NAS: Sustainability’s ’social justice’ component is a capacious circle.

I met Peter Wood, the President of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), this week, and he shared information about his recent research into the movement we now know as “Sustainability,” how it began, and what is driving it.

His most recent article, Sunbeams for Indigenes: The New Discipline of Cultural Sustainability, describes the Sustainability movement’s roots in socialism:

…The program at its core is about training social activists. Activism can play an important part in making the world a better place, though it often enough results in making things worse. Are the wishes of any given neighborhood, ethnic group, or tribe, automatically worthy of support? What if “what matters most” to a community is to get on with the business of ethnic cleansing? Or to obtain better weaponry to support the time-honored custom of brigandry? Or to convert the local rainforest into an up-to-date cattle farm? Or to cut the middlemen out of the lucrative local drug trade? As Madison observed, “Men are not angels.” (Nor women either.) Often what a “community” wants is its neighbor’s property, or worse.

We suspect that the Goucher program has some hidden provisos. Its authors declare an uncompromising commitment to sustaining whatever a community cares about “passionately,” but our guess is that they imagine a world where passions run only in wholesome directions. “What matters most” is not “hunting down and killing the intruders who have stolen our land,” or “first, kill all the witches,” but ideals such as, “We want to live in harmony with nature as our ancestors have since the beginning of the world,” or, “We desire a better price on the world commodities market for our sustainable-harvest crops”…Continue reading on NAS >>

For background, and additional research on the topic, check out the NAS archive, HERE (Scroll down to the “Sustainability” section).