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What Is Sustainability Studies? Gillen D'Arcy Wood

American Literary History, Volume 24, Number 1, Spring 2012, pp. 1-15 (Article) Published by Oxford University Press

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/alh/summary/v024/24.1.d-arcy-wood.html

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What Is Sustainability Studies? Gillen D’Arcy Wood*

1. Ecocriticism and Biocomplexity In 2004, an influential group of ecocritics convened in a decommissioned school classroom in Matfield Green, Kansas, to discuss environmental sustainability. This group included wellknown figures in American ecocriticism such as Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, president of the renowned Land Institute, and the philosopher Bill Vitek. Essays arising from that Matfield Green meeting were subsequently published in 2008, in a volume entitled The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (2008). By way of introduction to the themes of complexity and sustainability, editors Jackson and Vitek launch an assault on science and the scientific method. In the spirit of Aldo Leopold that presides over the volume, Jackson and Vitek represent professional science as a pernicious legacy of the Enlightenment, a hubristic “knowledge-based world view” (1). The instrumentalist, scientistic view of natural resources has led, .among other disasters, to the industrialization of American agriculture—its transformation from an agrarian model of small, variegated farming plots to a hyper-fertilized, monocultural agribusiness that deploys vast quantities of petroleum-based chemicals, depletes precious topsoil, and creates toxic dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. But Jackson and Vitek go further, extrapolating from the evils of industrialized agriculture a general argument against science as such. Science, according to this critique, is synonymous with the technologies and knowledge paradigms of modernity *Gillen D’Arcy Wood is Nicholson Professor of English and Director of the Sustainability Studies Initiative in the Humanities at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His current book, Frankenstein’s Weather: How Climate Change Shaped the Nineteenth-century World, reconstructs on a global scale the social and ecological impacts of the eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1815, and is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. American Literary History, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 1 –15 doi:10.1093/alh/ajr044 Advance Access publication December 23, 2011 # The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

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What Is Sustainability Studies?

itself, and thus responsible for the full cluster of environmental crises facing twenty-first century humanity: pollution of land, air, and water, mass bio-extinction, deforestation, and toxic food technologies, among others. Science has driven this Western and now global project of modernity by a ruthlessly positivist outlook, a “prideful optimism” (8) that disdains uncertainty and complexity in favor of data and “endless facts” (10). Science and sustainability are historical enemies, and sustainability science a contradiction in terms. What is needed, from their perspective, is a humble, nonquantitative respect for nature’s complexity, for the constitutive uncertainties of our relation to the environment, and for the limits of human knowledge. Ecocritics should champion, they argue, an “ignorance-based worldview” (22). The Matfield Green manifesto on sustainability offers a rousing cri de coeur, but it is also demonstrably wrongheaded and uninformed on key issues—and represents a dead end for twentyfirst century ecocriticism. For instance, it would certainly come as a surprise to a biophysical scientist working today to be charged with a disregard for uncertainty or complexity, when these constitute the dominant research paradigm in the natural sciences. In 1999, Rita Colwell, epidemiologist and incoming president of the National Science Foundation, established “Bio-complexity in the Environment” as a new priority funding category for the NSF. “The metaphor of biocomplexity was inspired,” she explained, “by the interdisciplinary imperative not only to integrate the natural sciences, but also to understand the role that natural and social system interactions play in the dynamics of our planet’s system and how these influence sustainability” (254). In terms that mirror the now-outdated Matfield Green critique of science, Colwell acknowledges that most twentieth-century scientific practice had been essentially reductionist, with the goal of isolating natural organisms and their observed behaviors within ever smaller ambits. But the advent at the turn of the century of large-scale digital technologies and data-merging capability—from genome sequencing to ecological monitoring devices to satellite imaging of land and sea—has now enabled scientists to emerge from discrete disciplinary problem-solving to address the bigger picture, namely “the complexity of the living system and non-living world, and how [they] function to sustain us on this planet” (“Biocomplexity” 1). Accordingly, the NSF now grants multimillion dollar grants under such rubrics as the “Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.” While such a phrase might never have flowed from the oracular pen of Aldo Leopold, he would certainly have understood its holistic intent and respect for nature’s complexity.

