Cultures of Transition and Sustainability

Culture after Capitalism

John Clammer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137532220
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137520333
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

Contending that culture lies at the root of our current planetary and civilizational crisis, this book uniquely explores the nature of the specifically cultural dimensions of that crisis and how culture relates to the areas of politics, policy, economics, ecology and the whole discourse of sustainability. It debates how profoundly our world is shaped by capitalist culture, emphasizing the import of political culture and policy, social justice, leadership and community in the shaping of a new cultural sustainability. It also reintroduces questions of religion, art, citizenship and comparative culture into the sustainability debate and suggests ways in which the central issue of consumer culture can be rethought and others in which socially satisfactory transitions to a sustainable future might be achieved. Addressing the specific role of culture in our crisis and of how to build cultural resources for transition, this cutting edge text provides the reader with an introduction to the literature on culture and sustainability, and both practical and theoretical tools for creating and advancing a humane and ecologically responsible future.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

John ClammerCultures of Transition and Sustainability10.1057/978-1-137-52033-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Cultural and Civilizational Roots of Our Planetary Crisis

John Clammer¹

(1)

United Nations University, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan

End Abstract

Few would deny that our planet is in crisis. While problems have occurred in the past and no doubt have done so throughout both planetary history and the shorter history of human civilization, the present conjunction of issues is unique, both in the sense of their potentially terminal nature (the real possibility of destroying much of the life on Earth and with it human society as we now understand it) and in the convergence of problems that were formerly separate or occurred in spatially or temporally distinct spheres, but now occur together. The list is familiar and depressing: climate change and global warming with its huge potential to fundamentally disrupt agriculture, weather patterns, the habitability of large areas of the globe and to be the source of an increasing number of “natural” disasters (although the causes are human induced) and environmental refugees. Conflict and war rage across much of the planet and with terrorism reaching its tentacles even into the previously most “secure” countries, territories and social groups. Huge biodiversity loss and ecological destruction, with its unknown consequences for eco-systems and through them to health, food, and other vital indicators for sustainable human life, is rampant and we seem to be in one of the tragic periods of mass extinctions, but this time induced by humans and our activities. Resource depletion—not only of oil, but even more significantly for life, if not for industrial civilization, of water is now a basic determinant of international politics. The militarization of the globe and the consequent obscene expenditure on weapons and the technology of destruction and the very real possibility of a new arms race leading ultimately to international conflict continue despite the need for resources for genuine and human centered development. Unfair and unequal trade continues and expands on what is anything but a level playing field. The persistence and in some cases even expansion of hugely unacceptable levels of poverty is a planetary scandal given our levels of technology and know-how. So the sad list goes on, and most of us could add other candidates: continuing gender discrimination, racism, corruption, biased and unjust legal systems, failed states, homelessness, unemployment, caste-ism and other forms of socially approved methods of social exclusion, domestic violence, rape and sexual crime, and indeed crime in general and its ever newer forms including cyber-crime, trans-border human trafficking, drug trafficking, illegal (or legal) trade in small arms, the rise of intolerant forms of religious fundamentalism and no doubt yet other “social problems” both local and global.

Taken together, these all point to the irrefutable fact that we have deeply and possibly irredeemably fouled our own nest. Our beautiful, fertile and probably the only inhabited planet in our solar system or beyond (and the only one, except in science fiction fantasies, that we have to live on) we have systematically trashed and turned into what is rapidly becoming an ecological desert, a universal war zone, a place of vast and unnecessary social inequalities, injustices and patterns of exclusion from the common goods that the Earth makes available to all of us and a place of deep insecurity. This insecurity is fueled by induced patterns of “social change”—urbanization and its often consequent loss of social ties, the loneliness and social isolation of the increasing number of elderly in many societies, changes in family structures, rising individualism with the freedom that it brings, but with costs, and our often narcissistic absorption in new technologies that while they may create “virtual” relationships, rarely create real ones.

