Indigenous Lessons about Sustainability Are Not Just for “All Humanity”

Indigenous peoples are widely recognized as holding insights or lessons about how the rest of humanity can live sustainably or resiliently. Yet it is rarely acknowledged in many literatures that for Indigenous peoples living in the context of settler states such as the U.S. or New Zealand, our own efforts to sustain our peoples rest heavily on our capacities to resist settler colonial oppression. Indigenous planning refers to a set of concepts and practices through which many Indigenous peoples reflect critically on sustainability to derive lessons about what actions reinforce Indigenous self-determination and resist settler colonial oppression. The work of the Sustainable Development Institute of the College of Menominee Nation (SDI) is one case of Indigenous planning. In the context of SDI, we discuss Indigenous planning as a process of interpreting lessons from our own pasts and making practical plans for staging our own futures. If there are such things as Indigenous sustainability lessons for Indigenous peoples, they must be reliable planning concepts and processes we can use to support our continuance in the face of ongoing settler colonial oppression.

Equality in the Air We Breathe

This chapter brings an interdisciplinary and social justice perspective to the concept and practices of "sustainability" by foregrounding the work of anti-racist struggles in U.S. cities, like Black Lives Matter. It asserts that anti-racist struggles have always been struggles about life-sustaining environments, at least as "the environment" is defined by the environmental justice movement as the place where people "live, work, and play. It suggests an alternative notion of sustainability, as it has long been theorized by and lived through black and brown lives, focusing on breath and breathing as an intimate geography of race and toxic exposure. In so doing it contributes to the challenge to sustainability practitioners to rethink their ideologies and practices through a politics of difference.

Man Destroys Nature?

This essay takes up one particular iteration of sustainability discourse, rooted in the American environmentalist tradition: seeing “man,” writ large, as an undifferentiated and usually malevolent force affecting “nature.” While this is but one strand of environmental thought, it is important (and, clearly, enduring). Here, I use this “man destroys nature” framework as a foil for this particular strand of environmental thought. That we often talk about environmental decline as a one-way street, from man to nature, reflects larger problems in how sustainability and justice are imagined. The fields of environmental feminism, environmental history, and environmental justice studies give us the tools to destabilize declensionist environmental narratives, thinking more critically about “man,” “nature,” and “destruction.” I outline key themes and contributions in these fields that offer new insights into how we can understand the complex milieu of our human relationships to the non-human world. What these fields suggest to us is that sustainabilities, like feminist epistemology, must be situated in contingent and intersectional environmental knowledge and experience.

Situating Sustainability in the Luxury City

This chapter seeks to situate sustainability within particular epistemological fields and communities in order to understand the growing contentiousness between rival versions of the concept. Focusing on the famously green yet increasingly unaffordable 'luxury city' of San Francisco Bay Area, it explores how these epistemological formations are quite literally 'situated' geographically, shaped by and shaping of the places, communities, social relations and political ecologies in which they emerge. It argues that as investments into greening are increasingly designed to serve powerful economic actors in aspiring global cities and regions like San Francisco, prevailing, historically and culturally rooted understandings of sustainability are often reframed and redefined in a more instrumentalist, market-oriented direction. The latter approach comes into conflict with classic understandings of the “3 E’s” of sustainability—in which economic concerns are balanced with and equal to those of equity and ecology. And they pose fundamental questions about what and how environmental justice politics are to be practiced today. The chapter aims to contribute to such emergent politics and scholarship by advancing a critical approach to "sustainability" that takes seriously the role of power, place, and history in shaping our use of the term.

Afterword

This afterword discusses the need to move toward analyses of just/ unjust sustainability to just resilience. To better move towards robust and just sustainability, we need a better vocabulary and analytic to not only diagnose problems, but also to understand how their efforts replicate existing epistemological and political problems. To better dislodge inequality, sustainability advocates require better tools, rather than re-using poor ones or tinkering around the edges of systems on the verge of collapse.