American Literary History

Biocomplexity—the chaotically variable interaction of organic elements on multiple scales—is the defining characteristic of all ecosystems, including human societies. Biocomplexity science seeks to understand this nonlinear functioning of elements across multiple scales of time and space, from the molecular to the intercontinental, from the microsecond to millennia and deep time. Such an approach may always have been necessary, but it mostly has not been possible until very recently. For example, only since the development of (affordable) genomic sequencing in the last decade have biologists begun to investigate how environments regulate gene functions, and how changes in biophysical conditions place pressure on species selection and drive evolution. How is the concept of complexity important to sustainability studies? To offer one example, only a biocomplexity paradigm offers the opportunity to better understand and defend biodiversity, a core environmental concern. Even with the rapid increase in knowledge in the biophysical sciences in recent decades, vast gaps exist in our understanding of natural processes and human impacts upon them. Surprisingly little is known, for example, about the susceptibilities of species populations to environmental change or, conversely, how preserving biodiversity might enhance the resilience of an ecosystem. The largely reductionist practices of twentieth-century science have obscured these interrelationships, while the mission of the new bio-complexity science is to begin with presumptions of ignorance, and from there begin to map complexity, measure environmental impacts, quantify risk and resilience, and offer quantitative rather than merely sentimental arguments for the importance of biodiversity, which might then form the basis for progressive sustainability policy. In sum, complexity science has abandoned simple causal models and conventional disciplinary specializations for an integrated understanding of the natural world as an open, dynamic system subject to nonlinear transformations, feedback loops, and multiscalar interactions beyond the power of traditional scientific instruments to describe or predict. The ecological iteration of complexity science—called biocomplexity or sustainability science—is explicitly focused on the dynamic and tightly coupled relations between human and natural systems, recognizing the historical power of human communities as biological agents, and even, in the late industrial era of climate change, as geological agents. The irony here is clear: the new complexity science begins from the same point as the ecocritics of Matfield Green with regard to thinking about sustainability. Sustainability, for both, necessitates a humble acknowledgement of the limits of human knowledge.

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One of the first NSF-sponsored biocomplexity projects at the turn of the century—one close to the heart of the Matfield Green mission—established complex linkages between the hypoxic “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico and farming practices in the Mississippi watershed basin.1 To understand the impact of irrigation, petroleum-based fertilizer, drainage, and deforestation in the Midwest on the fisheries of the Gulf is a classic biocomplexity problem, requiring data-merging between a host of scientific specialists, from hydrologists to chemists, botanists, geologists, zoologists, and engineers. Even at the conclusion of such a study, however, as the scientists themselves readily acknowledged, the human dimension remains to be explored; specifically, how industry, policy, culture, and the law have interacted, on decadal timescales, to degrade the tightly coupled riverine-ocean system of the Mississippi Gulf. Here lies the metaphorical “gulf” between data and meaningful change in human behavior toward the natural environment—a divide both the Matfield Green ecocritics and the emerging sustainability science community implicitly recognize. A quantitative approach to sustainability only goes so far. At a key moment in the analysis of an environmental problem, such as dead zones in the Gulf, data accumulation must give way to the work of social narrative and analysis, to the ecocritical description of human desires, histories, and discourses as they have governed land and water use in the Mississippi Gulf region. In the “gulf” between the data and the decision-maker, between the motive and the action, between past and present, lies the mandate and charge of sustainability studies in the humanities.

2. Systems Literacy In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, universal literacy— reading and writing—was the catch-cry of education reformers, who enjoyed stunning success. Literacy has been a prime mover in the complexification of social forms and synergies in industrial technology that characterize modernity. In the twenty-first century, however, the depredations of that modernity upon ecosystems and natural resources now necessitate a new global literacy campaign—systems literacy—to promote a broad, basic understanding of the complex interdependency of human and natural systems. Systems literacy is an evolved form of interdisciplinary research practice and pedagogy that calls for intellectual competence (not necessarily command) in a variety of fields in order to better address specific, real-world environmental problems. In


