Sustainability Discourses

1. Sustainability Discourses • Conceptually linked to the question of obligations/responsibilities to future generations of people. • Since the early 1970s: Often couched in terms of I = PAT. • Since the 1980s: Often couched in terms of sustainable development. • Since the 1990s: Often couched in terms of weak sustainability and strong sustainability. • Today: There are many, many sustainability discourses. Our textbook Green Development: Environment and sustainability in a developing world by W.M. Adams is one attempt to sort through some of these discourses.

2. Obligations to Future Generations:Five Central Problems 1. Ignorance Problem: How can we know what future people will really need and want, what rights they might insist upon, and what they will blame us for doing right and wrong? 2. Typology of Effects Problem: How can we determine which of our actions will really have moral implications for the future? 3. Problem of Intergenerational Trade-Offs: How should a particular generation balance concern for its own moral and prudential concerns with concern for future generations? 4. Distance Problem: How far into the future do our moral obligations extend? 5. Saving Stuff Problem: What should we save for future generations—actual natural resources or monetary investments? This tracks the distinction between strong and weak sustainability.

3. What is development? As cited in Adams (pp. 7-11), development is: • an ambiguous and elusive concept, a Trojan Horse of a word (L. Frank). • a perception which models reality, a myth which comforts societies, and a fantasy which unleashes passions (W. Sachs). • the colonization and enclosure of debate that limits the extent to which alternative futures can be imagined (A. Escobar). • a word used both descriptively to describe what happens in the world as economies, environments, and societies change and normatively to set out what should happen (D. Goulet).

4. And development is: • a duty the United States has to extend foreign aid to “underdeveloped areas” of the world for humanitarian reasons and to prevent communism from expanding (President Harry S. Truman, Inaugural Address, 1949) • a worldview in which the modern West is recreated across the globe by industrialization, urbanization, democracy, and capitalism (G. Aseniero). • a refiner’s fire though which successful societies emerge singed but purified, modern, and affluent as they pass through five stages of economic growth: traditional society, preconditions for take-off, take-off, maturity, and a new age of high mass consumption (W.W. Rostow).

5. The Dilemma of Sustainability • In order to achieve sustainability, development must occur to bring people out of poverty. • In order to achieve sustainability, development must be slowed or halted to protect nonhuman nature.

6. “Feeding People vs. Saving Nature”Holmes Rolston III • If persons widely demonstrate that they value many other worthwhile things over feeding the hungry (Christmas gifts, college educations, symphony concerts), • And if developed countries, to protect what they value, post national boundaries across which the poor may not cross (immigration laws), • And if there is unequal and unjust distribution of wealth, and if just redistribution to alleviate poverty is refused, • And if one-fifth of the world continues to consume four-fifths of the production of goods and four-fifths consumes one-fifth, • And if escalating birthrates continue so that there are no real gains in alleviating poverty, only larger numbers of poor in the next generation, • And if low productivity on domesticated lands continues, and if the natural lands to be sacrificed are likely to be low in productivity, • And if significant natural values are at stake, including extinctions of species, Then one out not always to feed people first, but rather one ought to sometimes save nature.

7. Protecting Nonhuman Nature: Some Problems • Failure to actually protect natural areas because local people exploit natural resources, kill animals and plants, encroach upon habitat, and/or denude or destroy habitat. • Worries that local people will put their own interests above the goal of protecting local natural areas. • Worries that local people will make bad management decisions about how to protect natural areas. • Ironically, attempting to protect natural areas might hasten their demise.

8. “Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environmental and Social Justice”Giovanna Di Chiro: • Traditional environmental groups (TEGs) have focused too heavily on wilderness preservation and protecting endangered species and too little on urban and rural environmental problems. • With their focus on protecting nature (wilderness) and species “out there” in the wild, TEGs have denied human-nature relationships and perpetuated past colonial injustices by alienating people from nature. • TEGs typically advocate top-down nature management at the expense of local communities. • In terms of their leadership and concerns, TEGs have practiced discriminatory environmentalism. Therefore, TEGs have contributed to injustices suffered by marginalized urban and rural peoples.

9. Protecting Nonhuman Nature:Some Problems • Forced removal of local people to create protected areas. • Torture and intimidation of local people to enforce protection policies. • Restricting access of local people to local natural resources. • Excluding local people from participating in decision-making and management of local protected areas.

10. Solving the Dilemma of Sustainability? Subaltern Environmentalism • Focus on livelihood issues: A local community’s struggle to gain access to and control over natural resources to support itself. • Provide critiques of modern, capital-intensive developments that increase export revenues, displace local people and knowledge, and usurp subsistence production. • Combat structural forces that marginalize and subordinate people and that produce environmental degradation.

11. “Caribbean” Barbara Deutsch Lynch The Green and the Brown: International tourism requires a supply of iconic island landscapes; the development community seeks to maintain the renewable resources and ecosystems of the region. Residents worry about natural disasters; urban services; water; pollution from military, mining, and manufacturing activity; the health effects of pesticide-intensive agriculture; urban sprawl; and access to land and resources. The locus of environmental decision making also is contested. (p. 130)

12. “Caribbean”The Green [T]ourism requires “an endless supply of ‘pristine’ beaches, ‘untouched’ coves, and ‘emerald’ pools,” whereas many islands struggle with the water and sewage demands of the hotel industry. Ecotourists want to visit national parks that have lush vegetation, well-marked trails, and folklore displays but are free of local human economic activity. The United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) emphasize biodiversity and forest and coral reef conservation. This preference is reflected in the ornithologist Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2005), which argues in favor of the repressive forest policies of the former Dominican president Joaquin Balaguer, which were condemned by human rights and environmental justice groups. (p. 131)

13. “Caribbean”The Brown In contrast, brown issues such as waste management and pollution often top local agendas…. Real estate markets consign poor people to polluted areas. Pollution is aggravated in countries where cars, busses, and trucks run on dirty petroleum fuels. Land markets also encourage sprawl, which raises the cost of urban services and takes land out of agricultural production, making it harder for families to find affordable food. (p. 132)

14. Discussion • “Protecting Environmentally Sensitive Areas and Promoting Tourism in ‘The Back Patio of the United States:’ Thoughts about Shared Responsibilities in Ecosystem and Biodiversity Protection” by Colin Crawford • “The Rich, the Powerful and the Endangered: Conservation Elites, Networks and the Dominican Republic” by George Holmes • “One Island, Two People, Two Histories: The Dominican Republic and Haiti” by Jared Diamond

15. Colonial District, Santo Domingo

16. El Cercado

17. Who are these guys?