The Human as the Ecological Dead End: On the Fallacy and the Myth of Sustainable Design
Abstract
The notion of sustainability is interrogated in terms of the causality of its conceptual inconsistencies and its material effects by situating the core of the problem in human subjectivity, the main agent of exceptionalism, anthropocentrism and speciesism - the human as a geological force engendering the current sixth mass extinction. A reflection is made on the sustainable discourse in which the hitherto successful attempt to maintain predatory discourses on the vitality of the Earth is verified, while analysing symbolic and seemingly actual attempts to respond to human-centred forms of domination in order to create and and materialise otherwise, for instance, by means of design’s agency on materiality and ontology. A call is made for collective activisms in their non-anthropocentric expressions and queer potentialities, decentred from such persecutory humanism, with the hope, albeit utopian, of eroding the fallacious and mythological effects of sustainability - both engendered and masqueraded by anthropocentric discourses and practices of design.
Keywords
Design, Sustainability, Anthropocene, Queer Theory, Activism
The Fallacy and the Myth
As much as a fallacy, sustainability is a myth (Checker, 2020; MacCormack, 2019, 2021) that becomes materially ubiquitous in direct proportion to the diametrically global distribution of anthropocentric impulses of human action. The agricultural revolution, for instance, initiated by growing practices of local agriculture by humans over 100,000 years ago, has led not only to the clearing of forests and the erosion of soils, but more broadly to the shift of land habitation to land territorialization. Redundant or obvious enough, despite increasing insistences of comforting disbelief, the dominating human expropriation and exploitation of local and global natural resources has actively corroborated the Earth's cataclysm and the non-human animal holocaust, since the progression of such transformation is currently reflected in and verified by the development of (post-)industrialisation and hyper consumerism, thus accelerating environmental violations (Harari, 2015) made sources of profit within capitalism. Rooted in the development and transcending improvement of anthropocentric impulses, the diffusion of such human-enforced shifts is strengthened and promoted—to a large extent, but not exclusively—by seemingly all the processes (of transformation, production, and distribution of matter, information, governance, and social control) convergent to what is currently known as and/or intertwined to globalisation.
On the one hand, the notion of sustainability is notoriously fallacious when acknowledging how invariably dominated by power (currently in the shape of financial capitalism) the materialisation of human reality is, which may be observed in both material and symbolic practices and applications such as the instances of architecture, engineering and design. The banal examples of paper straws, green walls, low CO2 emissions by airlines and even green-labeled packagings that magically turn any product into a “sustainable” one (AKEPA, 2021) are absent of genuine or good-faith environmental care insofar as they deliberately mask the human drive to reproduce capital through false ideals, such as the technocratic and neoliberal smart city (Seixas & Bordignon, 2022). Similarly, the same logic applies on a global scale to the notions of recycling, reuse, and reduction, where keeping chemicals in recycled plastics (and “ecological” composite materials with added plastics) boycotts circular economy efforts, poisoning air, water and food as well as polluting biological systems (Greenpeace, 2023; IPEN, 2023). Thus, the unpopular greenwash, also marketed with creative analogous adjectives such as “eco”, “clean”, “natural” and others, is not limited to the extractivist, transformist and productivist interests of the commodified materiality. However, more relevant than the scientific and media centrality given to plastics, whose global recycling rate is only 9 per cent (OECD, 2022) and whose production is expected to triple by 2060 (Greenpeace, 2023), reduction should not be the focus.
