Sustainable Utopias and the Climate Change Apocalypse

• Author: Michael Burger
• Pages: 229-242

229

Chapter 12:

Sustainable Utopias and the

Climate Change Apocalypse

Michael Burger

Sustainability is one of the most inuential environmental ideas of the

last 30 years. is is for at least two reasons. First, it possesses a certain

inherent appeal, calling to mind a ourishing, enduring civilization

constructed in harmony with both the constraints and the abundance of the

natural world. Second, it lls a particular role in intellectual history, standing

as a culmination of the idealism and vision of the American environmental

imagination. Yet, what sustainability actually is, what it would look like on

the ground, remains elusive—as it always has. One wonders whether such a

thing as sustainability could, in reality, exist.

Climate change is the most pressing environmental crisis that human

society has encountered. It is very, very real, and the existential threats it

poses to, among others, coasta l communities t hat may be inundated by ris-

ing seas, mountain towns with increasing risk of wildre, and desert mega-

lopolises with rapidly diminishing water supplies, are signicant, to the say

the least. But climate change also presents an imaginative crisis. It poses a

direct threat to ma instream American understa ndings of place, wilderness

and seasona lity, natural phenomena, and human values seeded deep in our

nation’s consciousness by w riters a nd t hinkers like Ra lph Waldo Emerson

and Henry David oreau. And, in its potential to realign the human rela-

tionship to nature in unpredictable ways, climate change also cha llenges the

foundational tenets of our environmentalism—the core theological narrative

of recovery, restoration, and salvation.1 One worries that the end is nigh, and

that none of our good works can save us now.

In this chapter, I explore the relationship between sustainability’s imag-

ined futures and the immediacy of climate change impacts. In Part I, I

unpack some of the indeterminacy that plag ues sustainability as a political

and legal concept by suggesting that we can more completely understand the

1. See generally C M, R E: T F  N  W C

(2003).