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offers itself all over the place as the answer to the main question asked by the Hannah Arendt Center’s Conference “Human Being in an Inhuman Age”: “How ought we humans respond to our inhuman future?” In contexts ranging from dining, farming, building, funding, and educating, sustainability invokes far-ranging sets of practices, behaviors, and processes. Their value as “sustainable” appears largely unquestioned. That is, one can object to a practice as unsustainable, but very few declare themselves against sustainability as such. Sustainability is a faith, like democracy. Rather than assessing the extent to which sustainability is the right response to an ostensibly inhuman future, I’d like to take up Hannah Arendt’s counsel to “think what we are doing” insofar as today what we are doing is seeking to live sustainably. How has sustainability become a panacea? What does it really mean? What is being sustained? For how long—indefinitely? And what might pursuing ecological and economic sustainability portend? Sustainability on its face offers a tautological answer to a question best posed as “how ought we humans to respond to an unsustainable present so as to ensure a (human) future?” This question, of course, already presumes sustainability as value or goal, insofar as unsustainability is what we have and don’t want. Thus unsustainability is where I will begin, as I explore in Part I how the human need for a “durable world,” as explained by Arendt, contributes to the power of sustainability. Rather than trying to determine whether sustainability is really “for the sake of the human” or “for the sake of the earth” (a live issue within sustainability studies), I will suggest in Part II, using the California condor as an example, that we think instead about the ways in which sustainability blurs distinctions between human and nonhuman, artifice and nature. Finally, in Part III, I will speculate about the sort of future sustainability offers.
I. Durability and the Unsustainable Present Many know of the two major 20th-century threats to human being identified by Arendt: totalitarian government and nuclear destruction. Arendt also mentions a third threat: that of consumer society. She argues in The Human Condition that as the “appetites [of laboring man] become more sophisticated, so that consumption is no longer restricted to the necessities, but on the contrary, mainly concentrates on the superfluities of life,” the character of the society of animal laborans does not change, but “harbors the grave danger that eventually no object of the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption.”4 Not only that, but with automation, “we are
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Human Being in an Inhuman Age