What do the Humanities have to say about sustainability?

“What genius thought that up?”  I told a friend I was going to spend the summer in Arizona, and she looked at me with pity.  When I said we’d be studying sustainability, her expression changed to disbelief.  Sustainability? In a state known for air-conditioned urban sprawl, golf courses in the desert and punitive immigration politics?  But Flagstaff, where I spent four weeks, is nestled in the San Francisco mountains, shaded by Ponderosa pine forest and watered by monsoon rains in mid-July. While Phoenix was being blasted by a 50-ft wall of dust termed a haboob, Flag’--as the locals fondly call it--was windy and cool, rocked mainly by the freight trains that lumbered through downtown with startling frequency.   At dinner one night we counted eight, going east and west; a trackside bar advertised “train shots” for $1 a piece.  

We were there for “Rethinking the Land Ethic,” a National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored seminar exploring “Sustainability and the Humanities.”  Convened by two professors from Arizona State University, Joan MacGregor (Philosophy) and Dan Shilling (formerly Director of the Arizona Humanities Council, now in ASU’s English Department), the seminar centered on the work of Aldo Leopold--forester, ecologist, co-founder of the Wilderness Society, author of A Sand County Almanac--whose most influential essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” is set in Arizona.  Twenty-four of us--philosophers, historians, literary scholars, cultural geographers, architects and one art-historian from New York--gathered on the campus of Northern Arizona University (home of the Fighting Lumberjacks) to ponder how our disciplinary puzzle-pieces might fit together to illuminate Leopold’s vision of “biotic community:” “a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”

A Sand County Almanac was published in 1949, posthumously.  Leopold didn’t live to see the Interstate Highway System or the Apollo program, Earth Day or the Endangered Species Act.  His writing--meditative, lyrical, keenly observed--has a melancholy edge and a slight tinge of sepia; the Dust Bowl and the New Deal cast their shadow over his views on conservation.  But the problems he addressed are as urgent as ever, the contours of ecologically-responsible citizenship no easier to discern.   The perennial dramas of the Southwestern landscape--drought, wildfire, dust-storm, sun and stone--sharpened our sense of the challenges of sustainability, and the resonance of key Leopoldian themes.  

For four weeks, then, we explored strategies for activating Aldo Leopold’s legacy, in dialogue with scholars who have opened up significant dimensions of the land ethic.  Julianne Lutz Warren, whose book, Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey, provides a richly-textured picture of Leopold’s intellectual development, framed sustainability in the context of utopian literature and delivered a poignant meditation on the question of hope, via readings of John Burroughs, Edward Bellamy, Bill McKibben and Cormac MacCarthy.   In an intricate demonstration of how land ethics are folded into the practices of indigenous peoples, Acoma Pueblo writer Simon Ortiz counterpointed poetry from his collection Woven Stone with Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony.  The University of Florida’s Bron Taylor, editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, traced his conception of “dark green religion”--experiences of a quasi-sacralized nature--from the Rio Earth Summit to the ocean waves of Malibu.  Finally, philosopher Bryan G. Norton drew some explicit connections between Leopold’s work and current practices of “adaptive ecosystem management,” informed equally by experiences with the EPA and an analysis of Deweyan pragmatism, with his magisterial Sustainability (2005) serving as a touchstone for recurrent debates.  

Literature, history, religious studies, philosophy:  ostensibly four distinct modes of mapping the humanities onto the terrain of sustainability, in practice overlapping and complementary strategies of inquiry and analysis.  Sustainability is a planning concept, most at home where the policy sciences meet ecological systems theory, and--as my skeptical friend observed--it is hardly promising terrain for humanists.  But how can we save what’s important, Bryan Norton shrewdly remarked, if we don’t understand what’s important? if we lack the language for discussing values and commitments, ways of life and visions of community?  Reflecting on time spent as a philosopher-in-residence at the EPA, Norton was struck by how difficult it is for policy discourse to incorporate what policy analysts and citizens know intuitively to be true: that places matter, that people care about where they live, that their relations to the natural world are meaningful and a source of strength and hope.  Such commitments often come to the fore only when life-contexts are threatened, and then, pressured by fear, sometimes give rise to attitudes of resentment and strategies of exclusion.  

The humanities are not going to save the world.  Indeed,  it’s just as likely that students will emerge from our classes skeptical of the idea that the world can (or should) be saved. (“All things that exist,” says  Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust “deserve to perish, and would not be missed”).  At their best, though, the humanities are disciplines of memory and imagination, curiosity and tolerance: what we are cultivating is historical perspective, cultural awareness, hermeneutic sensitivity, philosophical reflection, possibility.  These are the virtues of resilience--personal, social, cultural--and resilience, the systems theorists tell us, is the better part of sustainability.