Critical Perspectives on Sustainable Development in

Sweden

Daniel Mossberg, Director of Studies CEMUS – CSD UPPSALAdaniel.mossberg@csduppsala.uu.se

Uppsala 2009-09-02

How do I help my students uncover their passions? What infuriates or terrifies or enraptures them? What does all three, and more? What messages do my students desperately want and need to convey, and to whom must they convey them? […] It goes back to the same old question, but with a new one at the end. Who are you? What do you love? And the new one: What do you want? (Jensen 2004:182-83)

The purpose of this evenings lecture/mini-workshop:• Together try to define what this course uniquely can offer you as students

• Start the process of critical thinking and develop a set of tools for forming critical questions to lecturers

• Connect the sometimes elusive and fuzzy concept of SD with a useful scientific approach

• To present you with a personal reflection and perspective on Sweden

What is your general view of Sweden?

1. On your own write down everything that comes to mind 3 minutes

2. Discuss with the person/s next to you 5 minutes

Sweden and Sustainability?

1. On your own write down everything that comes to mind 3 minutes

2. Discuss with the person/s next to you 5 minutes

Critical Perspectives on Sustainable Development in

Sweden

What is Sustainable Development?

”Sustainable Development” a romantic labyrinth with many view points

19th century

1. Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

the concept of 'needs', in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs.

Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development , Chapter 2: Towards Sustainable Development, http://www.un-documents.net/ocf-02.htm#I

In general terms, let’s define sustainability as the ability of a system to continue working (and evolving) over the long term.

AtKisson, Alan, 2008, The ISIS Agreement.

Sustainable development has three dimensions: economic, environmental and social. These are frequently referred to as the triple bottom line, and are used to gauge the success of a particular development program or project.

Rogers et. al., 2008:42, An Introduction to Sustainable Development

What is a Critical Perspective?

It is not obvious what critical thinking is, and philosophers of education accordingly have developed accounts of critical thinking that attempt to state what it is and why it is valuable—i.e., why educational systems should aim to cultivate it in students.

These accounts generally (though not universally) agree that critical thinkers share at least the following two characteristics:

(1) they are able to reason well—i.e., to construct and evaluate various reasons that have been or can be offered for or against candidate beliefs, judgments, and actions; and

(2) they are disposed or inclined to be guided by reasons so evaluated—i.e., actually to believe, judge, and act in accordance with the results of such reasoned evaluations. Beyond this level of agreement lie a range of contentious issues.

"education, philosophy of." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 2  Sept.  2009  <http://search.eb.com/eb/article-261243>.

These questions have given rise to other, more specific and hotly contested issues. Is critical thinking relevantly “neutral” with respect to the groups who use it, or is it in fact politically biased, unduly favouring a type of thinking once valued by white European males—the philosophers of the Enlightenment and later eras—while undervaluing or demeaning types of thinking sometimes associated with other groups, such as women, nonwhites, and non-Westerners—i.e., thinking that is collaborative rather than individual, cooperative rather than confrontational, intuitive or emotional rather than linear and impersonal?

Do standard accounts of critical thinking in these ways favour and help to perpetuate the beliefs, values, and practices of dominant groups in society and devalue those of marginalized or oppressed groups? Is reason itself, as some feminist and postmodern philosophers have claimed, a form of hegemony?

"education, philosophy of." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 2  Sept.  2009  <http://search.eb.com/eb/article-261243>.

What do we see?What do we understand?What are our reflective

emotions?

What do we not see?What do we not understand?What reflective emotions are

not felt?

…that is, what can we uncover and reveal in the focus of our research and studies with the help of a scientific method and perspective, critical thinking and reflection, that would otherwise have been hidden from us?

”Critical Sustainability” a critical and sometimes politically incorrect discourse

20th century

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2002/1203apollo17.html

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2002/1203apollo17.html

Why do you think there are so few images in the popular culture for sustainability? "Sustainable" is essentially the opposite of "industrial." Sustainability implies a non-exploitive relationship with nature and a basic self-sufficiency in life. Well, industrialism can't allow that to exist because that kind of living would not create, manufacture, use or consume. Sustainability, community and self-sufficiency are antithetical to industrialism.

Yes, they have come up with this idea now called "sustainable development," but it is actually the most odious oxymoron going around. Development of the kind that is meant in industrial civilization is destructive of communities, people's lands, and eventually, of people's livelihoods. Sustainable development is a convenient industrial myth. It really means that corporations try to get people in the great world south to become consumers so they can keep this Ponzi scheme of industrialism going.

