I personally hate using the word sustainable in any context and Vaclav Smil, the energy scientist and European pessimist, hates the word sustainability too. He says it can’t even be defined.
“Sustainable for what? Over next year? Over 10 years? Over a millennium? On a local or planetary basis? I mean, there are so many time and space dimensions to it you cannot define what is sustainable. If somebody is boasting that what they are doing is sustainable, it’s a total laugh.”
A lot of people in the West are restricted by the construct of their language which in turn builds their Worldview. They mistakingly also are the biggest polluters, biggest consumers, and largest trash-markers, with enormous wealth collated in their muse(ums) rather unwilling to collectively cut down their emissions because it might hurt their economy, still stagnant and no one wants to trickle down the ladder on wealth class.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/13/australian-museum-extinction-cabinets-endangered-species
American Natural History Museum
That being said, I often also ask people if they know any other language outside of their Roman/Latin lingos, disappointed whenever they reply back with ‘No’, ‘Non’, ‘Nein’, ‘Nah’…
Let me try to break down sustainable development in my native tongue Hindi.
“sustainable" meaning in hindi - धारणीय
Dharaṇīya (धरणीय).—a.
1) To be held, kept or carried.
2) Supportable.
Dhāraṇīya (धारणीय).—mfn.
(-yaḥ-yā-yaṃ) To be held or retained, to be adhered to. E. dhṛ to hold, anīyar aff.
"sustainability" meaning in hindi - वहनीयता
वहनीयता = TRANSPORTATION
“development” meaning in hindi = विकास
development, growth, evolution, rise, rising, flourish
विकास etymology
Vikāś (विकाश्).—appear. [Causative] display, spread; illuminate, irradiate. l. [participle] vicā/kaśat shining, beaming; beholding, perceiving. Vikāś is a Sanskrit compound consisting of the terms vi and kāś (काश्). वि- (vi-, “asunder”) + कास (kāsa, “going, motion”)
From French développement, from Old French desvelopemens (“unrolling”). By surface analysis, develop + -ment. First attested in 1756.
There is no clear translation that makes sense of Sustainable Development, with India pouring more concrete than ever for the highways and urban infrastructure in the meantime, Paris is making 500 streets car-free, depaving their public centre and making way for more greener spaces in the cities.
To quickly conclude, sustainability is a false construct, a dream if you may say, by the occidentals and so is the use of the term - ‘more-than-humans’ which is quite trendy in academic circulation. More-than-human strictly defines us as a species that separates us from everything else, a classic division of Man versus Nature, Us versus Them, as if our environment and surroundings are something to conquer.
Similarly, back in the days, when the suprême church had this idea of Earth being the centre of the solar system Galileo was declared insane for his contradictory ideas and home prisoned until the rest of his life. So is the case with Western and whitewashed intellects, not comprehending that the centre of the life system is not ‘Human’ but rather we are just a part of it. I say this because, the word humans in more-than-humans signifies we are the centre of all there is, not an appreciation but an arrogance of our abilities of (dumbing) intelligence.
Not everything can be captured in terms of data in an Excel sheet or be a digital twin of some sort. We have to stop using Plastic words and by We, I mean the politicians and generic entities in power, like a basic need, care, centre, communication, consumption, contact, decision, development, education, energy, exchange, factor, function, future, growth, identity, information, living standard, management, model, modernization, partner, planning, problem, process, production, progress, project, raw material, relationship, resource, role, service, sexuality, solution, strategy, structure, substance, system, trend, value, welfare, work… completely misleading.
All the lexicons, ontologies, and epistemology of any language are mostly built with a functioning society that is strictly divided into a hierarchy so that the wise and intellects can escape the dreadful rot of the mundane and philosophy of the old, shut behind the gates of institutional procedures and various conceived methodologies.
sustainable - धारणीय, development - विकास et quoi...?!
"Cultural anthropologist often observes that individuals instinctively assume their formative intellectual frameworks—shaped by upbringing and professional immersion—are natural, universal, and immutable, a universal human bias. Yet ideas are inherently transient, evolving through cycles or shifting paradigms, and no framework, however entrenched, is immune to collapse. Having witnessed such transformations, it’s clear that even our most deeply held beliefs, products of our specific environments, are neither permanent nor universally valid, underscoring the fallacy of mistaking cultural constructs for enduring truths."
