Sustainability carries the idea of continuity, of our species, of our societies. And also of continuity of our requirements, needs, freedoms, consequences, impacts, well-being, living conditions etcetera.It carries an idea about future states, options, and preferences to safe us - and our way of life - from extinction.
The idea appeals to us. However,as soon as we speak or think about this idea, we transform this idea into intentions, decisions, and actions, the idea of sustainability becomes the idea said by someone, to someone, and attached to specific circumstances.
In other words, speaking or thinking about sustainability generates the question: sustainability by whom, for whom, where, when, how, for how long, in what qualities, in what quantities?
As soon as we think or speak about sustainability, we create - knowingly or unknowingly - a split between the generally appealing idea and a set of intentions, decisions, actions, speech, explanations, plans in the context of specific circumstances. We create a narrative, a story that explains, justifies,calls out for action, enables communication and interaction, initiates dialogue. And that is able to solicit questioning, criticism, persuasion, rejection, conflict, analysis,emotions, war and many more.
In other words, we have to deal with sustainability as a generalized idea that we can grasp intuitively and with the pragmatic instantiation of sustainability that enables us to speak about and prepare specific action about it.
Here we can see where the plethora of different opinions, political preferences, viewpoints, solutions and concentration of effort and resources regarding sustainability comes from.
The difficulty with sustainability does not come from not grasping what it is for humanity, but what consequences we draw from it for whom, where, when, and for how to get there. As sustainability is concerned with the future state of humanity, sustainability-in-practice is always political.
We mean political here in the sense of the authoritative distribution of value: who will have benefits or have his value or benefits limited resulting from specific choices proposes and realized through the efforts made to realize sustainability-in-practice? This has to be decided through a kind of governance and power structure,the very existence and functioning of it already distributes values and benefits to different people and groups in different ways.
Sustainability can be thus understood as the conversations and struggles about building the futures that specific people or groups want, need, and are willing and able to enforce (and in doing so impose on others
The fact that the number of individuals of the human species is still growing considerably seen at a global scale, and the fact that human interaction with its living and abiotic environment is creating more questions about choices to be made is only compounding the complexity and difficulty of putting sustainability into practice..
Sustainability as an idea and sustainability as pragmatic questions to be answered by some for some others reveals that sustainability carries the notion of being and the notion of becoming or transforming. This is the difference between an ontological understanding ("Sein") of sustainability, versus its pragmatic and realistic understanding ("Dasein", "Werden").
The tragedy of the realistic understanding of sustainability as an essential idea is that whatever someone decides to propose or do to create sustainability, in reality, this can result at best in only a fragment of the idea of sustainability. And it will be sustainable for some, by some, for a specific time and place and in specific qualities and quantities only. It will favor specific places, ecosystems and living conditions, and un-favor others. Although we might avoid total extinction as a human species if we manage to get climate change into grips at a global scale.