BEYOND SUSTAINABILITY
Re-Orienting VCU for the Global Environmental Crisis
There is no denying that we are all now living and learning amidst an irreversible climate crisis. Nothing that we do, nothing that we study, nothing that we seek to achieve gets to escape this global reality. The climate crisis is not ‘just’ about fossil fuels or greenhouse gases; it is about all of the many overlapping and intertwined ways that industrial society is destabilizing, debasing and destroying the life-sustaining capacities of the world we inhabit. So what are we to do?
Denial and disavowal are no longer options. We cannot simply look the other way or tell ourselves stories about how it’s going to be OK or how someone else will probably figure out a solution. Nor can we simply allow a blind faith in “science” to overshadow the hard work that has to be done politically, culturally, and socially to confront this crisis. A few new technologies or policies here or there won’t cut it; this is what the scientists who’ve come together as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are making unquestionably clear: “individual behavior change is insufficient”; we need coordinated and comprehensive “societal transformation,” and this “cannot be achieved through incremental change.”
This doesn’t mean we all have to magically become 100% green overnight. As Anne Marie Bonneau says, we need everyone to show up imperfectly. We’re all part of this ecocidal system, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still try to challenge, confront, and transform it without beating ourselves up with feelings of guilt, hypocrisy, and shame.
So what does that mean for us, and what does that mean for our university? How do we engage with humility and imperfection as well as a strong desire to make the world radically otherwise? It is no longer sufficient – politically, ethically or environmentally – to set our goals on “sustaining” institutions like the university. We need to move beyond sustainability, asking ourselves what part we play, and what part VCU plays – in conceptualizing, planning and fighting for the total societal transformations that “science” is telling us we need.
We cannot imagine that a single “university sustainability plan” will suffice – or that it will even begin to address the deepest roots of our problems: an industrial system of production and consumption, a way of life, a military and industrial order, a social and economic system. We have to consider how everything about our way of life – locally and globally – has added up to a devastatingly ecocidal “civilization” that seems intent on destroying the conditions of life in the name of comfort, wealth and military power. We either accept our responsibility to transform ourselves into an institution that confronts these grand challenges; or we remain comfortably part of the problems enveloping us and our world. And most importantly we need to do this work together. Along these lines, Beyond Sustainability is an effort to create our own collective vision of the university – what it has been historically, and what we want it to become.If you’re interested in learning more, contact jgoldstein2@vcu.edu
Billion Worlds Lab 