Fifteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

In the emerging discourse of environmental awareness, the concept “sustainable development” reveals its polyvalence as a speech-act largely through absences of meaning. In part, this absence has created a significant gap - at best, a debilitating openness - in global as well as local approaches to “best practices” to combine economic and environmental forms of sustainability. Despite the strength of models of leadership outlined in the Brundtland Report (1987), the definitions offered therein have created a foundation for fundamentally opposed drives toward understanding environmental sustainability. The neoclassical economic approach in developing models for sustainable development privilege land-based, cost-driven modeling of sustainable development, which, to-date, has produced weak forms of leadership in political processes of “environmental” sustainability. The coordination of policy, current science of climate change, and modeling of mitigation strategies and budgets to address the magnitude of future losses is inadequate. This paper considers current models, which omit inclusion of ocean-based research on, and preliminary modeling in, the damage accrued via land-based pollution. New forms of leadership in land-based models are crucial. In its “unsettling” nature, its divergence from land-based temporalities and spatial properties, the ocean offers multiple points at which the discourse of (land-based) sustainability collapses within its own tensions to reveal new horizons of policy, damage mitigation and, currently absent in the discourse, reversal modeling. Developing stronger models of leadership across this physical and behavioral series of gaps and tensions offers a way into the full complexity, and excitement, of re-envisioning an entire discourse of the (contested) future.