Abstract
Faced with climate change and other ecological crises, sustainability has become an inescapable normative framework for organizations and societies worldwide. However, it conceals very different practices and imaginaries of a sustainable future. Firstly, this article introduces the three imaginaries of modernization, transformation, and control and explores what chances of implementation these trajectories have. Modernization is the dominant path driven by governments and corporations, transformation efforts by civil society actors are marginalized, and control is currently becoming more influential as a trajectory in the wake of a renaissance of strong nation-states. Secondly, this article works out the idea that sustainability, in the sense of an open future, is no longer achievable. Too many ecological burdens already exist, or can no longer be averted, so much so that one should be speaking instead about the politics of post-sustainability. It is highly probable that catastrophes and social collapses can no longer be prevented, and a rapid decarbonization of economies and societies in the coming years is so unlikely that the question thus arises as to how positive visions of the future for living together can still be derived from this. Finally, using the example of the rights of nature, it is discussed how there can, nevertheless, be forms of conviviality that could (albeit slowly) grow out of the multiple social and ecological crises and which are based on an amalgam of modernization, transformation, and control.
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Introduction
In 1713, Hans Carl von Carlowitz coined the term sustainability, which was first applied to forestry. The idea was to cut only as much wood as could grow back in order to avoid future ecological and economic problems. Today, over 300 years later, we live in an “age of sustainability,” but this concept has become a mere symbolic justification, rather than an actual policy of precaution with regard to the consumption of natural resources and emissions. While the guiding idea of sustainability has, in fact, become globally and culturally widespread (Lafferty, 1996), this does not mean that all societies are truthfully following this path in terms of limited resource consumption — but rather that, initially, sustainability has become an inescapable normative frame of reference that no state, society, or organization can escape (Adloff & Neckel, 2019). Unsustainable action now has to, at the very least, justify itself and is no longer the taken-for-granted normality. Even the policies of the USA under the Trump administration had an indirect ecological orientation when it focused on preserving the unsustainable extraction logic of fossil fuels and distanced itself from the Paris Climate Agreement; for all this was done with the legitimizing (albeit flimsy) reference to the fact that these measures would precisely not contribute to global warming and environmental pollution (Levy, 2019).
The issue of the depletion of natural resources was put on the international agenda as early as 1972 by the Club of Rome. Years later, in the late 1980s, the concept of sustainability began to spread in response to global crises caused mainly by the overexploitation of indispensable resources. In the sustainability discourse, these include the natural resources of the Earth system, economic resources to ensure prosperity, and social resources, such as cohesion and solidarity. Sustainability means, above all, that the needs of the present should not be met at the expense of future generations, as was already formulated in 1987 in the report “Our Common Future” (also known as the Brundtland Report) of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development. The spread of the concept of sustainability has come at a time when the consequences of industrialization and capitalist as well as real-socialist exploitation of nature have become increasingly evident. Since 1945, a phenomenon known as the “Great Acceleration” has been observed, encompassing an accelerated release of greenhouse gases, an increase in water consumption, energy consumption, and land use, an increasing acidification of the oceans, and a multiplication of many other environmental burdens (Steffen et al., 2015). For a long time, the multiple increases in resource consumption in the Global North were considered unproblematic, as it was possible to rely on three mechanisms of problem shifting: the postponement of problems into the future, the spatial externalization of burdens such as waste and high-emission industries to the Global South, and the reference to globalization as an all-purpose argument for not having to tackle problems nationally (Wagner, 2020). In addition, there are collective suppression efforts that repeatedly push the urgency of solving ecological issues into the background (Lessenich, 2019). In recent decades, the neoliberal renunciation of state tasks has also been accompanied by a responsibilization of the individual, which has led to individualistic concepts, such as the ecological footprint and the appeal for sustainable consumption decisions. Individuals are called upon to work for the common good or ecological well-being and to become sustainable subjects (Henkel et al., 2018).
