Sustainability for the Forgotten

By Gary E. Machlis

Opening with the extraordinary story of a young French priest working in 1968 amongst impoverished villages of northeast Brazil, struggling to bring sustenance, sustainability, and hope to these disregarded and willfully ignored communities, this book asks a broad and far-reaching question that challenges the contemporary sustainability movement: What about sustainability for the forgotten?
 
Sustainability for the Forgotten is an incendiary book that confronts the history, policies, and practices of sustainability. It interrogates the usefulness of current sustainability approaches for the poorest of the poor, the chronic underclass, victims of natural disasters, refugees, the oppressed, and asks, how can we do better? With examples that range from the coffeelands of El Salvador to the coal country of American Appalachia, from the streets of Detroit to refugee camps in Greece and the upscale metro centers of the affluent, sustainability is examined with a critical eye and with an emphasis on insuring that the forgotten are heard.
 
At once well-researched and passionate, wide-ranging and sharply focused, Sustainability for the Forgotten is unlike any other book on the sustainability movement. Written with a distinctive voice that is reasoned, unflinching, and often poetic, the book challenges the sustainability movement to follow "a just and necessary path." The result is a provocative statement on the future of sustainability and a call to action that is ultimately hopeful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Utah Press
• Release date: Apr 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9781647691684

Book preview

Cover Page for Sustainability for the Forgotten

Praise for Sustainability for the Forgotten

"Gary Machlis’s Sustainability for the Forgotten is a heartfelt and erudite critique of conventional approaches to sustainability, with valuable, practical suggestions for how the concept, and the practices associated with it, might be refined and improved."

—Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable and The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

"I read Sustainability for the Forgotten with a feeling of awe. Gary Machlis has unearthed an interwoven history of environmental sustainability and anti-poverty activism that few Americans know anything about. He helps clarify the point that a movement for sustainability has to be driven by the needs of those with the least resources, not the most. A valuable, crucial book."

—Jess Row, author of White Flights and The New Earth

"As a citizen of one of the oldest colonies in the world, I have often felt a sense of invisibility that comes from exclusive decision-making processes. Reading Sustainability for the Forgotten made me realize (with staggering examples) that there are many shades of invisibility, and for so many people, we have erased them through our collective and individual actions (and inactions). Machlis offers a clear strategy for true social justice and sustainability: Observe, judge, and act.

—Elvia J. Meléndez-Ackerman, Professor of Environmental Sciences, University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras

In this engaging and thought-provoking book, Machlis illuminates the many ways the poor have been marginalized rather than prioritized in sustainability thinking and practice. In the spirit of sustainability as a solutions-oriented field, Machlis offers strategies–from local and very practical approaches to systems level changes–to recenter the poor as the priority for sustainability.

—Christopher Boone, Dean, College of Global Futures, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University

"Gary Machlis’s Sustainability for the Forgotten is an insightful synthesis of rigorous scholarship and compassion. This is a truly life-changing and world-changing handbook for the future. It should be read by everyone concerned with sustainability."

—Richard J. Borden, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor, Academic Dean, and Rachel Carson Chair in Human Ecology, College of the Atlantic

"Machlis has powerfully focused on the marginalized, the unnoticed, the invisible. Sustainability for the Forgotten stands as a major achievement."

—Robert Chambers, Professor, Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, and author of Rural Development: Putting the Last First

Sustainability for the Forgotten

Sustainability for the Forgotten

Gary E. Machlis

The University of Utah Press

Salt Lake City

Copyright © 2024 by The University of Utah Press. All rights reserved.

The Defiance House Man colophon is a registered trademark of the University of Utah Press. It is based on a four-foot-tall Ancient Puebloan pictograph (late PIII) near Glen Canyon, Utah.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Machlis, Gary E., author.

Title: Sustainability for the forgotten / Gary E. Machlis.

Description: Salt Lake City : The University of Utah Press, [2024] |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023048967 | ISBN 9781647691660 (cloth) | ISBN 9781647691677 (paperback) | ISBN 9781647691684 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Sustainability—Social aspects. |

Sustainability—Government policy. | Poor—Government policy. |

Poverty—Government policy. | Church work with the poor.

