.

I can still recall the particular geometry the body needed to adopt to climb the trees in the neighborhood where I grew up.  Those trees where one could be a simple straight line and inch along a tree bole set at an acute angle to the ground, those trees where one needed to make of one legs a geometer's divider to reach from branch to branch.  I recall those which could only be climbed by swiveling around the trunk, winding up the tree like a little human orange rind being sloughed off the fruit.  I recall too the mounting terror as I got higher and higher.  I was no John Muir atop a Douglas spruce in a Sierras' storm - I was a frightened boy who would get stuck precisely half way up a tree afraid to go further.  Afraid to go down.  And so I would stay aloft for longer than was sane, waiting for the fear to pass, waiting for that trust and hope that propelled me up the tree to return to guide me back down.

Boy, and tree, and wind, and sky; fear and trust and hope, are all world.  A tree is not theory to the climber. The limbs of tree and boy's limbs are world inseparable.  But the fear and trust and hope are also world - moods that are perhaps distinctively human; but because boy and tree are world the boys fear and hope and trust are also world.  I am fearful of world but I must accept that; I trust what it is to be human and accept that; I am hopeful and accept that.  I will climb up; I will pause in the mood of the world; and when I must I will climb down.

Learning to be as strange as the rest of nature

The period since the retreat of the glaciers of the Pleistocene, geologically termed the Holocene, has persisted for the past 12,000 years.  It is the relatively stable regime in which the social-ecological systems of the world have developed.  Poor management of the climatic, edaphic, hydrological and other ecosystem feedbacks that maintain this state may result in a critical transition to a less desirable state (at least from the perspective of many humans).  Indeed, we may have already transitioned from the Holocene to the unambiguously human-dominated era of the Anthropocene.  On first inspection this account seems to add little to what many concerned environmental thinkers have been saying for quite some time.  However, it recasts the ecological crisis in geological terms (though Paul Ehrlich has been employing similar devices for decades).  Humans will need to be thought of not only alongside other species but alongside ecological entities as diverse as tectonic plates, volcanoes and hurricanes.   

In future posts I will review recent developments in ecosystem thinking, emphasizing "resilience thinking" as a way of positioning concerns about the entities of ecological thought alongside accounts of the temporality of nature.  Contemporary ecology offers tools for analyzing events which may not result in changing the characteristic functioning of systems (in the way that a small rain event little perturbs a system) and for analyzing those events that tip a system into previously un-encountered states (in a way that a hurricane may radically restructure a system).  Do such recent developments in ecology as a science, or the realization that we may now be in the Anthropocene present something new for a consideration of environmental ethics.  In particular, can the ascetic gestures that characterized late 20^th C approaches to sustainability that are cast in terms of withdrawal from the world, for instance, as footprint reduction, simple living and so forth (often appropriate as far as they go) be reframed in terms of a more positive engagement with environing world?  Knowing that to be human is to both alter and be altered by the world; can we invent an ethic of engagement? Can be learn, in other words, to be merely as strange as the rest of nature?

A City for Human-clams: a Plea for Environmental Immobility

A young man of my acquaintance, adequately nourished, and provided with a room and a gaming console appears to be sustainable, quite extraordinarily so, in the environmental sense.  He has a small physical footprint.  A few square feet of a pleasantly upholstered couch in an ill-lit room is all that is needed to sustain him.  From this perch he can command vast legions of hobgoblins, medieval warlocks, sport heroes, and assorted heavily-armed movie characters.  He can distract himself for days at a time, emerging from his room very occasionally, like a three-toed sloth, to pad to the latrine.  An army of youth so employed needs little in the way of a great outdoors.   Slightly soiled pajamas, or underpants, it seems, can suffice for clothing.  The nutritional requirements of this battalion extend little beyond sodas and pop-tarts.  In light of this, might it not be wise for us to reverse course, and rather than advocating strenuously, as many of us have, for urban kids to get out of doors to cultivate responsible environmental stewardship, might we not instead council the cultivation of obsessive gameplay, reclassifying it as environmentally laudable behavior?

If we take this pragmatic tack, setting aside our pious feelings about the “old environment” and the worthy pleasures to be found there, it is apparent that there are several tendencies in contemporary life that we might encourage rather than scorn.  We have for too long decried our sedentary natures and the accompanying tendencies towards corpulence of body and spirit.  Bloat a little, rest a little more; you are doing your bit for the environment.  Applaud your small adventures in the great indoors – a peregrination from fridge to sofa will never have felt so good, and the lazy-boy is a fine environmental destination.  Think of the gas saved compared with a trip to Yosemite – no planes, no trains, no automobiles.  Even if your kids might like to romp in the corn fields of some distant rural hinterland, spare yourself the self-laceration.  Quite simply a family ensconced in a moderately appointed metropolitan apartment may well have a smaller environmental cost than a family whizzing around in their so-called mini-van in some suburban Eden.

A back of the envelop calculation shows that the environmental footprint of the immobile is smaller that of one in constant auto-motion.  Whole earths can be saved by merely standing still [1]. 

Sustainability doggerel

A framing term is sustainability

It calls for new forms of quasi- ecological -stability

A course correction to stay within Earth’s ability

To provision justly and equally

With respect for the rights of us all,

And  a love for beings,

  the macro, the meso and the pretty darned small.

Respect both the animate and inanimate!

Remember that all things have a limit…

(Including my ability to rhyme)