Since emerging in the late 1980s, the concept of a tripartite sustainability has prevailed, with its aim being to achieve economic, social, and ecological developmental goals (cf. Pfister et al., 2016). Adopted in 2015, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations include even more goals, such as peace, food security, economic growth, poverty reduction, protection of land ecosystems, securing water supplies, and preserving the oceans. However, the implementation of these goals inevitably leads to conflicting objectives, and ecological sustainability is just one normative dimension among others. Moreover, it is primarily viewed from the perspective of human utilization interests. Although sustainable development is critically regarded by some as an empty phrase (Weder et al., 2019), it has become a key concept of social change at the level of global society. Attempts are being made to use the idea of sustainability as a normative principle to make concrete development processes both assessable and subject to criticism (Dörre, 2021). Sustainability is now proclaimed everywhere in attempt to be institutionalized and operationalized — whether it is by cities, companies, social movements, or organizations.
In the following, this article firstly introduces three imaginaries resp. trajectories of sustainability, i.e., modernization, transformation, and control and explores what chances of implementation these trajectories have. Secondly, it is shown that sustainability, in the sense of an open future, is no longer achievable. It is highly probable that catastrophes and social collapses can no longer be prevented, and a rapid decarbonization of economies and societies in the coming years is unlikely. Finally, using the example of the rights of nature, it is discussed how there can, nevertheless, be forms of conviviality that could (albeit slowly) grow out of the multiple social and ecological crises and which are based on a blend of modernization, transformation, and control.
Three Trajectories of Sustainability
Although it is a global normative reference point, very different processes, values, and visions of the future are associated with the invocation of sustainability; that is, very divergent imaginaries are hidden behind the proclamations of sustainability. Three futures of sustainability currently dominate the social imaginary (Adloff & Neckelr, 2019): modernization, transformation, and control.Footnote 1 Trajectories of sustainability denote possibilities of social change, which, however, do not primarily mark the real future, but show which imaginations of the future are currently being carried out in conflict.
Supporters of modernization aim for a “green economy” and believe that sustainability is an indispensable prerequisite for future economic growth. They want to effectively transform and modernize the institutional structures of society according to the requirements of sustainability. Modernization programs aim to improve the ecological balance of modern societies through technological, economic, and social innovations to avoid overuse of natural resources (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015; Mol & Sonnenfeld, 2000; Symons, 2019). However, existing structures such as liberal democracy, market capitalism, and the modern lifestyle are not to be fundamentally changed, but merely adapted to the changing requirements. Ecological modernization as a socio-political government strategy relies on the internalization of ecological costs as an economic policy. This is to be achieved through market-driven large-scale technological projects, which are intended to end the age of fossil fuels and lead to sustainable growth. Market instruments such as CO2 pricing also play a key role.
Having said that, the modernization process also produces new contradictions, for example when the financialization of sustainability (Knoll, 2021) and the introduction of carbon markets lead to new capitalist land grabs, or price mechanisms for the conversion of energy systems exacerbate social inequalities and thus undermine social solidarity. The realization that growing social divisions in income and wealth are standing in the way of sustainability efforts has led to think tanks and green and social democratic parties seeking to link sustainable change with governmental corrections to the economic system as part of a “Green New Deal” (Rifkin, 2019), such as by creating community-based ecological infrastructures, launching investment programs, and linking issues of social justice with ecological change — just as the Brundtland report provided for a link between ecological and social issues. Ultimately, however, even the “Green New Deal” remains committed to the capitalist growth logic of “ever more.”
Modernization is the dominant future path in most societies and international forums, most forcefully promoted by governments, think tanks, and business associations. In spite of this, the limits of this developmental path are becoming increasingly apparent and the record of the promise of green capitalism is more than sobering (Aykut, 2017), as in even recent years, nothing has changed in the destructive dynamics of how economies operate. Typical instruments, like emissions trading or sustainability certificates, have not been able to stop climate change. One only needs to think of the research published in 2023 by the Guardian and ZEIT, which shows that many CO2 certificates are worthless. Large companies around the world have relied on offsets to achieve their climate goals and have apparently bought their way out for years with certificates to protect forests that save much less CO2 than promised.Footnote 2
Proposed technical solutions also turn out to be mirages on closer inspection. For example, the idea that it will soon be possible to remove CO2 from the atmosphere on a large scale. Most of these technologies are still in the planning stage or exist only on a very small scale, and are only available as an option for action as a bet on future technological innovations (Adloff & Hilbrich, 2021). Planetary boundaries and tipping points of the Earth system indicate that a reduction in resource consumption is in fact necessary, which can hardly be achieved through modernization alone. Studies show that it has historically not been possible to decouple resource consumption globally from economic growth (Hickel & Kallis, 2020). As a result, economic growth is ecologically and socio-politically a false goal (cf. de Saille & Medvecky 2020), which nevertheless remains firmly anchored as a guiding idea in business, politics, and science. Sustainability can therefore be seen as the latest step in the process of endogenizing societal critique (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005), in which capitalism takes up every socially relevant critique and uses it as a resource for innovation, but without changing anything in its inherent logic of exploiting cheap resources.