Classification: LCC HC79.E5 M43 2024 | DDC 338.9/27—dc23/eng/20231228

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023048967

Errata and further information on this and other titles available at UofUpress.com

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

To Bill, and to Barbarita

Suffering starts to dehumanize us from the moment we stop being aware of it.

—Alceu Amoroso Lima

. . . and the only sound that’s left, after the ambulances go, is Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row.

—Bob Dylan

Contents

Introduction: Freedom to Starve

Part I

Chapter One | On Sustainability

Chapter Two | Profiles of Desolation

Chapter Three | The Processes of Exclusion

Part II

Chapter Four | Toward a Just and Necessary Path

Chapter Five | The Foundation Must Be Rebuilt

Chapter Six | Repairing Sustainability

Chapter Seven | Sustainability in the Time of COVID

Conclusion: Esperanza y Lucha (Hope and Struggle)

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Freedom to Starve

In 1962, the Catholic Church sent a twenty-four-year-old priest from France to northeast Brazil. He was to minister to the impoverished marginalizados, the poorest of the poor. In his diary and letters home—collected and published as Freedom to Starve under the pseudonym Paul Gallet—he describes his deep faith and emerging realization that before he can preach, he must help organize the men, women, and children of the marginalizados in ways that bring improvement to their lives and sustainability to their communities.¹

It is hard work. He organizes a medical delivery service dispensing needed medicines to remote villages. He helps to form a maid’s union and start a local food cooperative. He creates adult study groups and establishes a Catholic youth organization. He sits with the sick, the hopeless, and the dying, all with patience and affection.

The priest’s sense of injustice grows as his observations increase. He witnesses doctors selling expired medicines labeled Free Sample, Not to be Sold. A prostitute plaintively asks him to pray for her to receive more customers, so she can better feed her children. But his anger ignites and burns when he recognizes the invisibility of those that suffer. After a visit to a leprosarium, he writes:

I must stop before my pen turns into a knife or a gun. The suffering of the poor cries to heaven for vengeance. I could weep. The sight of these poor, ruined bodies is horrible: hands without fingers, arms without hands . . . it is not really their physical state that is the intolerable thing. What is absolutely intolerable is the way they are despised and abandoned.²

Freedom to Starve is an extraordinary book—perceptive concerning Brazilian politics, sociological in its description of the maginalizados and their struggle for sustenance, and incandescent in its compassion. It is both a tactical field guide and poetic expression of what later became known as liberation theology. And it presents a direct challenge to the contemporary sustainability movement: what of sustainability for the forgotten?

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Sustainability for the Forgotten is not about the marginalizados, or northeast Brazil, or small and rural communities alone. Far more broadly, it shows how sustainability policy and practice has made only modest progress at integrating social justice into sustainable development. Efforts to advance sustainability by governments, universities, development groups, and corporations have oft forgotten the needs of the poorest of the poor, the chronic underclass, disaster victims, refugees, and the oppressed. As a locus of desolation, these classes of persons require distinctive and targeted approaches to sustainability. As a fault line in development practices, the issue of sustainability for the forgotten is both rising up in urgency and requiring critical analysis.

The problem of sustainability’s separation from the forgotten is not just a challenge to professional practitioners and policymakers whose work is often protected from scrutiny by the aura of expertise. It demands address by those that teach and conduct research about sustainability, particularly at universities, research centers, think tanks, colleges, and other institutions. It confronts students who are both eager to learn about sustainability but are unsure what it means and uneasy or uninformed about how the forgotten are to be considered and why.

Small books can have large aims. This one seeks to reset the framing of sustainability including the movement’s goals, strategies, and tactics. Chapter 1 outlines a definition and portrait of the sustainability concept, examining sustainability’s early roots in liberation theology and its current and destructive detour toward corporatist values, elite consumerism, and voluntary ignorance of the forgotten.³ It describes sustainability’s necessary companion—the alleviation of suffering—and attempts to avoid the myopic arrogance of the West that poverty is all about money, that those with money are not poor, and those without money are poor and helpless. The beloved Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío replied to that American conceit in his poem To Roosevelt (1904):

Crees que la vida es incendio,

que el progreso es erupción;

en donde pones la bala

el porvenir pones.