These facts are not entirely lost of course on the world, and an increasing chorus of voices from the scientific community, civil society, victims, concerned social scientists, practitioners of “alternative” agriculture, medicine, education and lifestyles, a huge range of social movements, artists, “development” agencies within the UN system and in some governments, universities, anti-globalization activists, individual authors and in a few cases even businesses have begun to name and discuss possible solutions to this devastating situation. Paul Hawken, in his book on what he describes as “the largest social movement in history” identifies and provides links to some of the hundreds of thousands of organizations working towards ecological sustainability and social justice (Hawken 2008). This expanding response to the planetary crisis falls into several categories. There is of course the rapidly growing scientific literature emerging from ecology, Earth sciences, meteorology, and such inter-disciplinary committees such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and parallel to it an equally fast-growing literature on “sustainability”, much of it building on the earlier work of documents such as the document of the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development—the so-called “Brundtland Report” after its chairwoman (WCED 1987)—that first introduced the concept into the wider discourse, especially as it applied to the notion of ‘development’ and where current patterns of such development were taking us. The thrust of the first category is generally ecological, and of the second largely the relationship between ecology and economy (especially economic growth). Another category consists of the “end of civilization” theorists, ranging from those predicting complete social and ecological breakdown (for example Vacca 1974) to voices arguing that unless we radically change direction, we will indeed face the end of human life on the Earth as we have hitherto experienced it (Rees 2004, Oreskes and Conway 2014), and those who suggest that on the basis of the historical study of past civilizations that have collapsed, the reasons were mainly ecological, combined with the frightening fact that those societies knew that they were heading for disaster, but had no political will to change direction, maintaining a “business as usual” path until their eventual and all-too predictable collapse (Diamond 2005). Yet another, and one significant for the theme of this book, is the “Transition Movement”—the movement that began in a small town in Southwest England and has since spread into an international one concerned with the numerous issues that will arise from the transition from an oil-based society to one based on alternative forms of energy, as we pass the point of “peak oil” and the essential source of energy and manufacturing in our carbon-based industrial economy begins to decline in availability or economic viability of extraction (Hopkins 2008).

What all of these approaches lack however is a systematic discussion of culture: the very real possibility (or certainty) that it is our civilization so-called that has got us into this mess is the first place. Our addiction to consumption, treating of the natural world simply as a “resource” for exploitation, our highly inefficient, polluting and congesting transport systems (mainly the car, but increasingly air travel and sea-transport of goods too), our almost instinctive tendency to turn to violence as the “solution” to political problems and then our unwillingness to accept responsibility for the refugees and victims generated by our war-making, the huge distortions in our economies devoted to weapons and the endless production of yet more unnecessary products, while never having “enough” to pay for welfare, education, universal health coverage for citizens, or the special needs of special needs people, and our eagerness to impose the same dysfunctional model on the rest of the world in the name of “development” or “aid”. It is to the discussion of this neglected dimension of culture that this book is dedicated, not so much as critique (although of necessity there is an element of that), but as an exploration of how culture may be seen as an essential component of sustainability and any successful transition to a peaceful post-oil and possibly post-capitalist society, and how a sustainable culture might be envisioned, since a cogent argument can be made that our current one (that of the ‘developed’ West, Japan and the rapidly expanding middle-classes of the rest of the world) is not sustainable and cannot create an equitable world for future generations.

The Meaning of Sustainability

The notion of “sustainability” has become one of the buzz-words of our generation. And rightly so in many ways—without sustainability in its most obvious senses, we do not have a future: an “unsustainable future” is a contradiction in terms. But in order to understand better how the concept might apply to cultural futures we need to unpack a little its history and semantics. A large and proliferating literature now exists (for a good survey and extensive bibliography see Robertson 2014). But the sources of the idea and its almost total neglect of the cultural dimension can quickly be traced. It is significant that in the well over 600 sources cited in the Robertson book, only two, if one excludes works on product design, architecture and urban planning, relate to culture (for a relatively rare exception see Kagan and Kirchberg 2008).

There are (as of course with many concepts in the social sciences) some immediate problems, and perhaps two major ones with the idea of ‘sustainability’. The first is definitional. The well known definition of the Brundtland commission is the much quoted one that “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. But this begs certain questions such as whether the notions of sustainability and development are compatible or whether indeed the idea of “sustainable development” is a self-contradictory idea, and whether we can know the needs of future generations, especially those distant in time from us. The second is measurement. How can we know that any given practice is “sustainable”? How long is our time frame here, and by what criteria are we measuring now the success of any practice claiming to be sustainable? What in other words are the indicators of sustainability? (Bell and Morse 2008, Bennett et al. 1999, Hart 2006). The sources of the idea of sustainability are not hard to see: growing realization of the environmentally destructive outcomes of the industrial based growth model which had prevailed for so long, declining essential natural resources such as oil, water and rare earths, declining agricultural productivity with overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and top-soil loss, deforestation, declining fisheries, and rising populations and accompanying consumption. At the same time there appeared to be an impasse in development theory, with Marxist derived ideas in decline, the perceived bankruptcy of the modernization model (itself seen as one of the causes of the problems now confronting the world community), and anti-development voices on the rise, promoting the not unreasonable position that it was “development” itself that was at the root of our contemporary crisis (Sachs 1995). Notions of going beyond growth to a steady-state economy were already in circulation, for example in the work of Ernst Schumacher in his now classic book Small is Beautiful (Schumacher 1979), and in the ideas of such unconventional economists as Hazel Henderson (1978, 1988) and Herman Daly (1973) together with ideas of alternative development of many kinds inspired by these ideas and in particular ones arising from an environmental critique of conventional development and industrialization and the social consequences of globalization. In fact the 1970s and 1980s were an exceptionally fertile period for such ideas, corresponding to the general cultural ferment of those decades and the preceding one, impacting areas as diverse as music, fashion, anti-war movements, New Age thinking, the growing attraction of Asian religions (especially Buddhism) in the West, and profound shifts in social values signaled and fueled by the writings of authors such as Theodore Roszak (e.g. Roszak 1973) with their message of the creation of a counter culture to the prevailing militarist, industrialist and culturally oppressive mainstream.