Sale, Kirkpatrick, An Interview with Kirkpatrick Sale – Rebel Against the Future, hämtad 2009-06-26, http://www.culturechange.org/issue9/kirkpatricksale.html

The idea of “sustainability” has gone mainstream. Thanks to Prius-driving movie stars, it’s even hip. What began as a grassroots movement to promote responsible sustainable development has become a bullet point in corporate eco-branding strategies.

[…]

Sustainability. Gone are the days when the word conjured up images of unapologetic veganism, dreadlocks, and mud-brick homes. From ecohippie to ecohip.

Adrian, Parr, 2005, Hijacking Sustainability.

Sustainable Development/s

Cultural

Social

Economic

Planetary, biospherelimits and basic needs

Human limits and basic needs

Planetary limits & needs

Human limits & needs

Economically sustainable

Socially sustainable

Culturally

Sustainable Development/s

Planetary limits & needs

Human limits & needs

Economically sustainable

Socially sustainable

Culturally

Planetary limits & needs

Human limits & needs

Economically sustainable

Socially sustainable

What is Sweden?

Uppsala, Sweden

Uppsala, Sweden7 december 1972

Try to formulate a number of general starting points, principles, tools…for the Q & A with lecturers

1. On your own try writ down a couple of principles3 minutes

2. Discuss with the person/s next to you 5 minutes

Art, like religion, is one of the ways we digest what is happening to us, make the sense out of it that proceeds to action. Otherwise, the only role left to us -- noble, but also enraging in its impotence -- is simply to pay witness. The world is never going to be, in human time, more intact than it is at this moment. Therefore it falls to those of us alive now to watch and record its flora, its fauna, its rains, its snow, its ice, its peoples. To document the buzzing, glorious, cruel, mysterious planet we were born onto, before in our carelessness we leave it far less sweet.

Time rushes on, in ways that humans have never before contemplated. That famous picture of the earth from outer space that Apollo beamed back in the late 1960s -- already that's not the world we inhabit; its poles are melting, its oceans rising. We can register what is happening with satellites and scientific instruments, but can we register it in our imaginations, the most sensitive of all our devices?

McKibben, Bill, 2005, What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art, Grist Magazine, http://www.grist.org/article/mckibben-imagine/

Most of us sense that the Earth is more than a sphere of rock with a thin layer of air, ocean and life covering the surface. We feel that we belong here as if this planet were indeed our home. […] The new understanding has come from going forth and looking back to see the Earth from space. The vision of that splendid white flecked blue sphere stirred us all, no matter that by now it is almost a visual cliché. It even opens the mind's eye, just as a voyage away from home enlarges the perspective of our love for those who remain there.

The first impact of those voyages was the sense of wonder given to the astronauts and to us as we shared their experience vicariously through television, but at the same time the Earth was viewed from outside by the more objective gaze of scientific instruments. These devices were quite impervious to human emotion yet they also sent back the information that let us see the Earth as a strange and beautiful anomaly. They showed our planet is made of the same elements and in much the same proportions as are Mars and Venus, but they also revealed our sibling planets to be bare and barren and as different from the Earth as a robin from a rock.

If we are "all creatures great and small," from bacteria to whales, part of Gaia then we are all of us potentially important to her well being. We knew in our hearts that the destruction of a whole ranges of other species was wrong but now we know why. No longer can we merely regret the passing of one of the great whales, or the blue butterfly, nor even the smallpox virus. When we eliminate one of these from Earth, we may have destroyed a part of ourselves, for we also are a part of Gaia.

There are many possibilities for comfort as there are for dismay in contemplating the consequences of our membership in this great commonwealth of living things. It may be that one role we play is as the senses and nervous system for Gaia. Through our eyes she has for the first time seen her very fair face and in our minds become aware of herself. We do indeed belong here. The earth is more than just a home, it's a living system and we are part of it.

James Lovelock, What is Gaia?, hämtad 2009-06-12, http://www.ecolo.org/lovelock/what_is_Gaia.html

En eld av … (Malm 2007)Geosfär - Biosfär –– Atmosfär - Noosfär - Teknosfär

Vladimir Vernadsky

The world faces significant environmental problems: shortages of clean and accessible freshwater, degradation of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, increases in soil erosion, loss of biodiversity, changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere, declines in fisheries, and the possibility of significant changes in climate. These changes are occurring over and above the stresses imposed by the natural variability of a dynamic planet and are intersecting with the effects of past and existing patterns of conflict, poverty, disease, and malnutrition.

