Bringing the word sustainability back from the brink of
cliché—to a substantive, truly sustainable future
Is sustainability a hopelessly vague word, with meager purpose
aside from a feel-good appeal to the consumer? In The Three
Sustainabilities, Allan Stoekl seeks to (re)valorize the word, for
a simple reason: it is useful. Sustainability designates objects in
time, their birth or genesis, their consistency, their survival,
their demise. And it raises the question, as no other word does, of
the role of humans in the survival of a world that is quickly
disappearing—and perhaps in the genesis of another world.
Stoekl considers a range of possibilities for the word, touching
upon questions of object ontology, psychoanalysis, urban critique,
technocracy, and religion. He argues that there are three varieties
of sustainability, seen from philosophical, cultural, and economic
perspectives. One involves the self-sustaining world “without
us”; another, the world under our control, which can run the
political spectrum from corporatism to Marxism to the Green New
Deal; and a third that carries a social and communitarian charge,
an energy of the “universe” affirmed through, among other
things, meditation and gifting. Each of these carves out a
different space in the relations between objects, humans, and their
survival and degradation. Each is necessary, unavoidable, and
intimately bound with, and infinitely distant from, the others.
Along the way, Stoekl cites a wide range of authors, from
philosophers to social thinkers, literary theorists to
criminologists, anthropologists to novelists. This beautifully
written, compelling, and nuanced book is a must for anyone
interested in questions of ecology, energy, the environmental
humanities, contemporary theories of the object, postmodern and
posthuman aesthetics, or religion and the sacred in relation to
community.
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