ANTHROPOLOGY OF

SUSTAINABILITY: BEYOND
DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS
Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis
Outline
What Sort of World Favours
Introduction
Sustainability?

What Sustainability Does for

Origins of Sustainability
Anthropology

Making Anthropology
Sustainability Today
Contemporary Again

What is an Anthropology of
Sustainability Tomorrow
Sustainability?

The Anthropocene Conclusion

The book and the authors / editors….

Marc Brightman

Jerome Lewis
Introduction
The challenge of sustainability demands much more than
the protection or preservation of communities or nature
reserves, and more than technical fixes for CO2 production
or resource limitations

Sustainability, from this point of view, might best be

understood as the process of facilitating conditions for
change by building and supporting diversity— ontological,
biological, economic and political diversity
Origins of Sustainability

nachhaltend Nutzung

nachhaldigkeit

Hans Carl von Carlowitz 1713

Origins of Sustainability
Eighteenth Century

Sustainability Cartesian belief

The right to subjugate nature to
Managerialism human needs

Ecology
(An alternative)

Goethe
Origins of Sustainability
• With the establishment of the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in1980, ‘conservation’
became the dominant modern approach to managing the
non-urban and non-transformed natural environment.
Origins of Sustainability

This institutionalization of sustainability is dominated by a

preoccupation with economic considerations and a tendency to
address cultural, social and ecological concerns in ways
compatible with economic growth.
Sustainability Today
Development interventions are surprisingly rarely
successful, especially when evaluated overtime
and according to the terms of their original aims.

They often ignore or misunderstand social,

political and cultural realities at the expense of
ordinary people.
Sustainability Today
Sustainable Development

humanists

technicists
 Technical
Experts

Policies /
Interventions
SUSTAINABILITY

Local People
DEFORESTATION
The temptation for implementers is to pay more
attention to those funding their activities than those
on whom the activities are imposed (Lewis 2008a).
Sustainability Tomorrow

From within their horizon,

sustainability was a simple matter
of viability.

For the meaning of sustainability to

become clear, it must embrace the
uncertain and the unusual.
Inughuit in Northern Greenland
Anthropocene Econocene Capitalocene
Anthropocene

The anthropos of the Anthropocene lives in modern growth-

based market economies that have intensified resource
extraction and consumption around the world, mostly
externalizing the costs to nonhuman species and
environments.

Anthropos is a force causing so much disturbance to natural

cycles such as climate, to environments such as oceans and
forests and to diverse microbiomes on which life depends that
it is rapidly reducing biological and cultural diversity.
 Holocene
12,000 years ago

Holocene
Resurgence
 Anthropocene proliferation
D
E
A
M
A END OF
N RESURGENCE
D

ASSETS

SPREAD OF
PATHOGENS
Anthropocene

In the Anthropocene the environment is expansive not

bounded.

Taking these insights into consideration clearly challenges

any definitions of sustainability that presuppose a predictable
future in a bounded space where economic and political
relations remain roughly constant over time.

Rather, the evidence suggests a working definition of

sustainability which emphasises that it is a principle based on
the active cultivation of cultural, economic, political and
ecological plurality, in order to be more likely to address
unpredictability in future.
What Sort of World Favours Sustainability?
Of 350,000 globally identified plant species2 there are 7,000
species that have been used by humans as food.

In the Anthropocene today, 75% of the food eaten by human

beings is composed of just 12 crops and 5 animal species.

Counter to this trend, the

indigenous Amazonian societies
(she discusses) select for diversity
by cross-fertilizing different
varieties of manioc to produce new
diversity, and using cuttings to
clone new varieties.
 Traditional forms of agriculture, especially shifting cultivation,
have proven to be associated with high biological diversity, and
more than the diversity within gardens, it may also help preserve
and even enhance the diversity of forests themselves

As Anna Tsing cogently argues, ‘meaningful sustainability

requires multispecies resurgence, that is, the remaking of livable
landscapes through the actions of many organisms’.

Rather than productivity, it is an ethic of encouraging, cherishing,

celebrating, protecting and producing diversity that is at the heart
of sustainability.

Handing a liveable world to our descendants requires moderating

the processes of commodification in order to preserve, or even
enhance the cross-species socialities on which we depend, and
actively fighting for spaces that will ensure resurgence.
 Ontological Struggles

KNOWLEDGE

Arturo Escobar

post-capitalist, sustainable
and plural models of life
What Sustainability Does for Anthropology

Our specialism in concrete and everyday realities and their

relationship to wider phenomena and ideas leaves us well
placed to offer insights into sustainability.
 Making Anthropology Contemporary Again

Anthropocene
SUSTAINABILITY

COLLABORATION
What is an Anthropology of Sustainability?

The key struggle of our time is to support alternatives to

neoliberal definitions of ‘progress and development’
among diverse societies and cultures.

‘anthropologists will have to engage not just with how

communities are to be maintained, but with how they can
be reworked, with what are the future desirable forms of
society’
 Conclusion

Understanding sustainability meaningfully requires a shift—at

very least a shift of emphasis—from ‘sustainable production’ to
‘sustained ontologies’ (Almeida, Chap. 16).