Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
political systems. A properly situated sustainability is one that takes power
and people seriously, rather than as an afterthought to the techno-fetishism
that eco-desire inhabits, glorifi es, and draws its breath from.
Scholars like Melissa Checker, Anne Rademacher, and Miriam Greenberg
have focused squarely on reinserting the political dimensions of “sustain-
ability” just as this language gains a foothold in multiple domains—from
policy to activism to everyday life. h e anthropologist Checker argues
against the idea of environmental and land-use development as a mode of
“postpolitical” governance in her articulation of environmental gentrifi ca-
tion. She argues, drawing from social movements for environmental justice,
that sustainability must be interlinked with justice concerns, and thus not
be reduced to “green amenities.” Greenberg focuses on “critical” urban sus-
tainabilities in her work on Northern California. Rademacher focuses on
what the actual ecological architectural practices look like in India, rather
than as a traveling discourse from the global elites, which has been the focus
of the examples in my case.
What I learned by “situating” sustainability in Shanghai is that environ-
mentalism is a powerful and fl exible discourse, one that can be used by
politicians, developers, and transnational architects and engineers in com-
pletely different ways and for different ends. Ideologies about
environmentalism, like pollution itself, travel in multiple directions and in
complex ways. As the scale and scope of environmental problems continue
unabated, scholars and the general public need more examples of sustain-
ability that works in actually stemming the tide of environmental disaster,
not sustainability schemes that merely abet it.
China is a good place to “see” the state of global transnational environ-
mental sustainability schemes, because of the particular historical and
national contexts that are amenable to its adoption as policy, if not practice.
Although the aim of this topic is not policy prescription, I do agree that
critique without construction is not “useful.” What is the alternative to a
