{"id":95947,"date":"2019-03-08T15:11:27","date_gmt":"2019-03-08T14:11:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=95947"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:23:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:23:13","slug":"why-every-day-should-be-a-sustainability-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2019\/03\/08\/why-every-day-should-be-a-sustainability-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Why every day should be a Sustainability Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the Erasmus Sustainability Days, environmental philosopher Yogi Hendlin calls on students to join the global climate strike and the nationwide education strike on 15 March. \u201cBecause if we don\u2019t prioritize education, there will be little hope that we have sufficient knowledge and power to provide the next generation of leadership that our world desperately needs.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\n\n<\/svg>\n<\/span>\n\tImage by:<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tElzeline Kooy<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\t

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Yogi Hale Hendlin<\/a> is Assistant Professor in Theoretical Philosophy at the Erasmus School of Philosophy and core faculty in the Erasmus Initiative Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity. As an environmental philosopher, he gave an opening address to the Erasmus Sustainability Days last Monday. This essay is an adaptation of his speech.<\/p>\n\n\t<\/div>\n

Sustainability first and foremost has to do with shedding stuff we don\u2019t need, rather than adding more quick fixes to the mix. We\u2019ll get more health and happiness out of each euro of investment by rewilding our cities, getting rid of cars and turning our streets into forests, than buying an air purifier, bottled water, or other gadgets to give us some imagined personal advantage. The punchline of nature\u2019s joke is that unless we improve the commons for all \u2013 the health of those inextricably shared elements of land, air, water and temperature \u2013 we\u2019re deluding ourselves, sustaining unsustainable conditions of business, politics and life. There\u2019s no individual salvation against the harm humans as a collective have perpetrated against nature. The only solution with stamina is a collective one that systematically stops and undoes the harm of technological industrial culture.<\/p>\n

But in order to address that, we need to change the incentives. We need to confront our public officials on why it\u2019s cheaper to jump in an airplane than buy a train ticket. We need to ask why the poor air quality in Rotterdam has been deemed acceptable, even though the pollution will kill many extra people, statistically, per year. We need to ask how many cyclists will be killed before we demand more car-free streets. We need to ask, according to Kant\u2019s Categorical Imperative, what would happen if everybody used as many throwaway items as I do? Is it sustainable far into the future for the whole planet to buy something at Spar or Albert Heijn, and throw away kilos of plastic every week just to package food and drink we could bring our own reusable packaging for? And we need to ask the European Union why a carbon tax and dividend has not yet been passed, so the goods and services we use reflect their actual impact on the environment, making low- or zero-carbon options the default.<\/p>\n

Magic tricks of technology<\/h2>\n\t
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\n\t\t\u2018Technoculture has finally become the image of Narcissus, so insecure and self-absorbed by our own reflection, that we have failed to look up and realize that the land is on fire all around us\u2019\n\t<\/blockquote>\n\n\t<\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n

The ecophilosopher David Abram in the film adaptation of his book Becoming Animal<\/em> remarks: \u201cIt\u2019s kind of wild witnessing this outrageous proliferation of technology right at the same moment that there is such a fraying and fragmentation of the earth\u2019s various ecosystems. I can\u2019t help but wonder, what is the relationship between these two contemporaneous happenings?\u201d As we are becoming increasingly entranced by our digital artefacts, they enable us not to feel what is really going on. These magic tricks of technology enable us to become disembodied from the earth, to tune out and numb out to the whispers and rumblings in our own body. \u201cSo we hang out in those virtual spaces \u2026 and lock the doors, closing us ever more thoroughly into that circuit of exchange with mirrors of our own invention\u201d, he writes. Technoculture has finally become the image of Narcissus, so insecure and self-absorbed by our own reflection, that we have failed to look up and realize that the land is on fire all around us.<\/p>\n

To really open up to the pain of the earth would require such a shocking confrontation with ourselves, that many of us flinch and look away. But as the venerable ecophilosopher and Buddhist systems thinker Joanna Macy emphasizes, it is impossible to be content until we wake up and accept the pain of the earth. Macy discusses the need to develop grieving practices and rituals to get in touch with those numb parts of ourselves that have been armoured and hardened. She urges us to come back to life, to come back to the animal and child parts of ourselves that have suffered, and to have great compassion for all of this suffering \u2013 for ourselves and the earth. For ourselves, because we have been violently forced to distance ourselves from our intuition and wisdom in order to get where we are today. And for the earth, because industrialism has for so long ignored nature\u2019s \u2018NO\u2019 that we will now suffer the direst consequences.<\/p>\n

Uneasy alliance<\/h2>

George Santayana is famous for saying \u2018\u201cthose who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it\u2019. But the situation we face is unprecedented. Prior in our history, the self-cannibalization of Rome, Persia and other great cultures, merely meant the downfall of a circumscribed, delimited civilization, plunging the region into a dark ages, but allowing other civilizations elsewhere to flourish. Had Rome not fallen, the Celts or Incas might have had to waste their precious time defending themselves from imperialists.<\/p>\n

Currently, however, there is no such alternative. The business model of capitalism and in many ways even democracy as we know it has been one of colonialism: stealing resources and ideas from the peripheries and siphoning them towards the imperial centres. This has been a model constructed on inequalities and injustice. More than a century ago, the sociologist Max Weber already observed, however, that \u2018we have no new continent at our disposal\u2019 to metabolize for a growing economy, and thus Weber was well aware that we need to find a new basis and legitimation mechanism for democracy.<\/p>\n

So far, an uneasy alliance between capitalism and democracy has required endless growth needed to placate the lower and middle economic classes from questioning and rejecting the obscene power asymmetries between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent baked into the economic system and thus the political system. Now, we need to find more resilient and compassionate models than the old world nation-state to reflect the simultaneous needs of coordinated global action on matters of the environment and human rights, on the one hand, and the local abilities to preserve ecological cultures, languages, and harmonious just traditions on the other.<\/p>\n\n\t

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