Sustainability: a good without light

1. Sustainability: A Good Without Light
Curtis White
I have a disclaimer to make before I begin my comments for you.
I am not an ecologist. I have no expertise in urban planning or
making cities sustainable. I am a generalist and a humanist. In
fact, I am the worst sort of generalist, a novelist. Which means
that what you should expect from me is not edifying scientific
analysis, but a good story.
Actually, telling stories is not something that should seem
strange or unfamiliar to environmentalists. Beyond our
dependence on scientific studies and analyses, we are always
telling stories that have to do with the “why” of environmental
devastation. Why is this happening? What does it say about
human nature? Or America? Whether we know it or not, such
questions are an invitation to metaphysics. Metaphysics is that
branch of philosophy, at one time the queen of philosophical
pursuits, concerned with what is beyond the merely phenomenal.
If a forest is clear cut, this is something more than a single rather
stupid incident. It is part of a general practice that is social,
political, and economic. And behind that practice is what ancient
philosophy called a logos: a construction of both spirit and mind.
And so we ask, “What logos is it that produces such a thing as

2. clear cutting?”
We environmentalists are surprised and maybe a little
embarrassed to learn that when we try to answer this question we
are indulging in metaphysical speculation. Nonetheless, we often
do try to answer this question. The forms this speculation has
taken will be familiar to you. There is biological speculation:
humans are destructive by nature. There is Christian speculation:
humans are greedy, i.e. sinful. There is sociological speculation:
humans are locked within social structures and are unaware of
what they do. And there is the most common, and most
metaphysical, political speculation: environmental destruction is
the consequence of two hundred years of the “political economy”
of capitalism.
The story I am in the process of telling has elements of all of
these metaphysical tales. It comes under the rubric of the Barbaric
Heart. In my thinking, all of the above metaphysical explanations
are either informed by or are a response to the Barbaric Heart. The
natural mode of reasoning for the Barbaric Heart is simple enough
to describe. It was the logic not only of the ancient northern
hordes, clothed in animal skins, but of the Empire and the Western
civilization that followed as well. For the Romans, virtue simply
meant success, usually military success. Valor. That was the heart
of Romanitas. This was their barbaric assumption: our prosperity

3. is dependent on violence. Or, as the great Roman hero Cincinnatus
said, in some perplexity, since he just wanted to work his farm,
“We are somehow fated to enjoy the favor of the gods in larger
measure when warring than when at peace.”
That was Roman virtu. Which is a way of saying that the
Barbaric itself is a form of virtue, especially if you think that
winning, surviving, triumphing, and accumulating great wealth are
virtues (as, in order, athletes, Darwinians, military commanders,
and Donald Trump do).
But virtues are not things that God has described for us.
Virtues are specific to cultures and rarely are they exclusive. They
are always challenged by contrary organizations of virtue. Barbaric
virtues have been challenged by competing ethical organizations
like the Stoic virtues of honour, integrity, simplicity, loyalty, and
moderation, or the Christian virtues of selflessness, compassion,
reverence, humility, faith, and hope. There have been other
articulations of virtue as well. Humanism and the Enlightenment
advocated the virtues of fraternity and equality before the law,
challenging the barbarity of royal despotism. Romanticism created
“intimations” of the virtue of a transcendental relation to Nature,
challenging the early brutality of unfettered European
industrialism. The environmental movement has used all of these
strategies at one time or another.

4. The virtues that have attempted to confront the Barbaric
Heart are the virtues of one form or another of what I’ll call for
lack of a better term the Thoughtful. And the Thoughtful is
concerned with articulating a sense of the whole. In his “Second
Philippic” against Marc Antony, Cicero chastised him for
surrounding the Senate with his armed men. “Why do your
henchmen listen with their hands on their swords?” he accused.
For Cicero, Antony represented the City of Force, while the Senate
represented the City of Reason. Cicero’s interest was in “the
brotherhood of the entire human race.” (Cicero, 22)
To see that what is most important is a “whole,” a
brotherhood or a “natural league,” requires an ability to think
beyond the immediate. In whatever form, the Thoughtful attempts
to arrest the Barbaric in its activities and say, “Wouldn’t it be
better to think about being human in this way?” Or, for
environmentalists, “Wouldn’t it be better to think about our
relation to the natural world not as an opportunity for exploitation
and profit but as life-giving interdependence?”
The Barbaric Heart is perfectly capable of seeing the
attraction of the ideals that Thoughtfulness offers. Unfortunately,
it has very little to offer on its own beyond the self-evidently
immoral argument that if it is allowed to continue its violent ways
(as if it were asking), the benefits of that violence will eventually

