ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how we might arrive at a vision of sustainability and political ecology by engaging with this critique. The meaning and structure of the futurity at work in sustainability discourse remains underexamined. Compared to the end of the world that current popular sustainability discourse asks us to think, namely the immediate ecological crises, and crisis is always immediate, solar death is an event almost unthinkably far in the future. Jean-Francois Lyotard does, however, engage extensively in a critique of development and democracy that is pertinent to contemporary discourses about sustainability, the ecological crisis and the relationship between Nature and politics. Sustainability of life on the planet Earth requires intervention in this openness by means of what is called 'regulation'. A Lyotardian reorientation asks us to approach the problem from a different angle and shows how the ways in which we 'think' sustainability shifts the stakes of its politics.