Critics of the modernization approach therefore argue that a fundamental socio-ecological transformation is needed to break with the dictates of economic growth and to initiate sustainable development (Brand et al., 2021). Many civil society actors believe that pure modernization alone is not sufficient enough to address the environmental and socio-economic challenges of the global crises. Concepts such as degrowth, care, conviviality, post-development, buen vivir, commons, solidarity economy, or post-capitalism are at the forefront of the search for alternatives (Adloff, 2020). Instead of a renewal of capitalism, the aim here is to gradually overcome it. Discussions about a “great transformation” towards a non-competitive and growth-oriented social order and a radically different human-nature relationship are taking place in both the Global North and the Global South (Adloff, 2022). It is about the fundamental restructuring of an economic and social order that currently dictates access to many options of livelihood through capitalism, and at the same time undermines the living conditions for many. By means of emancipatory practices in social niches, one hopes to be able to permanently undermine the growth compulsion of capitalism from within (Wright, 2013).
In these debates, the concept of sustainability is subject to massive criticism. With reference to the concept of the Anthropocene (Steffen et al., 2011; Antweiler, 2022), for example, there are calls to overcome the anthropocentric implications of sustainability and to ask what the conditions for habitability of the Earth system for non-human and human life are in the first place (Chakrabarty, 2021). A non-anthropocentric conception of sustainability is evident, for example, in discussions around the idea of rights of nature, which would grant nature subjective rights and provide non-human actors with the status of legal companions (Adloff & Hilbrich, 2021).
However, the transformation trajectory, which rather aims at a post-growth society, is comparatively weak worldwide. While many civil society initiatives aim at a fundamental socio-ecological transformation, none of them have been able to establish themselves on a broad enough scale so far. In addition, there are problems of speed, as the increasing urgency of socio-ecological transformation contrasts with the slow pace of changes in social practices and the small scale and lengthy process of building civil society structures for change (Adloff, 2020; Gümüşay, 2022).
Another way of dealing with sustainability problems is control, which includes techniques such as geoengineering, surveillance, externalization of ecological burdens, and measures to strengthen the resilience of certain groups (Dalby, 2020; Stirling, 2019). This authoritarian version of sustainability is often justified by an ecological emergency, which supposedly requires a suspension of democracy (“Climate Leviathan”, cf. Mann & Wainwright, 2018). Control practices can lead global elites to retreat into protected enclaves, while the vulnerable masses are threatened by famine, war, storms, floods, or droughts. In times of climate change, plans to involve the military have also been discussed as a control strategy. Global warming has become one of the most relevant topics in security studies, as it will overwhelmingly affect areas with relatively unstable statehood and high vulnerability. Strategies of “securitization” of climate policies (Warner & Boas, 2019) are discussed as a response to an immediate and existential threat and are linked to demands for executive primacy. The notion of sustainability as control is based on an ethical particularism, in which a few people can be saved while others are left behind. Thus, control under the conditions of ecological emergencies refers more to a world of resilience than to genuine sustainability. Resilience assumes a form of government that starts with the empowerment of resilience capabilities (Chandler, 2012) and at the same time pursues a “drawbridge strategy” through spatial exclusion: Vulnerable populations should be able to adapt to climate change (Walker & Cooper, 2011).
Recently, the strong nation state has been rehabilitated due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. This reflects the hope of limiting harmful activities and punishing polluters through state action or judicial intervention. The idea of control is here set against the liberal concept of freedom and the modern notion of the primacy of the individual over the community, and is associated with solidarity, justice, and resource conservation.