essence, systems literacy combines the study of social history and cultural discourses with a technical understanding of ecosystem processes. For example, research into deforestation of the Amazon Basin under a systems literacy paradigm would require traversal of fields widely scattered under the traditional disciplinary regime: including plant biology, hydrology, climatology, alongside economics, sociology, and the history and literature of postcolonial Brazil. One way of conceiving sustainability studies is as the drawing of maps that show connections between apparently unrelated domains or sequences of events. To return to our earlier example: what do the cornfields of Illinois have to do with the decline of fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico? To the systems illiterate eye, there is no relationship between two areas so remote from each other. This form of illiteracy is, of course, dear to an advanced consumer society, which relentlessly promotes the complacent assurance that nothing is connected. A sustainable systems analysis, however, will show the hidden ecological cost chain linking the use of chemical fertilizers in the Midwest with toxic runoff into the Mississippi Basin, with changes in the chemical composition in the Gulf of Mexico (specifically oxygen depletion), with reduced fish populations, and finally with economic and social stress on Gulf fishing communities. Sustainability studies, in this sense, would not have been conceivable even two decades ago. But advances in data-gathering technologies, and particularly the scientific revolution in genomics, now mean that the body of knowledge in many of the earth and biological sciences is doubling every five years. It is hardly the time, then, to be arguing for an “ignorance-based worldview” when humanists, and particularly ecocritics, have barely begun to interpret the vast array of new information about the natural world available on almost a daily basis. More than that, we as ecocritics find ourselves lacking the interdisciplinary facility and systems-based methodologies to actually absorb that information in the first place. To offer one multibillion dollar example of the emerging sustainability science infrastructure that will be available to the next generation of systems literate ecocritics: the recently created National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a continentwide network of digitally integrated observation stations capable of sampling ecological data drawn from “an unparalleled array of sensors” (Senkowsky 106). This new national environmental resource will offer the data range and computational power to overturn the traditional reductionist biases of the natural sciences in favor of a truly integrated socio-ecological paradigm with predictive capability. The impacts of the full range of human resource

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use practices will be, to some degree, measurable with such a continent-wide network. Far from representing a pernicious “knowledge-based worldview” anathema to the sustainability imperative, the purpose of NEON is for progressive scientists, social scientists, and policymakers to collaborate as never before in laying the empirical and intellectual foundations for a new era in sustainable governance. But such data-gathering projects are also breathtaking in the demands they place on analysis. The information accumulated is constant and overwhelming in volume, and the methods by which to process and operationalize the data toward sustainable practices have either not yet been devised or are imperfectly integrated within research programs, political institutions, and other decisionmaking structures. To elaborate those methods requires a humanistic as well as scientific vision, a need to understand complex interactions from the molecular to the institutional and societal level. Sustainability studies requires not only that humanists absorb greater knowledge about the natural world and its processes, but that we reflect critically on the anthropocentric biases that have inhibited acquisition of that knowledge in the past, and that continue to govern research in our own disciplines. Sustainability studies begins from the principle that all systems, human and natural, are characterized by complexity and nonlinear change. We are habituated to articulating human history and cultural evolution, for example, as a legible story of progress or decline, governed by human-built institutions and enacted by moral agents, with the natural world as scenic backdrop. But social history, from a sustainability viewpoint, is ecological in character rather than simply dramatic or ideological; that is, the evolution of human affairs exhibits the same patterns of systems connectivity, complexity, and nonlinear transformation that we observe in the organic world, from the genetic make-up of viruses to continental weather systems. For example, the environmental impact history of the world system since 1950 exhibits features of what biophysical scientists call chaotic transformation (chaos which may, counterintuitively, exhibit patterns): namely, a transformation whereby certain conditions—in this case, petroleum-based energy systems, technological infrastructure, advanced knowledge-based institutions, political stability, and population increase—synergized to create a period of incredible global growth and change that could not nevertheless have been predicted at the outset based upon those initial conditions alone. This unforeseen Great Acceleration has brought billions of human beings into the world, and unprecedented health and prosperity to millions. At the same time,


