DECC 2012 Transcript

1. I propose to start with the title of this conference, ‘Beyond Sustainability: Building Sustainable Communities’.

2. I would start by questioning why we need to go beyond the contemporary meaning of ‘sustainability’.

3. Are we moving beyond the green-washing, postpolitical, pro-market connotations of sustainability? That sustainability has come to mean everything and therefore also nothing today—except for more legitimacy to produce more and to consume more?

4. Or are we moving beyond the recognition that even with sustainability, we may come to a point of unsustainability. For example, in building sustainable cities to accommodate growing populations, we may collectively come to a point when even being committed to sustainability we would become unsustainable in aggregation by the absolute amount of irreplaceable resources consumed and necessary wastes produced. Or in other words, we are beginning to acknowledge that there is a paradoxical willfulness in our commitment to be sustainable, we have intentionally neglected uneasy political choices of population control over the more acceptable and pro-market choices of building sustainable cities.

5. Or perhaps this is the hardest conjecture of all: that to be truly sustainable, we have to look beyond the former two oversights at the community as the heart of sustainability. But what is a community?

6. Here, I distinguish a community from a club and a co-op.

7. A club filters its memberships through several control parameters, for example, ability to pay for access, similar preferences or competencies, or even converging ideologies. It is in other words, an enclave of like-mindedness with the discretion on who to admit and who to reject held by the elites of this enclave. But a sustainable community in our world today is likely to be made up of individuals with diverse values and interests who nonetheless want to live together in physical, intellectual or spiritual proximity without the exclusive boundary condition of an enclave. The community differs from the club precisely in the condition that there is liberty of entry or departure without invitation or coercion. The questions then that this distinction raised are, one, what could possibly sustain solidarity amid pluralism, and two, how do we inspire attractiveness and then loyalty to the communities that we build without the baggage of symbolic exclusiveness?

8. Similarly, the community is different from a co-op. A co-op is distinguished by the cooperative relationships directed towards the sustainment of a commercial enterprise. If and when the commercial mission is extinguished, then the cooperation in the co-op is also extinguished. In other words, an extrinsic objective or mission defines and sustains the co-op. However, in a sustainable community, the community is sustained intrinsically by the relationships of its members first: we must first enjoy and respect our mutual presence without extrinsic cause. The advantage that the community therefore has over the co-op is that it can define and seek out new missions or objectives without compromising its own organizational structure. In short, the community is a self-renewing structure, capable of forging new missions and objectives on one hand, and on the other hand, a self-perpetuating organization able to pass down and evolve its original mission across generations. The question then that this distinction raises are, one, how do we evolve existing models of co-op into communities if it is desirable to do so, and two, how do we prevent present communities from turning into commercially-defined, pro-market co-ops?

9. I do not want to give you the impression that I am talking about ideal or Utopian communities. Communities are the arenas of contestations and conflicts. But paradoxically, conflicts and the resolutions of conflicts are the hallmarks of sustainable communities. If we grow bitter and indifferent from our verbal squabbles, or if we go to violence or war because of conflicts, then clearly this is neither a sustainable nor ideal notion of what sustainable community means. The sustainable community must therefore have some ability to withstand assaults from the inside and from the external environment.

10. Economist Albert Hirschman once suggested that under organizational conflict, there are three possible responses, namely exit, voice or loyalty. In conflict, we can choose to avoid it and exit the community. However, we could also voice our discontent or if we are steadfast, we could choose to be loyal to our own point of view or to this community. The design specification for a sustainable community then, if we take Hirschman’s theory simply as a heuristic, is how to build a community that entails a very low desire to exit and a high preference for engagement through voice as constructive dialogues.

11. Finally, one may think that the sustainable community must therefore engender high loyalty. From the surface this seems to be true. However, I also think something additional is necessary in order for productive loyalty to exist. Adolf Eichmann was very loyal to Hitler and his genocidal cause, and that did neither the Germanic community nor the global community any good. Instead his unquestioning loyalty brought great evil. It is therefore of paramount importance to constantly question the quality of any loyalty. With a commitment for loyalty one must never forget to question the morality of the status quo—for this questioning is what distinguishes ethics from morality and is the necessary ethical duty required within any sustainable community.