Notwithstanding, the path of control encounters problems of democratic legitimacy on the one hand, and limits in the ability of modern societies to control and plan social change on the other. Moreover, the consequences of large-scale geoengineering projects, as the last resort of a control policy, can hardly be controlled with respect to the Earth system. This applies both to the Chinese model of control-based modernization (Lo, 2022) and to the visions of large-scale technological nature design from Silicon Valley, with each project harboring its own specific challenges. The control optimism of geoengineering is only taken to extremes by the vision of a future in which artificial intelligence takes command of the Earth system for the benefit of all. The Anthropocene would then soon come to an end, and, according to Lovelock (2019), we would enter the “Novacene.”
Is It Still Possible to Become Sustainable?
Modernization, transformation, and control currently show the competition between different ideas of the future of sustainability. In the context of the sustainability discussion, we are witnessing a paradoxical return of the future as a category of political planning and the idea of social change that can be controlled. In the 1960s and 70 s, political planning as a practice of preparing the future was very common in Western countries but has been curbed since the 1980s in the wake of increasingly neoliberal economic policies (Van Laak, 2008). Currently, models of planning are succeeding in a world that is actually marked by experiences of catastrophe, planetary insecurity, and the limits of controllability (Kemp et al., 2022). In effort to contrast the three policies of sustainability with Earth systemic reality, it is helpful to consider the following points.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the opening of COP 27 in November 2022, in drastic terms but hardly exaggerated: “We are on the highway to climate hell—with our foot on the accelerator.” By the early 2030s, we are likely to have reached 1.5 degrees of global warming (IPCC, 2023) and are currently heading for a late twenty-first-century world that shows global warming well in excess of 2 degrees, perhaps even 5 degrees — with the danger that even 1.5 degrees of global warming could trigger dangerous climate tipping points and dramatically exacerbate catastrophic developments. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research writes in 2022 on climate tipping points: “even at the current level of global warming, there is already a risk that five dangerous climate tipping points will be exceeded in the Earth system—and the risks increase with every tenth of a degree of further warming.”Footnote 3
However, the future and precautionary orientation of sustainability is reaching its limits in view of the ecological burdens and damage that have occurred in recent decades. It is no longer a matter of avoiding future impairments alone, but of dealing with massive damage such as littering, climate change, or biodiversity loss, which is already present and in part irreversible or no longer preventable (Folkers, 2022). Seen in this manner, all societies have long been in a post-sustainability stage and are still based on unsustainable economic practices (Blühdorn, 2022); CO2 has reached a new historic high in 2023, it remains in the atmosphere in the long term, and extinct species are above all one thing: extinct. The view on future development possibilities must therefore be supplemented by present and future ecological burdens and obligations that we have to deal with and that narrow our future horizon (see also Kersten, 2022).
Sustainability programs tend to view nature as an exogenous factor that must not be completely exploited in order to allow human societies continued access to natural resources. In contrast, the concept of the Anthropocene, following Latour (2018a) and Chakrabarty (2021), calls for a planetary perspective on habitability on Earth as a whole — for human and non-human life. Another tension arises from the different temporalities with which concepts of sustainability or the Anthropocene operate. Sustainability focuses on the future of coming generations, which immediately follows present people. The Anthropocene, on the other hand, refers to time horizons of the Earth system that can hardly be grasped within the framework of humans’ understanding of time. Climate change demonstrates par excellence the need to include distant futures in present-day decisions (Adloff & Neckel, 2020).
Theoretical concepts and political terms such as degrowth, rights of nature, buen vivir, resilience, habitability, and climate coloniality all point out how contested the concept of sustainability is and formulate a clear critique of the Brundtlandian understanding of sustainability (Sconfienza, 2019). In critical discourses from the Global South, sustainability is not only interpreted as an expression of the continued Western domination and exploitation of nature, but also as a continuing (post-)colonial exploitation of societies in the Global South, for example in the form of extractivist projects for the green electrified economy of the North (Sultana, 2022). Post-sustainabilities (in the plural!) thus result from the multiplicity of societal conceptions of natureFootnote 4 and societal development paths, as well as from different ecological obligations and burdens.