however, as we hardly need reminding, the negative impacts of the human “triumph” of postwar growth have been felt across the biosphere, human and non-human, and brought us to the brink of cascading systems collapse. This broad account does not imply that post-1950 global history is undetermined by social power relations and ideological decision-making, only that these crucial human factors are nevertheless embedded within a larger, and largely ignored, socio-environmental nexus, the importance of which looms as decisive to the future of human modernity. The evolution of ecocriticism toward sustainability studies will require that we abandon our reflex abhorrence for such quantitative, systems-based approaches that allow us to perceive the broad currents in global change and ecosystem decline. To offer another example of the damaging anti-science strain that persists in ecocritical thought, Jackson and Vitek, in the opening pages of The Virtues of Ignorance, attack the research methodology of sustainability economist Robert Costanza, who has, in his studies of the Louisiana wetlands, dared “to assign a dollar value to nature’s services” (1). On the contrary, however, nothing could be more vital than to do just that. A defining principle of the 500-year history of world system economic development—since Portuguese merchants first sailed to the East Indies for pricey spices—has been that the environmental costs of agricultural cash crop production, resource extraction, transport, manufacturing, and the trade of goods be “externalized,” that is, omitted from the selling price of products. Dismantling this centuries-old economic system of the environmental subsidization of consumer goods is essential to a new global economics of sustainability, one that prioritizes the management of ecosystems for resiliency rather than pure capital efficiency, and incorporates the cost of ecosystem management into the pricing of goods. This cannot be done by recoiling from the very notion of a dollar value for nature’s services. Only a reformed economic system of natural pricing, whereby environmental costs are reflected in the price of products in the global supermarket, will alter consumer behavior at the scale necessary to bring economic and environmental objectives into sustainable alignment. In a recent editorial, the opinion-leading journal Nature welcomed “ecosystem services’ entry into mainstream scientific and political thinking,” a fact reflected by emergent government programs and offices of ecosystems services in the US, European Union, and United Nations. As the Nature editors point out, vital natural resources such as watersheds, carbon-sequestering forests, and wetlands are literally valueless in the current system: “As long as the marketplace treats such services as free goods . . . the value

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of what nature does for humanity will effectively be set to zero and nature will continue to be trashed. But if the market could somehow be made to price the services appropriately, all those forests, streams, lakes, prairies and seashores would suddenly acquire real economic value, and people would have incentives to preserve them” (764). Though it may be a bitter pill for ecocritics in the Jeffersonian mold to swallow, a sustainable future depends rather on the Hamiltonian world we live in, on the reform of markets, banking, and price signals. Behavioral change at the necessary scale is unimaginable through simple consciousness raising, moral appeals, and even conventional government regulation. In the words of Conservation Biology, another major journal in the environmental sciences, “ecosystem services have now become the central metaphor within which to express humanity’s need for the rest of living nature” (Redford 785). The new generation of ecocriticism, what I am calling sustainability studies, embraces the expressive power of this emergent economic metaphor for environmental conservation, understands the centrality of environmental economics to the field, and recognizes that the only alternative is to be left out of the effective sustainability conversation altogether. In short, that the authors of a 2008 American ecocritical volume on sustainability should be so dismissive of the crucial concept of ecosystem services, as well as seemingly unaware of the emergent biocomplexity paradigm driving sustainability science, renders a mainstream branch of contemporary ecocriticism dismayingly marginal to the larger sustainability movement. The ironies are compelling and worth reiterating. The Matfield Green volume, designed as a significant ecocritical intervention in the sustainability field, aggressively inveighs against the scientific method for its disregard of complexity at the end of the very decade that witnessed biocomplexity’s emergence as a dominant paradigm in environmental research, and against econometric language at the very time that the concept-metaphor of ecosystem services emerged as a powerful tool for the sustainability lobby and policy-makers at the national and international level. The lesson of The Virtues of Ignorance? It is that the future of an engaged rather than self-marginalizing ecocriticism is not in neo-agrarian ideology and the critique of science, but in systems literacy as a new frontier of interdisciplinary method in the humanities. The charge of sustainability studies is to think through and adapt biophysical data of unprecedented character and quantity toward the construction of a holistic sustainability vision, and to help drive public and policy debates toward sustainable solutions to climate change, natural resource depletion, and the full roster of