Just as population reduction is problematic by inferring eugenicist thinking (MacCormack, 2021) and, more recently, eco-fascist (Cardoso, 2023), both of which are imbricated in the logic of human exceptionalism, reducing waste production is questionable both ethically and philosophically. From a critical perspective on the social contract (Rousseau, 1762), this issue is not addressed in an assertive way towards human privilege and its parasitic (Serres, 1991) forms of relationality and territorialization that are not symbiotic with the Earth, and therefore do not call into question its violating effects. Conversely, the causality of the problem is shifted to everything that prevents human exceptionalism from maintenance and reification. This epistemological oxymoron encompasses any and all forms of human activity that set out to interfere with the Earth's homeostasis, with or without the sustainable excuse, so that all humans must be held accountable for the Earth's environmental upheaval. The forged and comfortable claim for a “necessary change” (of exactly what?) in current environmental and design discourses has long been feeble faced with the factual action towards a radical rupture made simultaneously material and ontological.
On the other hand, the notion of sustainability is notoriously a myth that is intertwined with the encroachments of the anthropocene because, in relation to everything that is not assimilated to or recognised by it, “humans do not create symbiosis. Humans do not reciprocate. Humans use” (MacCormack, 2020, pp. 12–13), extract and appropriate the resources of the Earth, leaving trails of rubbish, pollution, waste and other raping footprints and forms of domination of the Earth based on a narcissist, consumerist and materially monolinear culture. And “every culture that leaves a trace is unsustainable” by definition, which configures “the myth of sustainability as a narrative that has been created by corporations to continue winning over consumers with the idea that what you are consuming is produced in a sustainable way”, as a justification (based on use and enslavement of non-human life and the Earth's resources) for not needing to truly look at what has been done to the planet and keeping us convinced that such behaviour will continue to be somehow advantageous as long as we are buying into such a concept (MacCormack, 2019).
Whether in “developed” countries, for not actually acting on social inequality (CNN, 2023), “developing” countries, for their scarce agency over aspects signed by sustainable treaties and agreements (Chandrakanth, 2021), or “ least developed” countries - which is itself a taxonomic categorisation that merely ratifies the oppressive position of subjectivation and social stratification systems - the concept of “sustainable development” is just a vain human position (Krenak, 2023). Guided by economic and technological premises conditioned to market imperatives (Lima, 2003), the debate on sustainable development conceals, with vehement cynicism, the duty of human accountability for the continued overexploitation and mass destruction of the Earth. Additionally, “this discourse on sustainability politically marks the condition of the human species alongside other species” (Corrêa, 2021, p. 8) in reiteration of the self-declared notion of human superiority disguised into the speciesism we idealised and imposed to other forms of biosentient life to please our ego at the expense of their lives. In this sense, it is not surprising that we, as the agents of the anthropocene, have caused the sixth mass extinction (MacCormack, 2021) at the same time that we design, at the peak of the 21st century’s climate and environmental crisis, nonsensically abject marketing and media concepts, such as “happy chicken” and “green transition”, to continue masquerading the environmental carnage and gentrification (Checker, 2020) that is the actual sustain of human occupation on Earth.
Yet from a social perspective, the dissymmetry with which many western societies have been built, anchored in processes of subjectivation, promotes and reiterates a pyramidal social stratification. Within a subject-object dialectic, this invariably grants to the dominant, to whom all basic needs are always already guaranteed, the hypothesis of “being sustainable”. At the same time, the dominated is often prevented from or even denied the minimum conditions of social development, thus heading to an impasse between surviving and having the luxury of being eco-friendly in the first instance. At this moment, it's worth noting that arguments such as “everyone can be sustainable” or “it costs nothing to have a sustainable position” are but barbarously privileged accusations against those at the bottom of the social pyramid. Those cannot and should not continue to sustain the massive (absent) responsibility of the subject who decides the course of human interference on Earth from the bloody and comfortable top of the social and speciesist piramid (which is seemingly the actual meaning of “sustainability”) while many indigenous people from the Krenak village fearfully grow some food in soil poisoned after the collapse of a Vale mining dam in Mariana, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, in 2015 (Dieguez, 2016).
