Abstract
Common approaches to sustainability and cognition focus on changing individual behaviors from less to more-sustainable practices. However, as social practice theorists have discovered, most individual behaviors are based on what is socially normative rather than individual preference and choice. This leads to the proposition that normative practice can only be changed by the aggregated behaviors of individuals and a shift in individual identities to comport with new social norms. In this framework, social relations enter as the conduit for communicating new norms from one individual to another, through a network of associations. Ultimately, consciousness and cognition are rooted in the individual connected to the world of nature and culture through the network (or web). This is not a new idea: the noosphere of Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin; Murray Bookchin’s humans as “nature rendered self‐conscious,” and some versions of Gaia theory all raise this possibility, but all start from the assumption of the individual. But what if there is no such thing as the individual? What if individual “identify” is a purely social phenomenon, arising out of that web of social relations? What if there is no “I” or “Me” without “You” or “We?” This model suggests that the individual is constituted through the world rather than the mind, and that such relations form identities that not only shaped by nature and culture but integral to creating the person and the self? What are the implications for creating an integral sustainable society rather than one based on eight billion individuals?
Presenters
Ronnie LipschutzPresident & Senior Analyst, Sustainable Systems Research Foundation, California, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Economic, Social, and Cultural Context
KEYWORDS
Nature, Culture, Individualism, Social Relations, Noosphere, Gaia
