Sustainability History Project

I attended the 2011 American Society for Environmental History conference in Phoenix a few days ago. One of the sessions I attended was an interdisciplinary round table discussion, titled “Sustainability and its Discontents.” Political science professor Thomas Princen brought up a number of thought-provoking points that are relevant to our work here with the SHP.

Princen works in the arena of formulating and applying social science frameworks that are future-oriented and normative, so as to devise solutions that will help society avoid catastrophe. He sees “sustainability” as an important, if contentious, concept, on the same level as “peace,” “freedom,” “progress,” and “democracy.” Critics may claim that “sustainability” is meaningless because it can be so vague, but Princen argues that the concept, nevertheless, is essential because it helps frame a constellation of topics and issues that are essential to present and future generations. The concept of sustainability has three key elements, in Princen’s view:

1) Provides a long-term outlook

2) Encourages consideration of systems approach that reflects more accurately the complex interactions between nature and society

3) Is a scalable concept that can be applied from the household level to the global level, and at all points in-between

Princen provided a clear and concise rule-of-thumb that he applies when people bring up “sustainability.” He asks: “sustaining what, for how long, and for whom?”

Princen’s final point involved asking a “dream team” of historians to provide examples to shed light on five areas he finds critical to implementing sustainability measures in the present and future. These are:

1) Sustainable Practices: Are there historical examples of practices that were truly sustainable? How grounded in discernible evidence is the notion of “collapse,” in the sense that Jared Diamond writes about? His understanding is that when empires collapse it’s generally the ruling classes that are thrown into chaos as leadership regimes and economic systems are in flux, but what happens to everyone else in a society when empires collapse?

2) Growth & Limits: Princen finds that modern Western society has a strong taboo against having serious political and intellectual conversations that challenge the notion that the economy should constantly be growing. What is the historical context for the development of this taboo? Has this always been a taboo? If not, how did the taboo come to be–what groups helped bring it about, what ends does this taboo serve?

3) Long-term Thinking: His own experience and work suggests to him that individuals and societies show a complex mixture of both short- and long-term thinking. With such experience, he wonders where the idea came from that humans are, by nature, only short-term thinkers (for example, in Garrett Hardin’s formulation of the “tragedy of the commons”)? What is the history of long-term thinking?

4) Denialism: What are the histories of skepticism, denialism, and resistance to change? What are the roots of these modes of thinking, how have they been applied, and how might they have been manipulated, fostered, or challenged by various political/ideological groups? [I’m reminded here of Robert Proctor‘s work, particularly the book he co-edited with Londa Schiebinger, Agnotology.]

5) Constitutionalism: Princen finds no explicit mention of the environment in the U.S. Constitution, but the environment is mentioned explicitly in some state and other nations’ constitutions [i.e., Ecuador]. What is the history of environmental consciousness as reflected in constitutions and other legal frameworks?

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