Legal Commentary

At Inside Higher Ed, Peter Wood has an interesting op-ed called Sustainability's Third Circle.  Wood argues that the very concept of "sustainability" can, accordionlike, be narrowed to "hard core empirical questions" or expanded into a "sail for utopian dreams in which advocates imagine themselves transforming humanity itself by changing our appetites.  On college campuses, you can find instances of both." 

Wood criticizes those academic sustainability programs, often spearheaded not by actual academics but by various college administrators, that have "no science at all but a great deal of ideology."  Some of those advocates have launched campus programs on sustainability that aim to explode the "myth" that sustainability is "mostly about the environment" in favor of a vision of sustainability that includes such "social justice aspects" as "fair trade," "living wage," "domestic responsibility," "water rights," "affirmative action," "multicultural competence," and "gender equity."  Wood argues that while some of these aspects of social justice might indeed be reasonably included under the general rubric of sustainability, the programmatic blending of a raft of social justice issues with academic and popular sustainability projects, without much argument about when it is appropriate to do so, is evidence that "'sustainability' is more of a social movement, with its own symbols and passwords, than it is a nascent intellectual discipline."

Wood bites off a lot here, and it seems to me that his argument is potentially subject to lots of reasonable argument and criticism; of course, one would expect as much from an op-ed as opposed to a fuller exposition of his ideas.  What a shame, then, that Wood's critics, in the comments section, mostly limit themselves to ad hominem attacks, general (and self-contradicting) arguments that Wood should be dismissed because he is an ideologue, ipse dixit statements that sustainability is "about ending human suffering," and utterly banal citations of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 

Read the whole thing.  If you get that far and can take any more, I added my own lengthy comment to the discussion there.

Over to you, Frank!