ecological crises faced by the global community. Sustainability scientists and social scientists have embraced the emergent data processing and econometric technologies of the last two decades as a millennial opportunity to begin to map the depthless complexities of natural systems and their dynamic interrelation with human societies. Sustainability studies, for humanists, in turn mandates scientific literacy, a comfort with quantitative methods, and active engagement and collaboration with scientists, social scientists, and policymakers across the sustainability arena. It is a tall order, to be sure. But to refuse this engagement is to stand outside the larger sustainability enterprise currently gathering force across government, industry, and academia. It is to render ecocriticism a kind of elegiac memorialist to the planet’s rapid ecological decline, and the immeasurable human misery it portends. Or worse, ecocriticism, in the Matfield Green tradition, risks falling in as an unwitting fellow traveler of the ecocidal Right. The Tea Party, after all, distrusts scientists and beancounting economists—in fact, systems thinking of all kinds. Sustainability studies recognizes that, in the twenty-first century, ecocritics can no longer afford to preach the evils of the Enlightenment, that it is counterproductive at the least to argue, as Jackson and Vitek do, for ecocriticism’s “ignorance-based world view” when progressive thinkers operating, however loosely, within the institutional framework of that Enlightenment—the scientific method, higher education, democratic government, etc.— are striving to produce the necessary intellectual resources and policy infrastructure for the sustainability revolution, all the while under daily assault by the avatars of genuine ignorance: the climate deniers and patriots of progress who, chainsaw in hand, would not think twice before cutting down the last tree in the heartland.

3. Systems Literacy and Literature What is the place of literary criticism in the new sustainability studies? Literature is, by definition, a complex system of writing. Across the global culture, it offers the richest available repository of reflections on human embeddedness in the natural world, a psychological and aspirational guidebook to the dynamics of human and natural systems. Like biocomplexity science, literature is also inherently multiscalar in its range, treating objects small and large, near and far, material and abstract. Literary texts likewise, as we all know, draw their character from the expressive diversity of language, built upon the iteration of idioms and

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Sustainability studies, for humanists, . . . mandates scientific literacy, a comfort with quantitative methods, and active engagement and collaboration with scientists, social scientists, and policymakers across the sustainability arena.

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figures in complex allusive webs, and on the wonders of abstraction—all marshaled to a powerful estranging effect. For a long time now, literary critics have asked the same questions of literary texts as biocomplexity scientists now do of human societies in general. In sustainability studies, this natural overlap is made explicit. Indeed the entire sustainability enterprise is dependent on humanists offering rich answers to central questions: for instance, how have human instincts, desires, and aspirations fed historically into larger ideological constructions of nature, be they providential, instrumental, or sustainable? Without this historical understanding, no amount of natural science data on declining ecosystem health will ever be enough to bring about the necessary social changes, a fact now increasingly recognized within the science and policy communities. The goal of the natural sciences has accordingly been redefined for the twentieth century as “[r]elating biodiversity to ecological function and sustainability, understanding the dynamics of coupled human and natural systems, and unraveling functional genomics at scales ranging from organisms to community assemblages” (Michener 1018). Because literary critics bring an inherent understanding of human complexity and community to the table, the new-generation ecocriticism is well equipped to engage scientists and social scientists under the biocomplexity paradigm. We have long valued lyric poetry, for example, for its allusive density and the tantalizingly intricate worlds it models for the reader. A central strain of this tradition of complex observation, in both Western and Eastern lyric texts, involves imaginative scrutiny of the relationship between human beings and their natural environments. Take Emily Dickinson’s short poem “There are two Ripenings – ”: There are two Ripenings – One – of Sight – whose Forces spheric wind Until the Velvet product Drop, spicy, to the Ground – A Homelier – maturing – A Process in the Bur– That Teeth of Frosts, alone disclose In far October Air. Systems literacy offers a generous paradigm for analysis, both formal and historical, of Dickinson’s text. The drama of complexity pervades the poem. In a single summertime moment, a fruit is falling from a tree at the same time an unseen biotic process unfolds in a nearby hedge, whose end product may only