Faced with a material reality fixed in a singular form of relationality with the Earth, materialising agents, such as design, construction and production practices (but not only), must assume a position of agency and political activism due to their direct and indirect roles in material transformation and in the production of artefacts of cultural value that, from a material perspective, are undeniably artificial. What other ways of relationality with the Earth may emerge and be cultivated from material approaches different from those that currently normalise the Earth’s exploitation and expropriation in the capitalist fetishism of “nature”?
Otherwise: Queering Human(ist)Design
If being parasitic has been constructed as the normalised standard, queering anthropocentric human forms of occupation and relationality may bolster thinking and acting otherwise towards our position with and for the Earth. Queer shares an intimate relation with the desire towards human(ist) collapse insofar as it insistently and tirelessly engenders “category trouble (even if new categories are sometimes reified in the process), which in turn contributes to the critique of the Human’s universalizing principles at the expense of the specifics of what it means to live as the occupant of discursive categories” (Giffney, 2008, p. 70). The term “queer”, in this sense, does not refer to the common conceptual use by LGBT+ identity politics in the united states of america as we would fall in the same ethical troubles of “reduction” or “recycling” designed for capitalist thriving: the hyper-mediatisation and consequent corrosion of the term in favour of a niche market that, with the banal use of the term “queer”, turns it into the same profitable token just like “sustainability”. It refers to the political ideal rooted in critical theory aimed at contradicting and frustrating identities and norms (Hesford, 2020; Wiegman & Wilson, 2015) to challenge “the very process and desire behind the act or impetus to ‘realize’ anything” (Giffney, 2008, p. 67 apud; Edelman, 2004). Also when applied to materialisation processes such as design, queering incites the potential to deviate from the omnidirectional continuity of objectification processes, or the fantasy of “a becoming object that locates pleasure in commodities and norms and the way of life they signal and organize for their consumers and subjects” (Hesford, 2020, p. 106).
To imagine a materiality as different to that imposed by current capitalist endeavours still seems a very distant, if not utopian, reality. The culturally constructed and normalised form of relating to matter - through a linear economy responsible for the loss of resources in production chains, the excessive generation of waste at the end of life, the excessive use of energy and the erosion of ecosystems (The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2013 apud; Michelini et al., 2017) - is yet another system which modus operandi projects anthropocentric impulses onto the reproduction of extraction, production and disposal systems, in this case of matter and of energy. Seemingly in contrast, the notion of circularity in material economy promises to “regenerate” such industrial production systems (Hobson, 2016 apud; Michelini et al., 2017) by the use of renewable energies and the elimination of toxic chemicals and waste through the design of materials, products, systems and business models (Michelini et al., 2017) in which the concept of a material's ‘useful life’ is extinguished and, consequently, the material effects of disposal, such as rubbish, pollution, waste and other footprints on the Earth.
Material economy’s circularity may be seen, in a first sight, as another way of thinking about our relation to the Earth for seemingly proposing a shift in the material cycle that primarily profits from the reproduction of human waste, and therefore, there would be something queer about circular economy as it attempts to contradict materialisation processes that establish reality based on, among many other things, use and disposal. However, it seems more like an euphemism or, more optimistically, an incipience than an actual shift because despite being theoretically and methodologically founded as a consistent concept, a scientific framework and a set of policies, “global economy is only 8.6% circular” (CGRi, 2020, p. 6) and still fails in its material practical application, an evidence that our will to change is not that great, even if we are daily threatened with an environmental apocalypse that we created and that will take us all together (hopefully, solely and at the first place). That is, organisations (private and public) fail in deploying new circular business models due to the scale of the globalised market (Baldassarre & Calabretta, 2023), thereby subjecting the circular economy to the same insufficient impasse of recycling, reusing and repurposing.