5. “trickle down” to you. Its options for contending with alternative
articulations of virtue are few. First, obviously, it can simply kill,
imprison or banish their advocates. Roman emperors persecuted
not only Christians but Greek philosophers, the Stoics. In CE89,
the Emperor Domitian banished philosophers from Rome.
Second, it can adopt a strategy of delay, as we see in the
work of corporate lobbyists, rightwing media pundits, and the
dishonest products of corporate-sponsored think-tanks. For the
purposes of self-defense, it will don the garb of its enemies, claim
thoughtfulness for itself, and insist that its actions are in the name
of freedom, democracy, Christianity, etc. Thus the profitable work
of Fox News, Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Sowell, the Weekly
Standard, and the venerable National Review. It’s a rather
shameless ploy, but when you consider that it’s employed by
people whose first instinct is violence, it’s a major strategic
advance.
But the third and shrewdest strategy of the Barbaric Heart is
to reason in this way, “I will always have the option of violence
because that after all is what I am. My efforts at denying the
arguments of the Thoughtful through my own claims to being
thoughtful will go on, of course, so long as there are well-educated
hypocrites to do the work. But it seems to me that if I must have
an enemy, the best thing I could do would be to invent that enemy

6. myself and in my own image.”
This, as you can see, is some very sophisticated barbarity.
How have we seen this strategy at work within mainstream
environmentalism? I believe its primary vehicle is the notion of
sustainability. Sustainable agriculture. Sustainable cities.
Sustainable development. Sustainable economies. Sustainability
seems for most of us as close as we can come to wisdom.
Henceforth, we’re told, it’s going to be a green collar world. As a
recent television advertisement tells us: Where is a perfect world of
clean water and air, no land fills, and 100% recycling? A Suburu
plant in Indiana! Never mind that it’s producing low mileage
SUVs like the Outback. Through advertisements of this kind, the
Barbaric Heart assures us that it has had a change of heart, and it
can now be trusted to play nice.
In truth, the point of sustainability is the idea that the
economic, political and social systems that have together produced
our current global environmental calamity do not need to be
replaced. The point of sustainability most often seems to be to
preserve—not overthrow—the very system of Barbaric virtues that
has created this great threat to the natural world in the first place.
In fact, what sustainability means, deprived of its mint-green cloak,
is “stay the course,” in George W. Bush’s diction.
But I want to be quite uncompromising in saying that the

7. logic of sustainability is also a sort of thoughtlessness. It
participates in the yearnings and willfulness of the Barbaric Heart
in spite of itself. The logic of sustainability, as a sort of program
of carefully calibrated amendment (“Sure! We can make coal clean
and still maintain our Lifestyle.”) is not an answer to our problem
but a surrender to it. It is, as Simone Weil put it, a “good without
light.”
Thoughtlessness isn’t no-thought; it’s thought that maintains
realities that real thought would prohibit.
What is most menacing about the logic of sustainability is evident
to anyone who wishes to look into its language. It will
“operationalize” sustainability. It will create metrics and indices.
It will create “life-cycle assessments.” It will create a
sustainability index. It will institute a “global reporting initiative.”
It will imagine something called “industrial ecology” and not
laugh. Most famously, it will measure carbon footprints. What the
so-called sustainability movement has accomplished is the creation
of “metrics,” ways of measuring. It may not have had much
impact on the natural world, but it has guaranteed that, for the
moment, thinking will not be about spiritual and social renewal
(another Great Awakening) but will be restricted to “technical
interpretation.” In short, to this point sustainability’s signal

8. accomplishment has been to bring calipers to the head of a
songbird.
But what is most thoughtless about the logic of sustainability,
especially as it has emerged through the Kyoto and Bali
international agreements and protocols, is the assumption that it
should allow for continued “economic growth” and
“development.” In short, sustainability assumes that the reasoning
of economics—of economics as a form of scientific reason—must
continue to provide the most telling analyses of and prescriptions
for any future model for the relationship between human beings
and the natural world.
But what if the thinking of economics is merely another
vestment for the Barbaric Heart?
The idea that economics will aid us in thinking through the
problem of the destruction of the natural world, will aid us in
managing the earth’s “carrying capacity,” commits us to the
assumption that our world ought to be governed and guided by
technicians. It is part of the thinking that says, “If only the
politicians would listen to what we scientists have to say! The
scientists will save us if only we’d listen to them, respect their
authority, follow their instructions.” Or, as the website Ecogeek
puts it, “We’re in a bit of an eco-mess, but we’ve got the brains to
lick any problem.” In short, for the Ecogeek technical innovation