I Tano’ i Chamorro/Chamorro Land

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Defense announced its intention to drastically increase their military presence on the island of Guam. Although this “military buildup” was predicted to cause severe damage to the island in environmental, social and economic terms, discourse from island leaders and media reports focused primarily on this increase as being the key to future “sustainability” for the island. This chapter argues that the notion of the military build-up as being “sustainable” was tied to historical militarization and colonization of the indigenous Chamorro people of the western Pacific over centuries, during which the United States has been elevated to the stature of a liberator and socioeconomic savior. This chapter surveys the scholarly literature on the effects of U.S. military "Draft Environmental Impact Statements" on indigenous populations, with particular regard to effects on the indigenous Chamorro people. This chapter also discusses the ways in which demilitarization and decolonization activists from local indigenous Chamorro groups such as Nasion Chamoru used the public comment period for the U.S. military’s plans in order to disrupt the fantasy of the build-up’s sustainability and help the local community develop a more critical position in relation to the military's own stated environmental impacts.

Situating Sustainability from an Ecological Science Perspective

The concept of sustainability has three dimensions—metaphor, meaning, and model. As a metaphor, sustainability conjures up images of healthy environments, socially cohesive communities, and persistent economies. Sustainability, however, must move beyond metaphor and towards a clear meaning. Sustainability is defined using three theoretical realms from ecology - ecosystem services, resilience, and environmental justice. This meaning of sustainability is operationalized into models by specifying particular components of a system, how those components are related to each other and how they interact. Models must be situated in time, space, place and motivation and indices or benchmarks must be established so that progress towards specified goals can be measured. This chapter explores the three dimensions of sustainability using the Chesapeake Bay as a case study.

Situating Urban Drought Resilience

Cities around the world are experiencing greater water stress as the result of growing urban populations, increasing per capita wealth (and water use), and climate change. This chapter examines the concept urban drought resilience. The central hypothesis of this chapter is that the resilience of cites to future droughts can be understood based on socio-ecological characteristics, including biophysical, economic, and social factors. I hypothesize that resilience to urban drought can be predicted by the antecedent hydrologic condition, the polycentric aspects of governance, and the capacity of governance, both to provide feedback for adaptation and to respond. I propose a research agenda to understand urban drought resilience and to create tools that cities can use to increase this resilience. Among these are actionable metrics of urban drought resilience, analogous to widely used economic metrics used by governments to manage economic conditions, including metrics of equity as well as system-level metrics of hydrologic condition.

Situating New Constellations of Practice in the Humanities

What forms will sustainability research that integrates the humanities take? This chapter seeks to explore this question. Adamson provides a brief field genealogy of the environmental humanities and situates this emerging field within a deepening critical engagement with the concepts of “sustainability” and “sustainable development” that has been taking shape since the publication of “The Future we Want,” the outcome document of the 2012 Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, and “On Care for Our Common Home: Laudato Si´,” the encyclical published in advance of the 2015 Paris Climate talks by Pope Francis of the Catholic Church. She then evaluates an ambitious humanities project emerging from calls at the international levels for more equity- and justice-focused definitions of sustainability. Titled “Humanities for the Environment,” or HfE, this project is designed to explore the roots and consequences of human caused change in the Anthropocene, or Age of the Human. Choosing the term “Observatory” as the formal mechanism they will use to network researchers, institutions, communities, NGOs, HfE projects are designed to align with other global scientific research projects, platforms and initiatives by evoking a sense of a humanities “laboratory” or “research space” where HfE researchers pilot new constellations of practice within the humanities and new forms of collaboration with the sustainability sciences. Adamson evaluates three HfE projects that bring humanists, scientists, policy-makers, and local communities together to creatively work for a more just and sustainable “future we want.”

Introduction

Sustainability and social justice remain elusive, even as it has become increasingly clear that each is unattainable without the other. Unsustainable practices diminish social justice: the effects of animal extinctions, toxic waste, and air pollution alike have fallen disproportionately on the poor. Meanwhile, efforts at achieving sustainability in the industrialized West and Global South have often aggravated social inequities, such as when indigenous people have been displaced to create wildlife or natural reserves or when governments have mandated expensive new environmental management technologies that exacerbate the burden of the poor. One result is that sustainability is sometimes perceived as an elite, technologically driven project in an increasingly diverse world, and opposition to environmental reform finds a solid footing among the expanding ranks of the world’s working and impoverished peoples. This book seeks to answer some of the contemporary challenges facing sustainability from a social science perspective.