be projected forward imaginatively in time to the Fall, the “far October Air.” The poet’s viewpoint is uncertain—“There are two Ripenings” (emphasis added)—but we can be sure that the unnamed “Process in the Bur” will only be disclosed to an attentive mind. The contrast to the mind attuned to “Process” is the “Velvet Product” of the first quatrain, which an implicit eye covets, attracted by the natural glamour of the first ripening and its sensual, almost siren properties—the perfect sphere, velvety texture, and spicy taste. Seduced by the joys of consumption in the here and now of the fruit tree, however, we are in danger of missing the second ripening. Because the fruit drops like an offering from the Gods, it is hard not to be distracted from the question of the fruit’s relation to the surrounding ecosystem, to the everywhere “maturing” that is ongoing though unseen. Ordinary biophysical processes are, after all, homely. Nature, mostly, does not catch the eye. Indeed, the second ripening, in the second quatrain, is somewhat forbidding. Its homeliness becomes almost skeletal. The human mouth that came to suck the velvet fruit of the first ripening is now the bare “Teeth of Frosts,” as if the human imprint on the natural scene were a dental record requiring analysis and the sifting of data to reconstruct—the “Teeth” mark left by the lived encounter itself. In this Edenic poem, we are tempted to consider only the fruit of the tree—but in consuming the fruit/poem we unwarily assume the burden of knowledge, the desire for the “Process” to be disclosed. Eating the fruit of the land, the poet suggests, should not be mindless. The first ripening of nature is for our pleasurable consumption, but the second awaits our understanding. The first is simple, the second complex. This second ripening, of the mind-in-time, requires our grasping, as the poem itself does, the multiscalar operations of time and space, from the fruit itself to the micro-organic “forces” that so beautifully shaped it, from the unseen terrestrial “Process in the Bur” to the sky in October. Only the bio-complex mind leaps from the joy of the fruit to contemplating seasonality in the abstract. And what a hard task this is, the answers we seek being remote, so “far” and “alone”! It is very uncertain, after all, what these “Forces” are, what maturing “Process” is occurring, and what precisely the future may “disclose.” The poem respects uncertainty; it names the very borders of our knowledge. But the poem is also a spur to knowledge, to a better understanding of biotic cycles and their human footprint (or “Teeth” mark). Balancing the glamour of the fruit is the glamour of the poet’s philosophic mind, capable of abstract thought, of thinking seasonality as such and bearing witness to its complex, nonlinear unfoldings. In “There are two Ripenings – ,” Dickinson

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offers us an ecological prescription, a “green” poem complex in character, with biocomplexity as its subject. And what about an eco-historical reading? It is plausible that Dickinson wrote this poem the very day, or thereabouts, that Colonel Baron dug the first American oil well, only a few hundred miles south of Amherst in Pennsylvania. One hundred fifty years and almost six billion people later and the so-called Petroleum Interval, the age of cheap energy, will soon be over. But we are all here now, and need to be fed and clothed, even as the homelier processes of nature are already undergoing unprecedented changes. An eco-historicist reading of Dickinson’s poem would compare the sustainable “ripenings” of Dickinson’s complex seasonal system to the environmental changes now driving unseasonality, the epidemic of false or abortive ripenings that cripple twenty-first century ecosystems, and the threat to the global food supply from soil depletion and climate change. In this light, the “two Ripenings” of the poem might portend something sinister, a proper and improper ripening, a deteriorated food chain—a fruit wrapped in artificial “Velvet” in your supermarket, shipped from thousands of miles away to be consumed out of season, instead of dropping gloriously within “sight.” This is Dickinson’s fruit as unoriginal sin—the crime of unseasonal consumption and its unpredictable feedbacks. Fertilizers in the Midwestern farm belt deplete fish populations in the Gulf of Mexico, while our supermarket apples from New Zealand, grown “organically” but flown across oceans, represent hundreds of tons of additional carbon in the atmosphere. From the fruit at our feet we have arrived at the macro-scale of the planetary biosphere itself, and the fragile cone of the atmosphere. In a complex feedback loop, climate change in turn amplifies deterioration in the world ecosystems on sea and land, driving an inevitable decline in fish, fruit, and grain yields at local and global levels, rendering protein and fiber scarcer for the world’s soon-to-be nine billion mouths. In the late or absent frosts of the age of global warming does nature show her “Teeth.” Sustainability is a dauntingly large and complex project, and will increasingly drive research and policy agendas across academia, government, and industry through the twenty-first century. The impacts of success or failure of the sustainability movement will be felt, of course, in the daily lives of billions of people, both living and not yet born. So far, academic humanists have been distressingly marginal to the sustainability enterprise. Whether it is climate change, ecosystem deterioration, the looming energy crisis, or the highly political trade-offs between conservation and development, the environmental debate has been dominated by the


