“Sustainability” vs. Sustainable Ambiguity

Have you noticed the proliferation of phrases like “sustainable product” or “sustainable business” or “the sustainable university”?

It seems everyone and everything nowadays is aiming to sustain itself as if it were intrinsically a good thing to be sustainable.

But “being sustainable” is not necessarily the same as “promoting sustainability.”

In this post, I discuss the way in which the overuse of the simple word  “sustainable” without the “-ity” at the end can be dangerously ambiguous  and can actually hinder sustainability-thinking, sustainability education, and the  sustainability movement.

This rhetorical practice may, in fact, promote sustainable ambiguity.

 

Is “Social Sustainability” Subservient?

Sustainable Development. Author : Johann Dréo, 2006. From Wikimedia.

I’ve been pondering the usage and implications of the term “Social sustainability.” In this post, I provide my reflections on the social and political challenges implied by an econo-centric view of the term in which social sustainability directly and indirectly serves to maintain the economy. I also add my thoughts about the use of the 3-sphere model in the university context.

 

2 Linked CSL Courses on Sustainability

This fall I will be linking two of my courses together with a shared theme of Sustainability and a shared project to create a website and/or blog.

The project will be to research and/or communicate about how our own Faculty of Communication and Culture teachers and students learn about, research and serve communities to enhance environmental, social, and economic sustainability.

The two courses are COMS 451: Research in Communication and COMS 463: Advanced Professional and Technical Communication. The links in the previous sentence lead to the course websites that were still under construction at the time of writing this blog. In the upper left-hand corner of each website is a link to its course outline.

In this blog, I describe how I plan to do this. I invite questions, comments, and good advice!

 

Social Sustainability

Herrad von Landsberg, "The seven liberal arts" c. 1180. Wikimedia commons.

At our university we have established an Office of Sustainability, and recently faculty members were asked to fill out a survey about their knowledge and participation in sustainability initiatives.

Of course, the sustainability discourse emphasizes environmental values and economic values; much of the discourse focuses on trying to harmonize and coordinate these values. See the Talloires declaration — this is a major document that is shaping the discourse of sustainability at universities.

I have been troubled lately by the extent to which there is a hierarchy in this discourse: Economic and Environmental sustainability vie for first and second place. Social sustainability is always third, like an afterthought. Why is this?

 

Sustainable Service-Learning

Calgary Downtown, 2006, from Wikimedia Commons

Q: What is the basic unit of Community Service Learning (CSL) in the university-community context? — What is the smallest social unit that contains all its necessary ingredients for its success and sustainability?

A: The basic unit of CSL is not a course or a student project, as teachers and administrators might think it is. … The basic unit of CSL is a “partnership” between one or more teachers, people in the community, and the students/citizens they currently mentor and work with.