Becoming Landsick: Rethinking Sustainability in an Age of Continuous, Visible, and Irreversible Change

• Date: 01 February 2016

2-2016 NEWS & ANALYSIS 46 ELR 10141

Becoming

Landsick:

Rethinking

Sustainability in an

Age of Continuous,

Visible, and

Irreversible Change

Summary

is Article is adapted from Chapter Four of Rethink-

ing Sustainability to Meet the Climate Change Chal-

lenge, edited by Jessica Owley and Keith Hirokawa

and published by ELI Press. e author argues that

climate change adaptation is absolutely necessary

because we have passed the point of avoiding climate

change impacts. Because adaptation is fundamentally

about coping with continual change, we must abandon

mainstream notions of sustainability, which assume a

relatively stationary world. We instead should adopt

three transforming principles: (1) pursue resilience

rather than maintenance of particular socioecological

states; (2) recognize and emphasize that private inter-

ests must yield to community survival; and (3) stop

avoiding the subject of human population growth.

ese principles will help us acquire “climate change

sea legs” and face the challenges to come.

Most people know what it means to be seasick:

When a land-dwelling human being goes out

on the ocean—or out on a lake big enough to

entertain signicant water movement—the swell, waves,

and constant motion induce nausea and vomiting. Sea-

sickness is one form of the more general ailment known

as motion sickness, a physiological reaction to t he brain’s

confusion when the nervous system’s three pathways for

sensing motion—“the inner ear (sensing motion, accelera-

tion, and gravity), the eyes (vision), and t he deeper tissues

of the body surface (proprioceptors)”—produce uncoordi-

nated signals about what the body is doing.1 In brief—and

to highlight the metaphorical import of seasickness for this

Article—human beings tend not to react well to uninten-

tional motion and change.

However, human beings are also adaptable. Stay out

at sea long enough, and you develop “sea legs”—that i s,

an ability to cope with the consta nt change and motion

that goes with being on a sh ip at sa il. Moreover, human

beings will often carr y their sea legs back on shore with

them, causing landsickness. Landsick ness is the inverse

of traditional motion sick ness, where a human body that

has become used to constant motion suddenly goes back

to stable land.2 Most people readjust fairly quick ly to

being back on land, but in some people, landsickness per-

sists as a more-or-less perma nent condition, an aiction

known as Mal de Debarquement syndrome. Research-

ers belie ve that in patients suering from this syndrome,

“the bra in may be stuck believ ing that the rocki ng

motion experienced at sea is normal and that being on

land is d isorienting.”3

In t his climate change era, we all need to rewire our-

selves into a metaphorical Mal de Debarquement syn-

drome—that is, into a state where we view constant change

as the norm, not as an aberration to be ignored, avoided, or

resisted. As a more positive formulation, we need to acquire

our climate change sea legs— and, as will be shown below,

that means jettisoning mainstream notions of sustainabil-

ity. Such popular conceptions of sustainability assume a

relatively stationary world, impeding humans’ ability to

deal with the realities of climate change.

1. Sy Kraft, What Is Motion Sickness (Travel Sickness)? What Causes Motion

Sickness?, M. N T, Jan. 15, 2010, http://www.medicalnewstoday.

com/articles/176198.php; see also Charles W. Bryant, What Is Landsickness?,

D F  H (last visited July 9, 2013), http://health.how

stuworks.com/mental-health/neurological-conditions/landsickness.htm.

2. Bryant, supra note 1.

3. Id.; see also Elizabeth Svoboda, 

Away, N.Y. T, June 12, 2007.

    

Law Collaborative for including me in the original discussions

regarding the future of sustainability.

by Robin Kundis Craig

Robin Kundis Craig is the

William H. Leary Professor of Law at the

University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law.

Copyright © 2016 Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, DC. Reprinted with permission from ELR®, http://www.eli.org, 1-800-433-5120.