ABSTRACT
The idea of sustainability ultimately calls for action in society, politics and academia. Sustainability demands that we take precautionary action to ensure the well-being of future generations, that we dismantle existing conditions of injustice between the rich and the poor and that we treat the natural environment with care. These demands are extremely demanding both ethically and intellectually:
From an ethical perspective, each person, society as a whole and above all those who represent certain groups of people politically are called upon to take action against unjust conditions. This means striving to live life in such a way that it does not endanger the natural environment upon which human survival or indeed nature as a whole depends. When doing so, each person needs to ask themselves whether what they are doing right now is beneficial in the long term as well. In other words they need to put all the things they do in their everyday lives to this test. In doing so they will probably discover that many of their actions – if not most of them – do not do justice to the demands of sustainability. Unlike ordinary citizens, politicians have an additional responsibility for collective action.
Intellectually speaking, sustainability demands that we are aware at all times of what is beneficial and how it can be achieved. Furthermore, any decisions that are made need to prove their worth over very long periods of time.
Demands of this kind can easily become overwhelming which, rather than stimulating action, threatens to stifle it. It is not uncommon for them to be clothed in quasi-religious rhetoric accompanied by an appeal to the authority of science. This is often followed by the demand for immediate change – a fundamental, rapid transformation of our modes of production and consumption and of our way of life – because it is only this, so it is said, which can avert the disastrous consequences of climate change (to name an especially pressing sustainability problem). What we identify in such utterances is an over-exaggerated trust in academia, i.e. a lack of appreciation for its limitations, as well as an inflated estimation of the potential of our actions. On this basis, all attempts to solve serious problems of sustainability are doomed to failure from the start. The reality is too far removed from the ideal of a ‘sustainable world’ to be able to bridge the gap within a short space of time.