In the 1980s almost no one used the term “sustainability.” Today, it is as pervasive in political and economic conversation as billboards are in New Jersey. From elementary school curricula to corporate chief sustainability officers to United Nations commissions — it’s “a dominant foci in the modern world,” William Cronon told a crowd of more than five hundred people gathered for the 40th annual Aiken Lecture at UVM’s Ira Allen Chapel on Nov. 12.

But Cronon, the most prominent environmental historian in the United States, asked the audience: “is sustainability sustainable?”

Drawing on a new book he’s now writing, Cronon’s UVM lecture examined the emergence of this term — from its invention in the 1950s to the way it has reframed global environmental discourse over the last quarter-century. “One of sustainability's greatest attractions is implicitly that we can have our cake and eat it too,” Cronon said.

Unlike some gloomy environmentalist stances that preceded it, Cronon said, much of the post-1980’s conversation around sustainability has claimed that ecological health, economic growth and social equity form a three-legged stool. If they are all given fair consideration, all can be delivered — but the stool will fall if any one is removed.

Sustainability, therefore, holds out a shimmering promise that “we can reinvent our entire culture, our entire political economy, our myriad relationships to nature and resources — without devastating reductions in the standards of living that past environmentalist prophecies have asserted could not be avoided,” Cronon said. “Sustainability seems to promise a kind of politics without conflict.” Step aside Malthus.

But Cronon — the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison — is acutely aware of what the past has to show us. “There's very little evidence in history that that's actually the way politics work,” he said.

Tragic choices

While the discourse of sustainability clings to “a kind of managerial belief in the win-win,” he said, “the most challenging aspects of real politics arise with groups with genuinely different interests and concerns.”

And as Cronon's hugely influential books — including Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England and Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature — each show: when groups with deeply different interests struggle to express their values through collective action, not everyone wins, not all values are honored, not all species are saved. Indeed, the outcome is often a series of tragic choices.

“Sustainability often seems not to recognize those kinds of choices or implies that they can kind of be indefinitely deferred — we can just keep optimizing in the system,” Cronon said. He speculated that this may partially account for the affection many sustainability advocates have for the local scale, “because it's at the local scale that those kinds of accommodations can sometimes most easily be made.”

“Trying to figure out how we scale tragic choices, how we make them, what their politics look like — is one of the dilemmas we continue, and need, to face,” he said.

Dialectical views

Cronon began his talk with a nod to the namesake of the lecture he was giving: Vermont’s celebrated conservation politician, Republican U.S. Sen. George D. Aiken. There was a brief period of bipartisan cooperation in U.S. federal politics — from about 1963 to 1975 — led by Aiken and others that produced much of the environmental legislation still operative today, including the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Cronon noted how that fragile environmental consensus — drawing on an older tradition of conservation — collapsed in recent decades, even as the language of sustainability has taken root from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to the Sierra Club.

Sustainability has come to be a dominant feature of twenty-first century discourse, Cronon said, because it “absorbs [environmentalist] concerns into itself and, if anything, leans harder into the older more bipartisan concerns of that movement,” Cronon said. “It resolved tensions within environmentalism by redirecting advocates towards questions of social justice and economic viability.”

On one hand, Cronon expressed deep skepticism about the most expansive claims of sustainability: that it's possible to manage our way toward a human future that is stable, and that “once we've remade human society, once we've shed our unsustainable lifestyles, what lies on the other side will be a genuinely sustainable human society, benign in its relationship to the environment, prosperous in its economy.”

“Any historian, I think, has to be skeptical about that kind of claim,” he said, “which looks utopian.”

On the other hand, Cronon concluded his Aiken Lecture — hosted by UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources — with a meditation on the power of sustainability. Through it, some of the “weakness of environmentalism has been replaced by a sense of empowerment and hope,” he said. At the emotional core of the term sustainability, Cronon suggested, is a belief that “we can make a difference. We can change the world,” he said, and “grapple with these terrifying, enormous challenges that lie ahead of us.”

“How do we make that hope real,” William Cronon asked the hushed crowd, “how do we make the hope sustainable? That's the central riddle of sustainability.”

PUBLISHED

11-18-2015
Joshua E. Brown
Google Ngram
Google’s Ngram Viewer tells a story about the explosive rise of the word “sustainability,” William Cronon said.