Sustainability as a Problem of Culture and Meaning: On the Role of Anthropology in Addressing the Central Challenge of the 21st Century
Sustainability as a Problem of Culture and Meaning: On the Role of Anthropology in Addressing the Central Challenge of the 21st Century

Summary/Abstract: "External shocks such as meteor strikes have led to rare mass extinctions events in the past. The “external” shock faced by life on Earth in this Anthropocene era, however, is unsustainable human ecologies. Human ecologies are clusters of local cultural narrative constructs and regulated practices that determine how we interact with local natural environments. The sustainability crisis we face today is thus not an ecological but a cultural crisis. Societies around the globe have adopted a flawed way living in relation to nature, a modernist and neoliberal capitalist human ecology that cannot be sustained. Consequently, the Human Development Index shows that the more developed a country is, the larger is also its environmental footprint. The development model we are applying is itself the problem.Today’s human ecologies are based on a model of industrialisation that originated in 18th century western Europe but has now reached almost every corner of the planet. In this paper I discuss the basic flaws of such modernist-industrialist human ecologies, and compare them with pre-industrial and sustainable ecologies that anthropologist have often studied. Anthropological research shows that human societies have been sustainable for most of our history as a species.While we cannot return to the past, there is much we can learn from the sustainable ways of life of our ancestors and of indigenous and local peoples that still retain sustainable ways of life. But the key to such learning is to understand first why traditional ecologies are less destructive. What forms of cultural meaning encourage people to live sustainably? It turns out that at the heart of the modernist industrialist ecology and general perspective on life lies a spiritual poverty, a sense of a disenchanted and meaningless world that arose in the wake of the scientific revolution from the Renaissance onward. Nihilistic, conventional science-based management of ecosystems therefore does not lend itself to conservation of nature as an end in itself. I argue that we need to instil human ecologies around the world with a new cosmological understanding of our place and purpose within nature, not as masters of an ‘external’ universe but as custodians of a living whole to which we inseparably belong."

• Details
• Contents