The changes taking place are, in fact, changes in the human-nature relationship. They are recent, they are profound, and many are accelerating. They are cascading through the Earth’s environment in ways that are difficult to understand and often impossible to predict. Surprises abound. At least, these human-driven changes to the global environment will require societies to develop a multitude of creative response and adaptation strategies. Some are adapting already; most are not. At worst, they may drive the Earth itself into a different state that may be much less hospitable to humans and other forms of life. (Moore et al. 2001)

Berrien Moore III, Arild Underdal, Peter Lemke & Michel Loreau (IGBP Science No. 4) 2001, Global Change and the Earth System: A planet under pressure http://www.igbp.net/documents/resources/science-4.pdf

One of the things that we as Okanagan people know is that our very flesh is our land. Our very breath that we take is our land. Everything that is about us is our land .... And so when we call on our spirits in the spirit world, that's how we talk to them. When we refer to everything that is, we have only one word meaning the all, everything, the land, the water, the birds, the insects – everything, including ourselves. We say tamihu. And that means everything, including us, has that life force in it. (Armstrong citerad av Suziki et al. 2004)

Jeanette Armstrong, citerad ur From Naked Ape to Superspecies 2004

… the third great discovery of modern science: the realization that the Earth's system is itself self-organizing or self-regulating. And one easy way to capture this is simply to say that the Earth is alive. Of course, it's not alive the way a salamander is. It doesn't give birth to baby Earths. But it's alive in the sense that is actually organizes itself so that the complexity of its life forms might continue. (Swimme citerad av Suziki et al. 2004)

Brian Swimme, citerad ur From Naked Ape to Superspecies 2004

Our planetary difficulties: our techonologies have resultedhttp://books.google.com/books?id=M72CiOOwtpYC&pg=PA47&dq=brian+swimme&hl=sv#PPA47,M1

Bikupa // Värderingsövning

Planeten Jorden”Leder kulturella gestaltningar respektive religiösa tolkningar av de

globala överlevnadsfrågorna till handlingar och beteenden som är ett steg mot en hållbar utveckling/ar? I ett kortsiktigt perspektiv? I ett

långsiktigt perspektiv?”

Ingen betydelse Mycket stor betydelse

”Earth at Night” en bild av planeten Jorden tagen av satelliter

11 augusti 2002

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2002/1203apollo17.html

Grottmålningar Lascaux, Frankrike

en av världens äldsta ”målningar” skapad av människanca: 15 000 år f.kr.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/court_and_social/article4425293.ece

Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it, the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's–in which all the people'smaterial wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.

[…]

The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain smallamount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people.Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as aninvidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo. (Sahlins 1972)

Sahlins, Marshall David, 1972, The Original Affluent Society, Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.

http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/

A New Green History of the World…

Clive Pointing, 20xx,

Maslows behovspyramid

Where, then, does the fall of evolutionary psychology leave the idea of human nature? Behavioral ecology replaces it with "it depends"—that is, the core of human nature is variability and flexibility, the capacity to mold behavior to the social and physical demands of the environment. As Buller says, human variation is not noise in the system; it is the system. To be sure, traits such as symbolic language, culture, tool use, emotions and emotional expression do indeed seem to be human universals. It's the behaviors that capture the public imagination—promiscuous men and monogamous women, stepchild-killing men and the like—that turn out not to be. And for a final nail in the coffin, geneticists have discovered that human genes evolve much more quickly than anyone imagined when evolutionary psychology was invented, when everyone assumed that "modern" humans had DNA almost identical to that of people 50,000 years ago. Some genes seem to be only 10,000 years old, and some may be even younger.

That has caught the attention of even the most ardent proponents of evo psych, because when the environment is changing rapidly—as when agriculture was invented or city-states arose—is also when natural selection produces the most dramatic changes in a gene pool. Yet most of the field's leaders, admits UNM's Miller, "have not kept up with the last decade's astounding progress in human evolutionary genetics." The discovery of genes as young as agriculture and city-states, rather than as old as cavemen, means "we have to rethink to foundational assumptions" of evo psych, says Miller, starting with the claim that there are human universals and that they are the result of a Stone Age brain. Evolution indeed sculpted the human brain. But it worked in malleable plastic, not stone, bequeathing us flexible minds that can take stock of the world and adapt to it.

Begley, Sharon, 2009, Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves . Newsweek, http://www.newsweek.com/id/202789

Bikupa // Värderingsövning

Mänsklighetens historia”Hur stor betydelse har kunskapen om, och förståelsen av

mänsklighetens historia för arbetet med en hållbar utveckling/ar? …från människans ursprung ca: 3-4 miljoner år sedan fram tills idag.”

