Fracas: Towards a more nuanced view of transparent sustainability

I worked on the frontlines of biodiversity conservation and community health across the Global South. In both professions we spoke in reverential tones of our faithful and earnest pursuit of "sustainability." Yet, over 30 years I never observed the creature in the wild. My closest approach came through encounters with poor rural farmers practicing shifting cultivation in tropical forests. Farmers lived as extended nuclear families (5-20 people on a bush farm) dispersed during the farming season and aggregated during the hungry season (perhaps as many as 75-125 people in a semi-permanent village). At very low population density, their indigenous knowledge and survival skills allowed them to approximate authentic sustainability--extracting sufficient calories and goods for the group needs of sustenance, reproduction and shelter with a small excess for barter and trade. They achieved this through protecting (stewarding) the land and her creatures by a seasonal-round subsistence strategy that allowed the soil and creatures to regenerate over 5-7 years of "fallow" period before cultivating again. In this seasonal round, bush farms were transitory--abandoned to move to a new locality on a regular cycle. Local land tenure and usufruct rights were maintained intergenerationally under traditional law by the linguistic band such that these rights obtained even for abandoned plots or villages.

Typically, in Tropical Africa cultivation yielded one (maybe two) seasons of upland rice, followed by 2-3 seasons of cassava after which the soil was depleted of nutrients. Sometimes, people used intercropping with the few garden vegetables and fruiting trees that would grow in the poor soils of the Tropics. Always, there was harvesting of forest creatures, plants, medicines and non-timber forest products such as vines and raffia for construction, containers and crafts. Moving meant clearing a new 1–2-hectare farm by felling the large trees (except the sacred ones), cutting back the bush, burning the vegetative debris to enrich the soil, and when the first Spring rains came, planting the new crop. There was a very strict division-of-labor by both sex and age as to the spheres of responsibilities for each. Contrary to common understanding, this pattern of subsistence may not represent a "stage of culture change" as was presumed by early cultural anthropologists. An emerging view is that this adaptation is actually more recent and the result of an attitude we find globally in remote landscapes and refer to as "the ungoverned." In other words, people who wish to be free to survive and manage their own affairs and families without the influence or coercion of outsiders or overlords. I see this attitude in my own smallholder heritage of independence, self-reliance, and contentment of having what you need and sharing what you can.?

Interlude. This is a short story about a?Grebo farm?woman?singing?to her?fire?in the Liberian high forest. During a lull in the 14-year Liberian Civil War, I was making a 75-mile trip on foot to visit a missionary village I had worked in before the war. My Grebo colleague and I came upon a young farm?woman?standing in her field, burning it to prepare for planting rice and cassava. In rural slash-and-burn agriculture, a new farm is opened in the rainforest every other year or so on land that has laid fallow for 5-7 years. It is the men's duty to fell trees, clear the undergrowth and bushes, and chop the branches into firewood-sized pieces while the females are tasked with burning the debris after clearing and drying. I knew very little Grebo and asked my colleague to interpret her?singing?line by line as she sang and gestured (imploringly) to the 5-10-foot-high flames. It was a lilting, beautiful melody but highly redundant in structure like some blues songs. She sang for the?fire?to stay away from the sacred cotton tree, to burn hot and completely down to ash, to enrich the soil for her seeds, to protect her family from harm in the coming season, to keep the animals from eating the seeds and young plants, to bring 'plenty-o' food for her babies and to trade for other necessities. She was so intent I don't believe she ever saw this white man standing at the edge of her field, admiring here faith, her labors, her raw courage.

Was this woman pagan or Christian? Where people live on the edge of survival in spiritual fluidity, its hard to say but hers was likely a hybrid faith. Certainly, she was either a Methodist or Assembly of God member as every rural village has a church and these are the two denominations that penetrated the interior and proselytized hinterland peoples following the end of WWII. I watched entranced for hours as she seemed to guide and direct the Spirit in the?fire?to every corner of the 2-acre plot. Tropical forest soils are very poor and will produce one season of upland rice and cassava and then another season of cassava before being left fallow again. It is arduous work based on centuries of ancient wisdom and oral transmission of knowledge. It reminded me of my years learning from my maternal grandfather, a smallholder farmer and stockman growing corn, wheat, maize, cattle, sheep, goats, hogs, chickens to survive on a barter economy on the borderlands of New Mexico and West Texas. My maternal grandfather?sang?Christian hymns throughout his workday on the farm.?Both grandparents worked sunup to sundown every day but the Sabbath. Tilling, planting, weeding, harvesting, cutting & stacking hay, milking cows, shearing sheep, feeding chickens and gathering eggs, planting and harvesting the vegetable garden, canning fruit and vegetables for winter, slaughtering and butchering animals, picking wild grapes along the fence lines, mending clothes and repairing farm equipment. They lived offgrid, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. In the evening kerosene lanterns provided light for reading or knitting but only for an hour or so because they were "early to bed and early to rise."

Heart of the Matter. Sustainability is an atavistic concept of late-stage industrial capitalism, a relict, and a reification at that. When it would take 2-3 Planet Earths at current extraction levels for 8 billion people to have equivalent access to calories, goods and services, the concept is either delusional or deceitful. The most apt metaphors for "sustainability" are these: (1) it is a?lizard--when we grab it, we are left with a twitching tail while the lizard scampers free to grow a new one; or (2) a?perpetual motion machine--of course, there is no such thing without external inputs because while nature is a self-sustaining system, the population density of modern humanity is not. Systems require the balancing of inputs and outputs. In early-phase disaster capitalism, we have to move onward from the 3 R's (reading, 'riting, 'rithmatic of a bygone era) to the 5 Rs of post-industrial modernity: Reconnection, Resilience, Rewilding, Regeneration, Restoration. Of these, the most problematic is "resilience" because, like sustainability, it is a reification that most often denotes a return to some state of equilibrium. To be useful, resilience must connote transformation to a new state of being. We can envision that new state as being based on degrowth, of having less, sharing more, sacrificing for the greater good. Resilience must be adaptive which in our situation means less--not the same, not more--but a polity of less. We need a new vernacular and a new conversation about sustainability if we wish to continue to use this word. In the interests of more transparent sustainability, perhaps we can more clearly delineate what type we are talking about. Let the fracas ensue. (FRACAS--a loud raucous?conversation.)?

1.?Fungible Sustainability?requires a revenue stream; it must be budgeted whether monetary or in-kind, and receive regular external inputs which are fungible by design

2.?Relational Sustainability?is a 2-way street--both parties co-adapt and may co-evolve; a state of reciprocity is built on trust and hard wired for a fixed term

3.?Alliant Sustainability?leverages a complementary--perhaps transitory--confederation that shares resources over the near term

4.?Contextual Sustainability?is locale specific; what it looks like must be defined locally through participatory process but typically will entail alliant sustainability and not be widely applicable or scalable

5.?Authentic Sustainability?(as defined above) is historical, now an illusion given global resource extraction and consumption rates

6.?Structural Sustainability?requires baked-in resilience strategies; based on degrowth, "less is better" ethics, shared sacrifice and equitable austerity would be salient features. Some or all of the 5 Rs would be design features.?