http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opinion/against-sustainability.html?_r=0

refreshing a rýpaci pohlad


When we talk about sustainability, then, what is it that we hope to sustain? We certainly do not sustain nature “in itself.” Rather, we sustain nature as we humans prefer it. More precisely, we preserve the resources needed for human consumption, whether that means energy consumption or aesthetic consumption. In one sense, we preserve nature for industry.

As the ecological theorist Timothy Morton writes in his book “Ecology Without Nature,” the environmental movement has become, and perhaps always was, infused with a sense of mourning and melancholia (not to mention nostalgia). This melancholia, I would argue, is connected to the death of God, or the ability to conceive God in a certain way, and stems from that Romantic transference of the divine into nature.

In either case, as with any death, first comes denial — we can save nature! — but it eventually gives way to acceptance. Talk about “sustaining” nature, or “preserving” it, only exacerbates this mourning and indulges our melancholia.

Instead of sustainability, we should instead speak of adaptability, a term that skews away from the idea of a perfect, ordered nature and unchanging industrial-technological conditions, and favors a vision of nature in a state of constant change, even chaos; a vision that values difference and diversity, both biological and cultural. Perhaps this revised language will allow us to see the planet not as a video-game landscape, programmed by God, that we’ve been dropped into and can either preserve or destroy, but as a bustling world of colleagues, both human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, over whom we have influence, but who also influence us.