9. will save the planet. They can maintain this while gloriously
ignoring the fact that the world we presently inhabit was conceived
by science, designed by engineers, and implemented by
technicians. It starts with the rapidly beating heart of the four-
stroke engine inside your automobile, and then radiates out in what
is laughably called urban planning (the strip mall, the commuters,
the traffic jams, the capitulation to our own machines), and then
what is disturbingly called transportation (the sterility of the
interstate highway, the fantastic waste and increasingly fascistic
experience of jet travel), and then the global energy infrastructure,
burning off methane waste, spilling its toxic cargo on land and
shore, and destroying the people who have been cursed with “oil
wealth.” And of course looming over all of this, guaranteeing it, is
the grim visage of the warrior, the global oil police known as the
military.
What I want to suggest, not to put too fine a point on it, is
that the act of trusting to these experts is to place faith not in the
subtle capacities of the engineer, but to indulge in the primitive
longing of the barbarian in his moment of despair. After a period
of truly grand slaughter and plunder, the barbarian discovers with
an audible “uh-oh” that the legions have regrouped, they’re
moving forward in an orderly and powerful way and it’s going to
be murder and mayhem in the barbarian camp for a while. The

10. barbarian has been shown that his willfulness and violence has
become the equivalent of self-defeat. That is his inescapable
reality even if it’s one he is constitutionally incapable of
understanding. The waters are lapping at the shores of Manhattan
Island. What science should be saying now is not “why were we
not listened to, respected, followed,” but “we have wittingly taken
common cause with the barbarians and participated in the making
of this world, and it is clear now that this making was also our
collective unmaking.” And yet like the barbarian in his moment of
anguish, who thinks that the only possible response to his situation
is to be even more violent next time, our technocracy thinks that
what will cure technological disaster is more and smarter
technology.
In the end, the great difficulty that we environmentalists have
with those forces of destruction that we see around us is not with
their sinfulness or greed, not with their stupidity, and not with their
part in an international capitalist conspiracy. The truly daunting
task before us has to do with their sense of their own virtue. With,
in short, their happiness. I’ll repeat, the greatest difficulty faced by
the environmental movement is the happiness of those social
forces that are at the source of most environmental problems.
These communities, if one can call them that, believe that they are
prosperous because they are virtuous, and they are happy because

11. they are prosperous. Very many people are happy with the
American business model, they are happy with their cars, and they
are happy with the array of cheap consumer goods available to
them at the mall, and they are ecstatic with their computers and
home entertainment systems. We can explain to them that those
consumer goods are connected in a very compelling cause/effect
line to China, global energy consumption, pollution, and the reign
of genocidal regimes like that in the Sudan, but such an account
seems to them truly metaphysical. Our challenge is to provide a
metaphysics (or a narrative, if you prefer) that provides a different
and compelling way of thinking about who we are and what an
alternative form of happiness could look like. That is a mostly
terrifying suggestion to people who already think they are happy.
People do not easily abandon happiness because someone says
they ought to, or that there is a superior form of happiness down
the road. For example, the promotion of “localism” is a tough sell
because it looks to most people like a return to the social realities
of the nineteen thirties. Walking, growing your own food, and in
general living more humbly.
The problem for environmentalists, people who do follow the
causal chain of consumer culture to the Sudan, people who find the
idea of local, self-sustaining communities and simpler lives
attractive, is how to maintain a commitment to this thing the