What is the chance now of a fundamental turnaround in climate policies emerging in the coming years? Are there already social drivers that could bring about a massive change in the coming years? Is the hope for a profound decarbonization of the economy in the coming decades justified? This is the prognostic question of two reports published by the Cluster of Excellence CLICCS (Climate, Climate Change and Society) at the University of Hamburg in 2021 and 2023 (Engels et al., 2023; Stammer et al., 2021). Reducing emissions to the level necessary to meet the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 °C global warming requires the complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050. Based on current evidence, complete decarbonization by 2050 is unlikely unless social drivers undergo significant strengthening. The ten drivers identified by the Hamburg researchers were UN climate governance, transnational initiatives, climate-related regulation, protests and social movements, climate litigation, corporate responses, fossil fuel divestment, consumption patterns, journalism, and improved knowledge production. So far, societal drivers such as corporate responses and consumption patterns have prevented deep decarbonization, while others are moving towards some decarbonization and offer partial resources to increase the likelihood of climate neutrality in the future. The study found that partial decarbonization by 2050 is therefore still possible, in principle, under current conditions. The most important conclusion they drew, however, is that deep decarbonization is currently not plausible or likely in view of insufficient societal transformation efforts. This means that there are currently no good reasons to assume that global warming will be limited to below 1.7 °C by 2100.
These findings stand in stark contrast to the dominant idea of progress in modern societies, which is based on an open horizon of the future (Fladvad & Hasenfratz, 2020). Whereas the future in the modern era was considered open in principle and inclined towards progress, it sounds downright desperate at present to try to sketch the contours of an open, positive, just, and sustainable world (Adloff & Caillé, 2022). This constellation harbors many uncertainties and insecurities, and right-wing populist countermovements that aim at denial, isolation, and suppression have clearly strengthened in recent years (Forchtner, 2019). The question will consequently be what remains of modernization, whether a transformation will succeed or not, and what role control measures will play. Will they only unleash dystopian energies in the form of anti-democratic movements and fortress mentalities, or will it be possible to bring about change in an open and democratic way? How can the new contingencies and associated fears be dealt with? Many religious, scientistic, and political programs of modernity have historically contributed again and again to the silencing of contingency and the search for ostensible certainty (Adloff, 2010). This brings to mind the nationalism of the nineteenth century or the political religions of the twentieth century, as well as technocratic-instrumental notions of progress, and the Enlightenment absolutization of an ostensibly universalistic reason, which also carries a contingency-shielding moment. One question for the future will therefore be whether contingency shielding and the manifest and symbolic violence that accompanies it will increase, or whether it will be possible to channel or contain fears of the future.
Societies worldwide are still on the “highway to hell” and talk of sustainability too often sounds hollow and like an empty promise. The climate crisis cannot be “overcome” either. Even if the decarbonization of the economy were to proceed quickly, societies would still have to deal with the consequences of global warming in the coming decades. Between 1881 and 2019, the annual average air temperature in Germany rose by 1.6 degrees,Footnote 5 and the temperature will continue to rise even if drastic climate protection measures are now taken. Societies must face up to this fact without falling into defeatism. On the one hand, global warming must be kept as low as possible, and on the other hand, societies must be prepared for the coming global warming — with all of this against the background of weak social ties that could support such a transformation.
As is well known, not only are there growing political polarizations and huge social inequalities in income and wealth, but the destruction of the planet also runs along class lines (cf. Neckel, 2023). While the poorest half of households in the EU reduced their CO2 emissions by almost a quarter between 1990 and 2015, the richest 10% of households in the EU increased their CO2 emissions by 3%, and the richest 1% increased theirs by 5%. The decrease in consumption-related CO2 emissions is thus mainly due to low- and middle-income households, while the richest income groups have actually increased their emissions. This makes climate change a social justice problem in countries like Germany as well, fueling social conflicts over the fair distribution of the burdens. This occurs worldwide anyways, because according to Oxfam, the richest one percent of the world’s population causes more than twice as many climate-damaging emissions as the poorer half of humanity combined.Footnote 6 Chancel (2022) has shown that between 1990 and 2019 the bottom 50% of the world population emitted only 16% of all emissions growth in comparison with the top 1% who emitted 23% of the total growth. In 2019, the top 10% were responsible for 48% of global emissions, whereas the bottom 50% emitted a share of 12% of emissions.
