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Sustainability paper - Coggle Diagram
Sustainability paper
Language
Scoones (2007) "Future buzzword archaeologies will no doubt trace transmutations, adaptations, and shifts, but, in my view at least, sustainability – and the wider agenda that it inspires – is here to stay."
'human needs' in a pluralistic sense discussed by Seghezzo (2009). How does this intersect with language use? What are our 'needs' within this refrain?
Temporal elements involved in the assemblage of 'doing sustainability' and how we talk about it? See Seghezzo (2009) for 'permanence'.
Continual 'languaging' as opposed to the 'thing' that is language - see Gurney and Demuro (2022) for a reconceptualisation of language as ontological and multiplicious. This is helpful in how it gives a different understanding to how language (and ritornellos as language practices) move and alter through our being with them. This paper also adds weight to the arguments for moving away from traditional linguistics understandings of language to more alternative perspectives and what insights they might offer
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Problem with the dialectic implied in modern thought and the implications on how 'sustainability' is positioned in too-simplistic binary terms
Garoian 2012 explores/documents various arts-based practices that consider discursive routes/issues through climate crisis via Deleuzoguattarian concepts
also provides an interesting example of 'drifting' conversations about climate crisis mitigation/interventions that flip the rhetoric away from humanist 'sustainability' (for ourselves only) to one that moves with the ecology to produce a language or way of speaking that understands our relation to the rest of the earth - we are not separate to but wholly integrated within and in relation to. The artists reported in this paper do this via flipping 'speech acts'
This paper also asks the reader to consider a rhizomatic school curriculum - whilst this is a dream, the reality is that mainstream schooling is so entrenched in neoliberal policy, the Capitalocenic rhetoric of ecology and how the natural world can/should 'serve us' (soooo messed up) is incredibly hard to deterritorialise away from
Reinertsen (2020) posits the need for an "inter-intradisciplinary and/or transcurricular approach to education and sciences for sustainability that harnesses both the benefits from natural science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and those from liberal arts,including the humanities and social science backgrounds."
Bonnett 2019 comes close to my position and asks the same questions about what we are trying to 'sustain'. His long established project agrees with the broadly posthuman position that the dialectic of humanisms understanding in dividing nature and culture is ultimately futile and harmful. He states: "I have explored the idea of the holding
sway in Western culture of a superordinate “metaphysics of mastery” whose ambition is to make all
subject to the human will. I have argued that this—and the scientism that it spawns—are both precisely
the root cause of our current environmental crisis and the chief obstacle to human flourishing: they
alienate us both from nature and our own nature."
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solutions
We need to employ concepts as tools for thought, as there is a lack of thought in the practices that we engage in because language is serving as a refrain - we need to confront the chaos by thinking about it properly maybe. Bonnett also make a case for 'thought' rather than more 'action' that is only ever a temporary fix until it becomes a problem again (see the move from horses to cars to fossil fuel to electric for a good example of this)
"For no matter how pressing in terms of action are the exigencies of our environmental crisis—and they are very pressing—equally pressing is the need to take the time to think properly
in relation to them. Arguably, the most urgent issues are ones of thought, attitude and spirit. For too long
humanity has sought to “deal” with environmental problems by changing the environment rather than
itself, relying on technological “fixes”—either actual or hoped for." Bonnett 2019
Seghezzo's (2009) five dimensions of sustainability as a way to rethink educational practices - also rejects the capitalocenic notion of profit - see end of pg 551
Not settling - changing with the changes. See Crisostomo, Reinertsen, 2021 for a similar idea of a non-dialectical pedagogy
1.1 Intro
The Problem
Background
the earth is not 'natural' now due to human activity and intervention to 'preserve' it (is this in Graoian 2012 as a quote from Bateson or Bottoms?). If this is the case, what exactly are we 'sustaining' in sustainability?
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'sustainable development' as helping us to 'continue human flourishing' was initially/formally defined in 1987 - Bonnett 2019
Antecedents to the current situation, New Sylva Book of Trees on sustainability, and see Bonnett 2019 for nice overview of Modern/Enlightenment scientific thinking that created binary and separation of nature and man
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