Reflections on “Actually Existing Sustainability”

This chapter is a cautiously critical assessment of “sustainability.” The topic is timely, and appropriate here, because this idea—and its many associated practices—are quite highly regarded today, as this volume on Global Ethics for the 21st Century illustrates. This chapter will discuss the inherent contradictions of sustainability, and then illustrate how this idea has spread with greater economic growth. It then explores the different conflicted understandings of sustainability over time and in different settings. Finally, it concludes that ecological sustainability is about upholding economic development in most contemporary policy arenas. The thesis is relatively simple: irony and contradiction are characteristic qualities of all formal diplomatic agendas and hard-won policy designs to implement ethical change. What might appear as advances in global ethics to make progress toward developing more responsible paths toward sustainability also can serve, in large part, misleading narratives for sustaining older irresponsible developments.