It is hard to derive a convincing new narrative of progress from all this. Narratives of ecological modernization, for example, cling almost stubbornly and counterfactually to a belief in progress that presents itself largely in continuity with past social developments. Progress as we knew it is very likely history today; what matters most is the containment of catastrophes (Hentschel, 2022). Therefore, the social sciences should also expect disruption, radical social change, and societal collapse (Kaven, 2020). Revolutions and coups, planned and unplanned transformations, polarizations, de-differentiations, tribalizations, community formations, breaking off of path-dependent developments, social tipping points, system changes, etc., will most likely be on the agenda. A completely new social, and truly “postmodern,” challenge arises.
Facing Catastrophes
In the face of multiple crisis-related developments, the key socio-political issues will be how to contain crises and make them more manageable, and how to make societies as a whole more resilient and just. Is it possible to live with disaster and still develop positive imaginaries of the future? The COVID-19 crisis, as well as the current geopolitical energy crisis in the wake of the Russian war of aggression, have clearly shown how interdependent the globalized world is. For the economy, this almost necessarily raises questions of how it can be made more crisis-resistant, how it can be possibly freed from the compulsion to grow, and how it can become more regional, more democratic, and more oriented towards the common good (Adloff, 2022). Resilience to external economic shocks will certainly only be achieved by pushing back processes of commodification and marketization.Footnote 7 In 2015, the French collapsologists Pablo Servigne and Raphael Stevens put forward the thesis, which seemed absurd to many at that time, that infrastructural, economic, and social collapses could be expected in the near future as a result of global warming and the loss of biodiversity (Servigne & Stevens, 2020). Food scarcity, water shortages, droughts, and floods — we are currently experiencing all of these, not only in countries of the Global South, but also in Europe. Only resilient structures that make themselves independent of the growth logic of modernity will, one might dare to predict, be able to survive these collapses favorably. For this reason, the current crises could possibly be interpreted as a window of opportunity for movements aimed at degrowth, for example. Crises can certainly challenge entrenched imaginary worlds and spaces of possibility and open up alternative horizons for action.
It remains to be seen whether the opportunity to implement the hitherto marginalized idea of a post-growth society will be taken. In the coming years, many existing conflicts will intensify massively, and new, very likely fierce, struggles over distribution will have to be fought out (cf. Koubi, 2019). Underlying this, though, will always be the question of how to proceed with the Western model of distribution, growth, and development. As long as additional expenditures for a more ecologically sustainable and just society are to be borne mainly by the lower and middle classes, those affected can only be attracted to a more radical transformation of society to a very limited extent and may move further to the right politically (Adloff, 2019). Majorities could only be won for a more radical socio-ecological transformation of society if these classes would also benefit from redistribution policies from top to bottom in material terms. The social and ecological questions are closely connected. Bruno Latour has concluded from this that it must be a matter of forging new geo-social classes, i.e., alliances between very different population groups worldwide that share common ecological interests and connect in solidarity with the soils, forests, lakes, and other ecosystems on which they depend (Latour & Schultz, 2022). This process is only just beginning, and it would be false optimism to assume that such practices of transformation have the potential to usher in a decarbonization of the economy in the coming years. What is more likely is that crises and breakdowns are intensifying around the world, and that out of these breakdowns comes the potential to strengthen existing and upcoming social alternative experiments. Servigne and Stevens (2020) also distance themselves in this sense from consistently dystopian doomsday scenarios, arguing that collapse is not the end but the beginning of our future. This perspective is followed by their 2018 book, “Another End of the World is Possible: Living the Collapse (and Not Merely Surviving It)” (Servigne & Stevens, 2018). Here, they address the questions of how to sustain hope, how to build a culture of life, how to make connections with nature, and how other forms of knowledge might come to bear. For Servigne and Stevens, the civilizational reboot obviously comes from the social periphery, from the social movements and groupings that seek alternative forms of living together. The question here is how influential these alternatives might become and in which timescales major changes could be expected.
