Sustainability From Below: Mission

The ecological devastation of the earth and the immiserization of billions of its inhabitants cries out for redress: sustainable development. Alas, naive supplications to government to right wrongs fail to realize the complicity of public policy, often covert, with the ravenous agents of ruin, often, like Enron, big corporate names in such industries as agriculture, energy, chemicals, and transportation.

Sustainable development offers a coherent and feasible alternative vision to global laissez faire, but aimed at restoring vibrant ecosystems, promoting right livelihood for all, and addressing the glaring inequities and mass misery now intensified by globalization. A major premise of the Strategic Sustainability Web Site states that the institutions, cultures, technologies, methods, and practices that can build world sustainability already exist and must be set in motion by an active and informed cosmopolitan citizenry.

Sustainable development demands a synthetic, critical, and complex thought process. We must think simultaneously about economics, ecology, social and ethical impacts (especially environmental justice, another emerging field), within an open and democratic process. The topic begs for a holistic epistemology and a comprehensive ontology. The contemporary triumph of neo-classical economic thought, positivistic science, and laissez faire globalization must be encountered. Our mission here, however, rejects the romanticism of utopian speculation in favor of pragmatic and strategic thought. A sense of urgency accompanies this project.

We work here between the destructive and a constructive aspects of globalization. To frame the destructive side of globalization, I will borrow a Hindi term from the mid-nineteenth century, Juggernaut. The term Juggernaut derives from the 1841 expression Hindi JagannÀth, literally, lord of the world, the title of Vishnu, indicating a massive inexorable force, campaign, movement, or object that crushes whatever is in its path (Mirriam Webster).

The transnational assemblage of political and corporate actors merge into a Juggernaut, a process of globalization from above that ruinously overrides natural and human communities, the home places that the Juggernaut renders as objects for its maw. An unsettled world with enclaves of enormous wealth and privilege becomes the inevitable product of the mechanisms of Juggernaut.

Boosters of globalization refer glowingly to the expanding global enclaves of wealth and privilege. Critics of globalization see this but also reckon the consequences shunted aside: the ruins. They go together, which requires a rethinking of the inexorable, perhaps irreversible (Hardt and Negri) forces of globalization, the Juggernaut.

To understand who and what sets the Juggernaut in motion requires a critical perspective that includes politics, economics, demographics, geography, ecology, history, and more. We will call the broad investigation political economy in the classic sense of Adam Smith, examining the formation of wealth and, here, its obverse, ruin.

The constructive side sees the emergence of a global civil society in response to these ruinous dynamics, a sustainability percolating from below. Our mission: Unearth the emergence of a spontaneos and cosmopolitan sustainability from below, if such a process exists and if we can discover it, even if covered up.

The goals of the Strategic Sustainability Web Site:

to show specifically and empirically how the globalized Juggernaut unfolds: the task of critical analysis;
to offer remedies to Juggernaut that are accessible to citizens practicing cosmpolitan regionalism in the pursuit of sustainability from below: the articulation of right livelihood in the face of Juggernaut;
to frame public policies that strategically counteract those initiated by and for the agents of ruin: the civic assertion denying legitimacy and resources to Juggernaut.

To pursue strategic sustainability, three parallel projects go forward:

The development of the potential of cosmopolitan regionalism, whereby sustainability percolates up from grass-roots origins. This notion guides a companion project, Unearthing Sustainability, which examines civil organizations associated with the Ramapo College Environmental Insitute for their potential for sustainabilty from below.
The Political Economy of Ruin lays out the political economic basis of Juggernaut and defines alternatives. This project offers a critique that includes, but goes beyond, ecological economics.
Sustainability and public policy, offering a critical examination of public policy and a reconstruction toward authentic sustainability.

Mission Statement