12. United States of America. Because, frankly, to many of us it looks
increasingly on any number of fronts like the enemy. It would
seem to be the fondest residence for the Barbaric Heart since the
Roman Empire.
There’s an old Italian folk tale, told by Boccaccio among
others, that goes something like this: A Jew once told a Christian
friend that he wished to convert to Christianity. He sensed that it
was the true religion. But before he converted he wanted to visit
Rome in order to see first hand how Christians lived. This idea
horrified his friend because he knew what sin and hypocrisy he’d
see there, so he tried to dissuade him from the journey. Never the
less, the Jew went. On his return he said to his Christian friend
that he would convert because, truly, Christianity must be the
greatest religion. To believe in a religion that endures such
debasement of its own ideals takes the very greatest faith.
So, our discovery that American culture is the home of the
Barbaric Heart should not inspire Anti-Americanism but a truer
Americanism. An America whose primary commitment is to the
Thoughtful. What I have advocated elsewhere is a renewal of the
distinctly American virtues of pragmatism and transcendentalism.
I offer these remedies not because of a merely antiquarian fetish
with our past, but with the intent of making history work critically,
in the interest of life, in the present. Pragmatism and

13. transcendentalism have always been our homegrown responses to
the violent world of the Barbaric Heart. Pragmatism offers the
renewal of a democratic world in which the offering of reasons is
paramount, and the best reasons prevail. Transcendentalism, as
developed by Emerson and Thoreau, offers the renewal of a world
in which nature is a source of joy, not profit, and the primary way
in which we humans discover our relationship to God. But that is
a much longer argument for another day.
From “Planetizen” The Planning and Development Network
Media Density Discussions are Needed for Cities
Brent Toderian
16 April 2008 - 11:54am
Tagged:
* Architecture
* Community / Economic Development
* Energy
* Environment
* Government / Politics
* History / Preservation

14. * Infrastructure
* Land Use
* Landscape Architecture
* Urban Development / Real Estate
Can any North American city have a meaningful public discussion about
sustainability, about its "green-ness" or ecological footprint, without having
the challenging but necessary public discussion about the city's density?
Many are still trying to. Many freely trumpet smart growth and sustainability
without the tension and trouble that comes with discussing the "d-word"
openly, and thus avoid the necessary heavy-lifting. Few politicians, and
embarrassingly not enough city planners, are willing to tackle the density
issue publicly, as it is still what Sustainable Urbanism author Douglas Farr
calls the "3rd rail" of sustainable city building.
There is, however, great commonality in thinking in expert circles that
density done well is a critical component to reducing a city's carbon
footprint. The vast majority of our city's greenhouse gas emissions come
from buildings and transportation, both of which are powerfully determined
or influenced by the city's density patterns.
But of course, what we've called "density done well" is not easy. What
does that mean? How can it be done, with design, amenity, infrastructure,
and neighbourhood voice? Here, the public weighs in loudly, and rightly so.
And as for the willingness of cities to put the issue front and centre,
witness Vancouver. Density has been part of the dialogue for decades,

15. and the public by comparison to most cities, is astute on the issues.
But since the launching of the EcoDensity Initiative in June 2006, the
density discussion has been front-and-centre like never before. My
previous posts have documented some of the steps, controversies and
dialogue, which ramped up since November 2007 with two and a half
months of consultation on the second draft of the EcoDensity Charter and
Initial Actions (54 additional workshops or meetings with public or
stakeholder groups to be exact, between Nov 27th and Feb 26th), followed
by 7 nights of public delegate presentations to Council on the second
drafts from Feb. 26th until early April.
The videos of our many hours of presentations and discussions at Council
can be found on our EcoDensity website, and its been fascinating to see
how they've been poured over, commented on, debated, by bloggers and
media alike - the closest thing to reality tv I've been involved with in my
career. Many for and against EcoDensity have commented that they have
learned a tremendous amount during (and even enjoyed) the many
evenings of public presentations and Council questions, much of it about
what density done well could and should mean.
One of the most interesting results of this year and a half engagement
though, has been the surprising number of media articles in our city and
region about density and its link to sustainability. As most city planners will
attest to, it is usually very difficult to get the media interested in planning
matters. Although that is somewhat less true here in Vancouver, we have
arguable been in a flurry of media attention with few past equals (although
observers who have been here longer than I, may challenge that

16. suggestion).
Not every reporter, pundit or letter-writer has agreed, and as one
would expect, and there have been pieces both positive and negative to
the Initiative. Headlines have ranged from "The Price of EcoDensity" and
"EcoDensity Raises Fears of Crowding without Amenities" to "The
Argument for Density: Livable, Affordable and Kind to the Climate". A key
point in the media back-and-forth came later in the game, when after
running many articles and letters with varying perspectives, the Vancouver
Sun in March 2008 ran a definitive op/ed from its editorial board endorsing
the Initiative, entitled "Vancouver Neighbourhoods needn't fear the Impact
of EcoDensity Plans."