Legal Revolution: Modernization, Control, and Transformation
Proposing further, however paradoxically, a new start for civilization could also emerge from the center of liberal conceptions of law. In the face of worsening crises and a lack of political will to act against them, a multitude of civil society actors are currently struggling to use and further develop law as a central control medium of modern societies in the fight against climate change and species extinction. In modern societies, law is a central medium of control and governance that is not completely dependent on political decision-making processes and has a certain degree of autonomy (Habermas, 2018).
New legal concepts such as ecocide (Higgins et al., 2013) as well as fundamental moral and ontological questions of the Anthropocene (Kotzé & Kim, 2019), such as the rights of future generations, are being negotiated. In 2021, the German Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG, 2021) stated that the legislator has a human rights obligation to protect its citizens from the impacts of climate change, which means that the civil liberties of future generations must not be disproportionately restricted for the benefit of current generations. This norm of a “freedom-preserving” implementation of climate policies refers, at its core, to a deeper conflict between modernist, transformational, and control-based imaginaries of sustainability. This conflict is increasingly being fought out in the courts, and the constitutional lawsuit in Germany is part of a global trend to enforce climate policy concerns through the courts (Aykut, 2022).
The fundamental question of who is considered a legal subject at all, and thus counts as part of the human legal order, is also being renegotiated. As early as 2008, rights of nature found their way into the constitution of Ecuador, and in 2017, a river was declared a legal entity in New Zealand (cf. Adloff & Busse, 2021). Thus, new hybrids of Western and indigenous-relational thinking have emerged in recent years and have been cast into law. In Article 71 of Ecuador’s 2008 constitution, nature is granted the right to exist, preserve, and maintain its vital cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes (cf. Gutmann, 2021). At the same time, every person, community, and nation is explicitly given the opportunity to demand the rights of nature from state institutions. Whereas in the Western legal model, nature cannot claim any rights of its own, and in Ecuador, recourse has been made to the cultural topos of pachamama (Mother Nature) or buen vivir, which is of indigenous origin but has been introduced into Ecuador’s constitutional debates in recent years in dialogue with international NGOs. Buen vivir draws on indigenous knowledge stocks mainly from the Andes, which are communitarian and non-capitalist in origin, and outlines a social and ecological concept of the good life that does not rely on competition and exploitation of nature. The legal break with anthropocentrism allows for the recognition of intrinsic values of nature and aims at the interdependence of all living beings (Acosta, 2019). Other Latin American legal discourses — for example in Bolivia and Chile — also refer to indigenous cosmologies that inextricably link nature and culture (cf. Ulloa, 2017; Vanhulst & Beling, 2017; Acosta, 2021).
In Europe and North America, too, debates are currently taking place about the extent to which such a further development of the law can be an effective means of combating species extinction and global warming (Fischer-Lescano, 2018; Kersten, 2022). As early as the beginning of the 1970s, the US-American legal scholar Stone (2018) developed the idea of a right of legal action for animals and natural entities such as rivers or ecosystems. Based on this, some lawyers currently hold the view that nature’s rights could be integrated into the German legal system. The concept of “nature as a legal entity” is not utopian or unrealistic: various civil society actors around the world are currently campaigning for binding and enforceable rights of nature.Footnote 8 The debate has been driven primarily by the aforementioned indigenous initiatives in Latin America, by developments in New Zealand, but also in the USA. There is definitely a chance that the idea of natural entities as legal persons will prevail—ecosystems such as rivers or forests, or even some species, would then have the status of a legal person that can go to court through representatives.
It is therefore a matter of establishing an “equality of arms” by legal means, which on the one hand corresponds to the cosmology of many people worldwide, and on the other hand simply follows the imperative of fairness, so that ecological interests can make themselves heard and also prevail (Kersten, 2022). A partnership between human society and nature without legal equality as a recognized legal subject will otherwise be difficult to realize — as a look at the history alone of the social struggles of slaves or women shows. If it were possible to achieve rights for nature step by step in many legal systems of the world, this would be tantamount to a fundamental paradigm shift. A break with the foundations of Western social orders and their anthropocentric ideas of sustainability would take place, and this would be based on the logic of expanding the system of rights. Via the modernization of law, human possibilities of disposal over nature as a resource would be restricted by the state (control), and finally, this would initiate a logic of transformation of Western social orders, as one moves legally and politically towards a symmetry of human and non-human actors (cf. Latour, 2018a, b; Niesen, 2021).Footnote 9 From this amalgam of modernization, control, and transformation, a positive vision for coexistence on a damaged planet could emerge. However, this will take time — time that is not actually available.