Ingen alls Mycket stor

New Orleans, LA efter orkanen Katrina

augusti 2005

http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/whentheleveesbroke/http://www.teachingthelevees.org/

As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

Justice William O. Douglas, The Douglas Letters : Selections from the Private Papers of Justice William O. Douglas (1987) edited by Melvin I. Urofsky and Philip E. Urofsky, p. 16

Bikupa // Värderingsövning

New Orleans”Leder kulturella gestaltningar respektive religiösa tolkningar av de

globala överlevnadsfrågorna till handlingar och beteenden som är ett steg mot en hållbar utveckling/ar? I ett kortsiktigt perspektiv? I ett

långsiktigt perspektiv?”

Ingen betydelse Mycket stor betydelse

Himmelska fridens torg en ensam mans protest och civil courage

5 juni 1989

http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/activism_non_profit/watch/v17952557FjB5JmA6#

Civilisationskritik den västerländska kulturkritiken

från den första civilisationen fram tills idag

Today's crisis is pervasive and deepening, accelerating its impact on all of life in our biosphere. Many are now beginning to question the nature and validity of modernity/mass society/the techno-culture. Maybe it's the problem, not the solution. It could be that the dynamics of this frightening, worsening reality goes all the way back to civilization itself. What is driving it all forward to a non-future seems to go deeper than capitalism, for example. We must face truly stark times and begin, together, to question all the givens and move toward solutions that undo what some very basic institutions are delivering.

When people began domesticating animals and plants just 10,000 years ago, our species began a downhill slide. This is the premise of the anti-civilization movement, which is based on several decades of archaeological and ethnographic research. There is mounting, convincing evidence that domestication of animals and plants brought previously unknown side effects: hierarchy, gender inequality, disease, haves and have-nots, soil depletion and the creation of deserts, and a host of other ills. These negative trends have continued to build momentum, and now appear to be leading to worldwide catastrophe.

John Zerzan is a leading theorist of the anti-civilization movement. John's arguments are based in part on an assessment of human prehistory that is now part of the standard university curriculum. Contrary to long-held stereotypes that described prehistoric human life as "nasty, brutish, and short," for the past few decades, scholars have considered our two-million-year existence as gatherers and hunters as the only successful human adaptation to the planet. Origins alone do not contain the whole solution to the why of the emptiness and the deteriorating quality of social existence today. But looking at how life was once and for such a long time, combined with existing indigenous wisdom, may point to a way forward. (Zerzan 2009)

Zerzan, John, 2009, Introduction. www.johnzerzan.net

Industrial civilization is incompatible with life. It is systematically destroying life on this planet, undercutting its very basis. This culture is, to put it bluntly, murdering the earth. Unless it’s stopped – whether we intentionally stop it or the natural world does, through ecological collapse or other means - it will kill every living being. We need to stop it.

Jensen & McBay, 2009, What We Leave Behind

Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.

Premise Six: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.

Premise Seven: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.

Jensen, Derrick, 200x, Endgame, Premises of Endgame

Bikupa // Värderingsövning

Civilisationskritik/Anarkoprimitiv.”Leder nya insikter och välgrundad kunskap om de globala

överlevnadsfrågorna till handlingar och beteenden som är ett steg mot en hållbar utveckling/ar? I ett kortsiktigt perspektiv? I ett långsiktigt

perspektiv?”

Ingen betydelse Mycket stor betydelse

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism#Dehumanization_.28Frankenstein_argument.29

Djupekologi…

Arne Naess, 19xx,

Radical Ecology

Carolyn Merchant, 1992, Radical Ecology

The psychological structure is the same. Semon has termed it 'mneme',[2] whereas I call it the 'collective unconscious'. The individual Self is a portion, or excerpt, or representative, of something universally present in all living creatures, and, therefore, a correspondingly graduated kind of psychological process, which is born anew in every creature. Since earliest times, the inborn manner of acting [p. 476] has been called instinct, and for this manner of psychic apprehension of the object I have proposed the term archetype. I may assume that what is understood by instinct is familiar to everyone. It is another matter with the archetype. This term embraces the same idea as is contained in 'primordial image' (an expression borrowed from Jakob Burckhardt), and as such I have described it in Chapter xi of this book. I must here refer the reader to that chapter, in particular to the definition of 'image'.

Carl G. Jung, Psyhcological Types, chapter X,1921, översatt av H. Godwyn Baynes 1923