- Gillian Tett
sustainable - धारणीय, development - विकास et quoi...?!
“30 years ago, Carl Sagan predicted what the United States would be like in the future. How accurate is it today?”
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...” ~ Carl Sagan
There have been so many rushing emotions and conflicting thoughts for almost the whole past year which has challenged me constantly, on how to find a direction in work, where multiple interests conflict and navigate with the micro, and macro trends in politics, economy and sustainable financing (a.k.a. greenwashing).
Eat the rich, nuh, a little desi angle because this is not new and we have seen this unchecked power before across multiple geography and societies. भाड़े का टट्टू (Bhade ka tattoo) means a ‘hired pony’ in English but in this context, it's the corporate slave or the CEO of the Evil Corp. hired by the stakeholders or board members.
Mr. Robot (TV series) Elliot, a cyber-security engineer suffering from anxiety, works for a corporation and hacks felons by night. Panic strikes him after Mr Robot, a cryptic anarchist, recruits him to ruin his company. #evilcorp
Premchandra, an Indian writer wrote a short story of the same title back in 1922, more than 100 years in Unindependent India.
I am 26 as I am writing this, there is a dead CEO of a major health insurance company on a New York sideway killed by an Ivy League graduate with a 3D-printed gun and was found by police in a McDonalds, a Netflix drama for the future. He has nothing to lose, to be honest, he is not a middle-class living paycheck-to-paycheck, well-read with a Goodreads account and a spam of memes and iconisation of this event surfaced in the last 2 months. By the amount of Superhero movies and comics I have consumed, he is the ideal who took things into his hands, the elites and pundits are on the run and this event eventually is a point where the corporates get intertwined with the militarisation, CEOs will have more protection.
New Heroes - Franco “Bifo” Berardi - https://www.e-flux.com/notes/649956/new-heroes
The funny aspect was how the CEO was freely roaming the streets as if he had done nothing morally wrong, unaware of how bad the system is and how corporate greed has normalised this system. We say, there are 8 billion people on this planet but with corporate personhood which is legally considered the "person", where the individual stakeholders are not legally responsible for the corporation's debts and damages, there are more fictional/invisible entities legally assigned, a fictional owner to our labour and time.
It's fundamentally obvious, that Americans actually work more than medieval peasants, if an average American works 1,801 hours per year, or 37.5 hours per week, the average workload of an adult male peasant in 13th-century England was approximately 1,620 hours a year, historians say.
Like him, there was another event in San Fransisco, when the former employee of OpenAI, Suchir Balaji, 26 years old was found dead in his apartment. He killed himself (possibly a murder) after knowing how OpenAI has been violating copyright law.
According to a BBC report: "The San Francisco medical examiner's office determined his death to be suicide, and police found no evidence of foul play."
After working at OpenAI for four years as a researcher, Balaji concluded that "OpenAI's use of copyrighted data to build ChatGPT violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet".
Now, what's the play, how to survive this oppressive right-winger tech oligarchy where ethics and morals (Slavoj Žižek and Peter Singer did a talk on morality) are flushed down the drain for the competition and profitability? How do you function in this society when you are well aware of the consequences of how things are bad, really bad and it's not going to change?
Another lesson to learn from history is the French Revolution, all forms of power go unchecked from time to time and it was a similar case where the power was concentrated for the top 1% of the population which I can say is true for today itself. The three-part division of King with divine rights, the first and second estates of Catholic clergy and the nobles and the third estate of middle-class merchants, the craftsmen and the 20 million peasants.
And while we celebrate the French Revolution's ideals, we still struggle with many of the same basic questions raised over two centuries ago. French needed the revolution so that they all could live like kings ethically exploiting the Françafrique countries (which for the last 10 years had multiple coups and military uprise). Not only that but the same model of vertical hierarchy is clearly visible between the global north and the global majority part of the world, to say, the developed, the developing and the under-developed.
“La légende « A faut espérer q’eu se jeu la finira bientôt » utilise le langage du paysan, signe d’une revanche à venir du tiers état sur les deux autres.” (The caption "We must hope that this game will end soon" uses peasant language, a sign of the coming revenge of the third estate on the other two.)
https://dhooop.substack.com/p/bhade-ka-tattoo-hired-pony
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