Conclusion
To sum up, it can be concluded that modernization is still the dominant path driven by governments and corporations, which, however, has so far largely failed. Transformation efforts by civil society actors are still rather weak, and control is currently becoming more influential as a trajectory in the wake of a renaissance of strong nation-states. A consequence is that sustainability, in the sense of an open future, is no longer achievable. Too many ecological burdens already exist, or can no longer be averted. It is thus highly probable that catastrophes can no longer be prevented, and a rapid decarbonization of economies and societies in the coming years is very unlikely to happen. Nevertheless, forms of conviviality that could (albeit slowly) grow out of the multiple social and ecological crises and which are based on an amalgamation of modernization, transformation, and control may be possible to evolve, as the example of the rights of nature movement has shown.
This outlook is not to be understood as an optimistic brightening of what has been said before. To look optimistically into the future and think “that things will turn out all right” would be naïve and blind of reality. But perhaps one can still have some hope for a future in broader conviviality (cf. Adloff, 2022). Those who practice hope do not automatically assume that things will turn out well but also reckon with failure. Terry Eagleton (2015) pointed out that it is more meritorious to keep one’s hope when the outlook is bleak. The hopeful must be able to peer into the abyss of possible doom, which the optimist usually shrinks from.
Notes
Raskin et al. (2002) uses a similar conceptual tripartite division (conventional worlds, great transitions, and barbarization). However, the terminology is not sufficiently anchored analytically, which is due to the strategic context of political consulting. In addition, the path of barbarization is only tentatively used as a negative contrast in order to outline the normatively distinguished path (of the Great Transition) more clearly and positively. In “Climate Leviathan,” Mann and Wainwright (2018) develop a distinction between four possible worlds (Climate Leviathan, Climate Behemoth, Climate Mao, Climate X). However, these four worlds are less linked to already existing pathways than to speculations about possible worldwide future developments.
“Grün getarnt” by Tin Fischer and Hannah Knuth, DIE ZEIT, 18 January 2023. “Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows” by Patrick Greenfield, The Guardian, 18 January 2023.
“Kippelemente – Großrisiken im Erdsystem,” last access on April 4, 2023, https://www.pik-potsdam.de/de/produkte/infothek/kippelemente/kippelemente
In particular, a look at epistemologies and ontologies of the Global South reveals that Western naturalism, which is based on the ontological separation of human subjects and objects of nature, is not universally valid (Descola, 2013). The understanding of what the West calls “nature” also varies, because conflicts are also waged over this question within the Global North, since it is by no means a place where exclusively an ontologically dualistic and instrumental understanding of nature can be found (cf. Adloff & Hilbrich, 2021).
See Deutscher Wetterdienst (last access on May 5, 2023): https://www.dwd.de/DE/klimaumwelt/klimawandel/ueberblick/ueberblick_node.html
See Oxfam 2020 (last access on May 5, 2023): https://www.oxfam.de/ueber-uns/aktuelles/klimawandel-ungleichheit-reichste-1-prozent-schaedigt-klima-doppelt-so-stark
Cf. for example the manifesto for a post-pandemic economy “Work: democratize, decommodify, remediate,” which was signed by almost 7000 academics. See: https://democratizingwork.org/ (last access on December 8, 2023).
See for example the work of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN), https://www.garn.org (last access on December 8, 2023).
To be sure, it is impossible to foresee how consensual such a change might be or what intensifying conflicts over new forms of law might arise. In my opinion, however, one should not assume a conflict-free or even harmonious transition to a new system of the rights of nature.
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Adloff, F. Trajectories of Post-Sustainability. Int J Polit Cult Soc (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-023-09463-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-023-09463-0