Reading time: 5-6 minutes
By Levien van Zon
There many stories on sustainability. However, half of the stories I see seem too optimistic, and the other half too pessimistic. It seems that we’re stuck when it comes to important collective insights. The dominant stories on how humanity should proceed all seem to be somewhat broken. And more crucially, they contradict each other in important ways.
One important way of thinking treats sustainability as mostly a set of technical or behavioural problems. We’ll call this the “ecomodernist” point of view. Then there are ideas on how everything is connected and on how modernity has messed things up. We can think of this as the “antimodernist” or “neo-romantic” point of view. Finally, there are quite a few stories on how we’re all doomed because of climate change, and on how only drastic and immediate action can keep humanity from going extinct soon. We’ll call this “ecopessimism”.
Usually we choose a point of view based on our existing beliefs and our preferences or fears. Ecomodernists mostly rely on science and technology to fix problems. Neo-romantics see a more important role for nature and tradition. Both groups may be overly optimistic about how far their preferred solutions can take us. Ecopessimists point out that there are limits to what we can do and how much resources we can use, and they identify climate change as a serious challenge to human and natural systems. Climate change certainly has the potential to cause much individual suffering. But focusing on fears of collapse may be unhelpful, and may underestimate the flexibility and resilience of natural systems and human societies in the face of difficulties.
There are of course many more and more nuanced views on sustainability than just the three stereotypes of ecomodernists, neo-romantics and ecopessimists. Moreover, we’re able to switch between various viewpoints and beliefs, sometimes very rapidly. But the point of these examples is that stories are important. They largely determine how we see the world and act in it. All stories, however, simplify things, and this can end up blinding us to certain issues. Stories can be seen as models of the world, but they are not merely descriptive. Most stories, whether fiction or nonfiction, are also normative. They don’t just portray the world as it is, they also decsribe how it should be, and how we should get there.
Most books, articles and talks on sustainability talk about “the environment” as something out there. Something that needs to be fixed, protected or saved. Sustainability is often portrayed as mostly a technical problem, or a behavioural one. It certainly has technical aspects, but it’s also very much an issue of values: it’s about how we want to live and what we want for humanity. Because values are always subjective and sometimes short-sighted, it isn’t so easy to say what sustainability should be about. It’s easier to say what it should not be about. The point of sustainability isn’t to continue what we are doing at the moment. Sustainability also isn’t about preventing human extinction. “Not going extinct” is setting the bar a little low, in my opinion. One would hope that we can do better than that. What could we be aiming for instead? My proposal is to aim for continuing and improving the wellbeing of both humans and other life-forms. We should probably also aim to stabilise the material and social bases of our societies.
Stories are lenses through which we see and understand the world. They are about cause and effect and about what is important. Essentially, stories are simple toy-models of the world, or rather of parts of the world. We tend to prefer simple stories over complicated ones, because simple stories make our lives easier. They can specify which categories of things are “good” or “bad”. Simple stories provide a feeling of certainty, and we much prefer certainty over uncertainty and doubt. Also as a group we construct collective stories to give direction to our societies. Yuval Noah Harari calls such stories “shared fictions”. Shared fictions are concepts and stories that we collectively believe in and that therefore, through our collective actions, have real power in the world. They include religions and ideologies, but also things such as money, “the economy” and “human rights”.
Stories help us to understand and navigate the world, but they also blind us to the parts of the world that do not fit the story line. We are usually not aware of the story-lenses through which we view the world, and of their inherent assumptions and limitations. Our stories lead us to collectively focus on certain problems and connected kinds of solutions. An example is the relentless modern focus on “efficiency”. Thinking in terms of efficiency can be useful, and has proven very powerful in shaping the modern world. But making a system more efficient tends to reduce its diversity and its resilience, which almost always causes problems in the long run. Examples of this are not hard to find, for instance in modern agriculture.
Do we really have to choose between technological optimism or environmental pessimism? I think that we can do better, but wishful thinking will be insufficient. Our stories aren’t just explanations and problem solving-tools, they are also meaning-making tools and self protection devices, used by people to feel good about themselves. They help determine what we want, how we want it and what we’re willing to give up. Most people want sustainability, but they also want growth (as a perceived part of “progress”). We prefer “magic bullet” solutions to ones that actually require effort or sacrifice. Unfortunately most of the real problems we face do not require technology or an individual to “save the world”. Instead they require tough choices and hard work done collectively by many people and organisations.
In this series of articles I will look for better stories. I want to find more useful ways of thinking and talking about sustainability. We need to focus less on fears or on wishful thinking and more on solutions that may actually work. Science is one tool that may help us. The neat thing about science is that it provides a toolbox for testing if our explanatory stories are useful, based on observations and experiments. The stories of science are far from perfect, yet they are often the best explanations we have for how the world works. In the next articles we will look at the fairly young science of complex systems. We will also examine some reasons why biological life is so robust that it has managed not just to survive but to flourish, despite great challenges in the past. Perhaps we can learn something from this.
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