There are many different uses of the term sustainability as well as its derivatives, such as social sustainability, environmental sustainability, sustainable development, sustainable living, sustainable future, and many others. Literally, the word sustainability means the capacity to support, maintain or endure; it can indicate both a goal and a process. In ecology, sustainability describes how biological systems remain diverse, robust, resilient and productive over time, a necessary precondition for the well-being of humans and other species. As the environment and social equality became increasingly important as a world issue, sustainability was adopted as a common political goal. The concept of sustainability the way most of us use it today emerged in the 1960s in response to concern about environmental degradation. This degradation was seen by some to result from the consequences of industrial development, increase in consumption and population growth and by others as poor resource management or the result of underdevelopment and poverty. Sustainability was linked to ethical concerns, typically involving a commitment to justice between generations involving issues such as equal distribution of wealth, working conditions and human rights, and possibly between humans and nonhumans, as discussed in chapters of Robert Garner, Holmes Rolston III and Haydn Washington. We can distinguish between different types of sustainability, for example between social (in terms of promoting equality, health, human rights), economic (in terms of sustaining people’s welfare, equitable division of resources) and environmental (in terms of sustaining nature or natural resources for humans and for nonhuman species) sustainability, as well as combinations of them. The study of sustainability involves multidisciplinary approaches, anthropology, political ecology, philosophy and ethics and environmental science. This type of multidisciplinary combination enables us to explore this new form of institutionalized sustainability science in a neoliberal age of environmental knowledge production and sustainability practice. This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in "Sustainability: Key Issues" on 07/19/15, available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203109496 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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This article examines environmental ethics theories focused on the division between “anthropocentric” and “ecocentric” approaches in regard to three valuebases for environmental concern: self-interest, humanistic altruism, and biospheric altruism. The author argues that while applied anthropologists claim to be morally engaged, this engagement rarely supports biospheric altruism. Anthropological advocacy of indigenous rights as well as support for development enterprise on the part of applied anthropologists results in anthropocentric bias in anthropology. While moral engagement may be said to be the mark ofapplied anthropology, environmental ethics is rarely evoked and moral engagements seem to extend only to humans. On the other hand, constructivist anthropologists often describe environment, nature, or wilderness as social constructions and do not engage with questions of value and rights, resulting in relativism that ignores the urgency of conservation efforts. https://doi.org/10.1080/1943815X.2011.625951 https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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