An attempt to question the authenticity of corporate efforts to be sustainable misses the mark
In Hijacking Sustainability, Adrian Parr, a visiting associate professor at Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, looks at various ways in which the idea of sustainability has been adopted by business, Hollywood, US politics and the US military. Parr also looks from the point of view of sustainability at urban development in the United States and Brazil, and the issues of disaster relief, waste disposal and poverty.
Parr primarily contrasts mainstream forms of sustainability, such as the corporate responsibility efforts of major enterprises, against a notion of “sustainability culture”, which she describes as involving “joyfully embracing the ontological force of life in all its creative potential”, and which she views as the authentic form of sustainability. At other points she takes a more analytical approach, such as in her discussion of the gated communities of Savannah, Georgia, and in her discussion of poverty.
The results are mixed. In her discussion of BP, General Motors and Wal-Mart in the first chapter Parr raises some valid – if obvious – questions about how sustainable these companies can ever be considering their arguably unsustainable business models. She also has some pertinent things to say about how consumerism works against sustainability. But she drops the ball with her suggestion that total socially responsible investment assets under management in the United States fell between 2001 and 2002 while Hummer sales rose because “the social feeling of power was now invested in militarism”, when there is surely a much more obvious explanation of why SRI fared badly during the technology crash.
The analysis of gated communities vis-à-vis ecovillages makes some interesting connections between suburbanisation and the rise of the US armaments industry after the second world war. But for this reader the analysis was overshadowed by Parr’s use of stereotypical images in the description of the black district of Savannah, complete with the “smell of barbecue ribs” and teenagers “lingering on porches whistling at the ‘bootie’ strutting by”.
The chapter on the installation of green technology at the White House centres on the decision by former president Jimmy Carter to install solar panels on the building and the removal of the panels during the Reagan administration. It is questionable whether the removal of the panels says as much about Ronald Reagan’s attitude to environmental issues as the author would have them say, since this took place well into his second term. This chapter contains an interesting discussion of how the executive residence “was once a model of sustainable architecture”.
It also discusses the incorporation in George Bush’s ranch in Texas of state-of-the-art environmental technology, a fact that is not widely known. In fact, the various discussions of design and architecture throughout the book are its greatest strength. These range from the discussion of tents for the homeless designed to look like covered cars and of medical clinics in Africa “grown” from kenaf seeds, to green design that foresees no end of life for its products.
Questionable and strange
But the book is repeatedly undermined by questionable statements and strange arguments. The author argues, for example, that Carter’s preference for conservation and renewable energy somehow supports a view of him as militaristic. In another passage she suggests that the (pre-Watergate) Clint Eastwood film “Dirty Harry”, released in 1971, “clearly depicts” the “insurmountable divide between citizen and government” felt by the average US citizen in (post-Watergate) 1979. These and many other examples present the reader with many reasons to question the author’s judgement. And while her discussion of how renewable energy has been represented in the US as a national security issue is illuminating, her rhetorical question about whether for the military sustainability means “the opportunity to eat organic food while raping, abusing, and torturing Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib” risks trivialising serious issues.
The main problem with the book, though, is that often what looks like a simple point is presented in incomprehensible academic jargon. The entire chapter on the media, for example, seems to make just a couple of obvious points about how Hollywood stars can raise awareness of issues and how minority groups can be misrepresented.
Yet it does so in page after page of opaque academese. And how, to look at one of hundreds of potential examples, the statement that “sustainability culture produces a radical mode of self-determination from a vantage point of the current moment” is cleared up by its footnote that “this idea is influenced by Badiou’s concept of the truth event” is anyone’s guess. While such language may mean a lot to those who are familiar with it, those who are not will have a hard time reading this book.
Hijacking Sustainability
Author: Adrian Parr
Published: March 2009 by MIT Press
224 pp, $24.95/£16.95 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-262-01306-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-262-01306-2