ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that sustainability is a candidate for what Heidegger calls the saving power. The argument focusses on three issues: reduction of nature to resource, exclusion of other knowledge-systems, and anthropocentrism. First, based on Heidegger’s accounts of the historical emergence of modern technology and the role and limits of science in determining the ontology and epistemology of modernity, sustainability sciences are argued, even more so than art, to be well positioned to open an alternative relation to nature. Secondly, weak sustainability, through its ideology of conservation, is shown still to function within Gestell. Next, the idea of ecosystem services is examined to argue that strong sustainability makes possible a relation to being that expresses what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit. The final part articulates strong sustainability’s promise of “the saving power” in a constellation of sustaining, living, logic that rethinks Heidegger’s building, dwelling, thinking.