Significantly too, when the World Commission on Environment and Development issued its report, it identified six core issues—population, food security, ecosystems and biodiversity, energy, industry and urbanization, but nothing at all about social or cultural aspects of sustainability. This is true of the solutions proposed—democratic political systems, an economic system that can deal with the tensions arising from development itself, a production system that is ecologically responsible, a technological system that fosters sustainable patterns of trade and finance, and an international system that does the same, together with administrative systems that are flexible and can learn from experience. While these all imply a social and cultural dimension, none are specifically identified in the report. But in fact any comprehensive approach to development must recognize that it is a multi-disciplinary field that requires holistic thinking, since all its elements—poverty, environment, resources, migration, urbanization, gender and patterns of inequality, health issues and so forth—are all inter-related. Such holistic thinking has begun to slowly emerge (for example in the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002), but again with little or no reference to culture, either as a means of promoting sustainability, or as a key element of sustainability. The argument being advanced here is that all the specific dimensions of sustainable practice so far identified—such as use of renewable energy sources, re-cycling, low-carbon and zero-waste societies, localization strategies, alternative forms of transportation and so on—all have deeply cultural characteristics since all require behavioral changes and involve re-orientations of notions of self, relationships, daily life style decisions, travel patterns, and such obviously cultural processes such as clothing choices, food habits, entertainment patterns and even religious thinking, as with the rise of various forms of eco-spirituality as alternatives or supplements to more traditional religious observances and practices.

So too do many of the suggested solutions—participation, democratization, empowerment, localism, grass-roots development, the activation of social movements, drawing on indigenous knowledge for example. In fact these are all profoundly socio-cultural in nature and require quite significant shifts in cultural attitudes and values to make them work. In short: there can be no sustainability without cultural transformation. In many ways the notion of sustainability is more of a moral principle, a question of values, than it is a precise program or definition, it is one that requires the re-ordering of commitments and priorities. This was recognized a decade before the Brundtland report, in a document published by the Dag Hammerskjöld Institute (1975) in which it was argued that development means the development of people, not just the increase in the number of things, and that, while it should certainly aim first to meet the basic needs of the poor, should lead ultimately to the “humanization” of people by fulfilling their essential needs for expression, creativity, conviviality and control over their own affairs, and as such must be endogenous and self-reliant, be in harmony with the environment, and requires deep social as well as economic transformations. These are all good ideas, but their realization also requires major changes in current attitudes, not only structural changes in the global economy, but challenging such dominant paradigms as the growth model, techo-centrism and its assumption that more or better technology is the solution to our problems, the ways in which we measure progress through such indicators as GNP, consumerism, and implies fundamental shifts in our relationship to nature, our concepts of true wealth, our political priorities, our educational systems, and our measurement of “status” and the bizarre lengths that many of us are prepared to go to in achieving what society currently defines as “success”.

All this requires a number of things: the expansion of our social imaginations, positive visions, understanding of the psychology of change, a willingness to reorder our political short-term thinking, and a willingness to confront the difficulties of making the transition from where we are now to a truly sustainable future. Sustainability is not an end point or even a steady-state: it is a process, a goal that we seek but which is always receding, and is as much a matter of values and cultural reorientation. It is essentially a “utopian” concept, and no worse for being that, for in our current situation the very desire to create a humane and ecologically just society where the quality of life rather than its quantity is the goal, is the force that attrac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. The Cultural and Civilizational Roots of Our Planetary Crisis
• 2. Culture in Crisis
• 3. Cultural Resources for Sustainability
• 4. Culture and Economy: Rethinking the Relationship
• 5. Transforming Political Cultures
• 6. Sustainability, Cultural Citizenship and the Ecological Self
• 7. Rethinking Sustainability
• 8. Cultural Futures: Getting There From Here
• Backmatter