Sustainability History Project

[This post was written by Sara Scott, Sarah Griswold, and Jamie Price, and complements previous students’ analysis of the question What is Sustainability?]

Environmentalism and sustainability is a very polarizing topic. There is no shortage of literature and media supporting sustainability. That being said, one has to dig a little deeper to discover literature, or other forms of media, that argue against it. In this day and age, it seems very ‘politically incorrect,’ and even risqué, to voice opinions arguing against sustainability. Today, we will discuss two articles that critique our societal concepts of sustainability and environmentalism. The articles that we will discuss are, “Roots of Sustainability” by Glenn M. Ricketts and “Is Sustainability Sustainable?” by Daniel Bonevac.[1]

Ricketts’ article is an historical perspective of how environmentalism and sustainability grew in American culture. Daniel Bonevac’s article is a philosophical attempt to define sustainability based on our society’s various definitions. Both articles critique the concept of sustainability from two very different approaches.

Ricketts began his article by discussing the environmental movements of the 1960s. Specifically, how the public became aware of the harmful effects of DDT spraying on our food and in our environment. From there, fear tactics became a norm in our society as a method to make people aware of what we were doing to our environment. As environmentalism gained momentum and popularity, different sub-groups started to emerge stressing their various movements. Ricketts argues that these sub-groups ‘watered-down’ environmentalism and kept the environmentalist movement, as a whole, unorganized. Ricketts also argues that, through the course of history, more and more groups with increasingly specific agendas emerged using environmentalism to serve their own interests. At the present time, sustainability has engrained itself in our culture and some people have even taken it to the extreme where it has almost become a religion. These groups of people have such a passionate stance on environmentalism that they dismiss any person or group that argues against their beliefs.

Bonevac’s approach is quite different from Ricketts’ in that he has a more philosophical point of view. Some of the key issues discussed in his article are that resources are finite and that to deny people the ability to prosper from these finite resources is pointless. Bonevac argues that sustainability cannot last forever because eventually the sun will go supernova. Even though Bonevac’s view may seem very pessimistic, that does not mean that we cannot, or should not, think about sustainable actions for the near future. In order to think in terms of sustainability, we must project only into the near future; we cannot predict our resources further than roughly 150 years. “’[T]he long run’ must be restricted to … a century or two, at most.”[2]

Both articles may come off as a little extreme, but there are points in each that are difficult to argue against. It is also very important, in scientific terms, constantly to question our society’s policies and views pertaining to sustainability. If we do not question it, how can we advance as a society? Even if we cannot be truly sustainable forever, by definition, it is our job, as humans and stewards of the planet, to strive for a sustainable present and near future.

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[1] Glenn M. Ricketts, “The Roots of Sustainability,” Academic Questions 23:1 (2010), 84-101; Daniel Bonevac, “Is Sustainability Sustainable?” Academic Questions 23:1 (2010), 20-53.

[2] Bonevac, “Is Sustainability Sustainable?” 87.

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