Activism beyond Us
Despite a practically ubiquitous economic conditioning that subscribes the vast majority of human operations to a subject-object dialectic towards the Earth, the visible potential in such materialistic methodologies and strategies is, optimistically, a primordium of non-reproductive thinking, in the sense of willing to thwart the linear logic of repetition of what is produced. To be(come) otherwise starts by acting for another ethics towards the Earth, and, accordingly, by creating different material relations that do not slaughter Earth's vitality. In order to underpin such “non-reproductions”, collective expressions of activism have the potential to foster a non-anthropocentric shift, as long as they queerly assume a contradictory position to human exceptionalism. Relying on a humanist-based relationality or human-centred epistemologies would be equal to maintaining the same repetitive human exception that has created a historical materiality of domination.
Many of us with progressive political intentions claim repeatedly that the root for an actual change is education, especially those forms of social transformative pedagogical processes, such as proposed by Paulo Freire, which include “the self-transformation of human beings, promoting the (critical) interfering posture of these subjects in the context where they are inserted” (Freitas & Freitas, 2020, p. 20). Or even proposals for environmental education anchored in overcoming the fragmentation of knowledge through the “interdisciplinarity of a process aimed at the critical appreciation of the environmental issue from the historical, anthropological, economic, political, cultural and ecological perspectives” (Tozoni-Reis, 2011 apud; Corrêa, 2021, pp. 15–16). However, despite the consistency and seriousness of such proposals, they do not seem to critically address the predatory human subject in the construction of historical materiality, assuming it as an inexorable part of life on Earth, and thus unintentionally reiterating the practice of human exceptionalism. To think of an education as detached from speciesism, privilege and anthropocentric drives, in which attention is distributed to other biosentient systems whose life should be equally cared for, is core for a consistently holistic discussion about ecology. To do so, it is also necessary to understand education as a form of collective activism, in which reflections between “educator” and “student”, “researchers” and “civil society” are made unhierarchical, within a blurred distinction between the “I” and the “other”, and focussed on acting.
While imagining an activist education decentred from human privilege still seems utopian, other actions, albeit incipient, may be undertaken. One materially possible action is to put an end to the linear economy’s lucrative monotony by actually disfavouring and boycotting the consumption of material artefacts from large multinational corporations with large production scales, even if they present an ideal of environmental accountability. The globalised scale continues to be one of the pillars of cynical unsustainability sold as anything “green”, “eco” or “bio”.
Our (Dead) End
Critical thinking is needed to formulate methodologies, strategies and activisms that aim to redesign earthly relations beyond cartesian divisions for flattening any hypothesis of subjectivation and stratification of life and matter, and that could make up another material reality with the Earth. Awareness must follow abolitionist actions, such as boycotting large multinational corporations actively responsible for either material and environmental destruction or for cultural and symbolic appropriation. Activism must take on the commitment to support and care for the vitality of the Earth, focussing on queering the ways in which material reality is created, thus envisioning and fostering the emergence of life without the suppression of the Earth's resources or its use without retribution and regeneration. From the point of view of design, this means overcoming the conditioning and dependence on the interests and market pressures of financial capitalism, bolstering the creation of other material and ontological processes, artifacts and forms of thinking that diverge from those employed and cultivated by the neoliberal and post-industrial regimes - those which ultimately give meaning to the cynicism of “sustainable development”.
Activism is called to overcome the very arbitrary notion of sustainability. There would be no sustainable thinking if there were no human advantage of Earth. Sustainable thinking is a political, cultural, material, historical and, first and foremost, a human issue. The failure, sometimes deliberate, to acknowledge all the human dimensions in such an issue, especially the self-declared superiority of its speciesism, leads to the creation of myths to distract from any ongoing anthropocentric predatory domination. The problem of sustainability is a human design to which there is no solution other than an ontological rupture in which the foundations of humanism, anthropocentrism and speciesism are annihilated. Activisms that queer humanist systems of signification like non-anthropocentric artistic practices, deep ecology education and intersectionality beyond identity politics and speciesism are claimed towards the collective imperative of quitting to be exceptional, of giving up being (this) human, of undesigning our subjectivity and material reality, of becoming something other than this ecological dead end.
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