scientific and policy communities. How can ecocritics change that, and insert themselves into the emerging, urgent discourse of sustainability? First must come recognition that sustainability studies in the humanities is the natural companion of sustainability science, not its antagonist. Sustainability demands an interdisciplinary, integrated socio-ecological worldview. Scientists cannot retreat to the study of organisms in laboratory isolation, or of ecology in its Platonic, pristine forms. But nor can ecocritics afford to retreat to the bower, the plough, or the graduate seminar, issuing the same familiar jeremiads against science and industrial capitalism. A meaningful sustainability studies embraces critique, but will be focused principally on the production of models, case studies, and analyses of human –environmental interrelationships that look to an operational horizon, and are legible to collaborators in the sciences, social sciences, and policymaking. Second, humanists should recognize and address the anthropocentric bias inherent to their historical mission. The goal of sustainability studies is to demonstrate, over and over, the historical and material interdependence of human and natural systems. The academic humanities have largely failed to do this. Under the prevailing anthropocentric regime, the understanding of natural systems and their embedded relation to human affairs has not been a goal, or even a working concept in most disciplines. Even the post-1970s turn toward environmental issues has not produced a revolution in methodology or disciplinary realignment commensurate to our twenty-first century cluster of mounting ecological crises. Meantime, in the world of literary ecocriticism, the Leopoldian school has been focused on literary and philosophical representations of the natural world, mostly in a celebratory or elegiac vein, while second-wave environmental justice criticism threatens to constrain the eco-critical movement within the terms and goals of the liberal social protest movements of the late twentieth century, to be focused on the class and global inequities of the current human system rather than on species-level ecological threats looming at the horizon. Because the accelerating ecocidal conditions of our era will, among other tragedies, quickly devastate the hard-won victories of the progressive rights-based social movements of the past century, environmental justice must be rethought on local, global, and millennial scales. We need to extend to the natural world the same moral sense and ethical imagination we apply to social relations, as well as extend the concept of justice to the subalterns of future generations—the billions of people in all hemispheres yet unborn who have no political voice in the present.

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To this extent, sustainability studies is driven by an ethics of the future. The word itself, sustainability, points to proofs that, like the “homelier maturings” in Dickinson’s poem, can only be projected forward in time. To be sustainable is, by definition, to be attentive to the future. But sustainability studies is also a profoundly historical mode, committed to a critical history of environmental discourse, to reconstruction of the long, nonlinear evolutions of our dominant extractivist and instrumentalist views of the natural world, and of the “mind-forg’d manacles” of usage and ideology that continue to limit our ecological understanding and inhibit mainstream acceptance of the sustainability imperative. Sustainability studies thus assumes the complex character of its subject, multiscalar in time and space, and dynamically uncertain and adaptive in its modes. Ironically, the mistake of the Matfield Green ecocritics is not so much to reject the scientific enterprise as to overstate its claims. As it stands right now, at the beginning of the most crucial decades in the history of the human species on earth, the complex synergies of sustainability between natural and human domains have barely begun to be conceived, in any discourse. We as twenty-first-century ecocritics need to help encode, enrich, and promote new languages of ecology, human and natural, if we are to take our desired place among the acknowledged legislators of a sustainable world.

Notes 1. See N. N. Rabalais, R. E. Turner, and D. Scavia, “Beyond Science into Policy: Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia and the Mississippi River,” Bioscience 52.2 (2002): 129 –42.

Works Cited “Biocomplexity: The New Bioscience Frontier.” Interview with Rita Rossi Colwell. American Institute of Biological Sciences (May 2004). 4 Nov. 2011. ,http://www. actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/ colwell2.html.. Colwell, Rita Rossi. “Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases: Biocomplexity as an Interdisciplinary Paradigm.” Ecohealth 2 (2005): 244 –57.

Dickinson, Emily. “There are two Ripenings –.” The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Cambridge: Belknap, 1999. 194. Michener, William K. et al. “Defining and Unraveling Biocomplexity.” BioScience 51.12 (2001): 1018–23. “Natural Value.” Nature 457.12 (Feb. 2009): 764.


Redford, Kent and William M. Adams. “Payment for Ecosystem Services and the Challenge of Saving Nature.” Conservation Biology 23.4 (2009): 785 –87. Senkowsky, Sonya. “Planning of NEON Moves Ahead.” BioScience 55.2 (2005): 106– 12.

Vitek, Bill and Wes Jackson. “Introduction: Taking Ignorance Seriously.” The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge. Eds. Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2008. 1 –17.

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