‘After Sustainability: the end of pretending’ – public lecture on 16th September
Published On Mon 8 Sep 2014 by Grant Hill
Philosopher John Foster will visit the University of Dundee this month to argue that it is too late to protect the Earth from climate change and that we are unprepared for the ecological and economic ravages it will bring.
‘After Sustainability: the end of pretending’ takes place on Tuesday, 16th September at the Accountancy Lecture Theatre, 1 Perth Road. In his talk, Foster will describe what he sees as the myth of sustainable development and why a deep-seated attachment to progressivism is hampering attempts to adapt on personal and societal levels.
The lecture is being hosted by the Centre for Environmental Change and Human Resilience (CECHR), a joint initiative between the University of Dundee and the James Hutton Institute.
“Dangerous climate change is coming,” he said. “It has been clear since Copenhagen that the political will to make adequate cuts in global CO2 emissions isn’t going to be generated in the foreseeable future. The international attempt to shift the world by agreement onto a ‘sustainable’ trajectory, always half-hearted, has failed.
“But denial is not confined to those who refuse to see the serious environmental damage we are doing. It extends equally to those who refuse to see that we have missed our chance to stop it. The ruling sustainable development paradigm facilitates both forms of denial, since neither the grip of putative claims on us from the future, nor the predictability of specific long-term harms, is robust enough to act as a genuine constraint on what we want to do or believe now.
“The roots of such embedded denial lie in progressivism. Exorbitant resource consumption is the form in which this mindset has caused environmental damage in the first place. Latterly, it has manifested itself as wilfully self-blinded technological optimism.
“But what if we stopped pretending? Environmentalism is about what is wrong with us here and now, not only what that might mean for the future. Progressivism has provided the impetus for genuine advances in material welfare, so our environmental situation is tragic in the full sense. Tragedy entails losses which can’t be mitigated or compensated, but it can also reveal us to ourselves in ways from which we may be able to learn.
“We can’t really predict what will happen on the ground as global economic and ecological systems unravel. We must build existential as well as economic and social resilience, arming ourselves with recognition, insight and flexibility rather than with plans or blueprints. If we approach what is coming with a realism thus grounded in genuinely non-optimistic life-hope, we may here and there come through it.”
John Foster is a freelance philosophy teacher and writer, and honorary Research Fellow in the department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University. He has published widely on the philosophy of environmentalism, including his 2008 book, ‘The Sustainability Mirage’. A new book, ‘After Sustainability: Denial, Hope, Retrieval’ has just been published.
‘After Sustainability: the end of pretending’ takes place at 4pm on Tuesday, 16th September. The event is free and open to all. More information is available at http://www.dundee.ac.uk/cechr/events/details/john-foster-after-sustainability---the-end-of-pretending.php.
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