No.

You think that life is one big fire,

that progress is just eruption,

that wherever you put bullets,

you put the future, too.

No.⁴

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One of this book’s purposes is to transform for the interested reader the generalized forgotten into real and specific persons to be counted and considered within sustainability policy and practice. Chapter 2 focuses on several categories mentioned earlier—the poorest of the poor, the chronic underclass, refugees, victims of disasters, and the oppressed. Statistics can describe the distribution and abundance of a category or population of persons, but statistics alone are abstractions and insufficient. Case studies can provide compelling description and testimony that give voice to the forgotten, but alone cannot enumerate the scope and scale of each category. Hence, both numbers and stories are necessary tools for understanding. The scale, diversity, and range of cases from the homeless of East Los Angeles to refugees from North Africa describe a profile of desolation that poses a global challenge to sustainability.

To tell this story and account for the forgotten accurately, the processes of exclusion must be described. Chapter 3 asks: How are people driven into invisibility by governments, militaries, religions, corporations, and educators; by the elite, the powerful, the corrupt, and the complicit? Who directs these acts of dispossession, what George Orwell labeled the dirty work of empire?⁵ The planned diaspora of the poor by Olympic Games organizers, strategic marginalization of mega-city slums in Asia, callous lack of American planning for climate change refugees, and other global examples help form a narrative of how the forgotten become forgotten, and why it is essential to make them visible to sustainability policy and practice. Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit writes: Making an injury visible and public is often the first step in remedying it . . . [and] every conflict is in part a battle over the story we tell.⁶

The description of exclusive processes is a sad and repeated litany of malicious injustice, strategic coercion, and unwitting apathy. This description of what the Dominican Priest Gustavo Gutiérrez deems structural violence against the forgotten is an essential part of a realistic conversation on sustainability.⁷ It is admittedly the darkest part of the book.

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And then we must necessarily pivot, for as Barbara Kingsolver reminds us in her novels, essays, and interviews the only moral choice is optimism.⁸ The second of the book’s purposes is to vigorously answer the question: What then, can be done?

Later chapters outline a necessary path for integrating the needs of the forgotten into sustainability policy and practice. The proposals are at once practical and aspirational, achievable in practice and strategic in vision, to be implemented by small steps and advanced by major realignments of purpose and power.

To be clear, the focus is not only or even predominately on the developing world citizens that populate the forgotten. The favelas, kampongs, or bideonvilles have their counterparts in the zombie neighborhoods of Detroit, the banlieus outside Paris, and the grim mining towns of Northern Alberta. In fact it is the relative invisibility of persons in these places amid the prosperity of high-income economies that reinforces the need for an expanded view of sustainability. Those (like us, author and reader) currently privileged to converse on issues of sustainability should well remember: Desolation Row is a nearby neighborhood.⁹

The book concludes with a call for new forms of sustainability policy and practice focused on the provocative interaction of hope and struggle. Integrating the needs and concerns of the forgotten into sustainability policy and practice is a necessary response to the desolation and devastating conditions that characterize their lives. It is also an opportunity to strive toward more just and effective forms of sustainability for all. Policymakers, scientists and scholars, students, politicians, business leaders, and citizens can and should incorporate sustainability for the forgotten into their values, beliefs, and actions.

Ultimately, this is a book of provocation meant to disrupt contemporary assuredness regarding the path of progress for the sustainability movement. It challenges much of what have become comfortable assumptions and accepted paradigms for sustainability. And it seeks to inform, but also cajole, persuade, enflame, and (hopefully!) inspire action by a new generation of sustainability professionals.

The poet, writer, environmentalist, and farmer Wendell Berry noted that valid criticism attempts a just description of our conditions—and Sustainability for the Forgotten strives to meet that simple but lofty standard.¹⁰ So did the young priest working in northeast Brazil, writing in his diary that for Brazil’s forgotten persons, independence had so far given them only freedom to starve.

Part I

What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve about.

—Old English proverb

One

On Sustainability

In the fall of 1983, as the Ethiopian famine’s death toll approached four million persons, the General Assembly of the United Nations established a World Commission on Environment and Development. The commission’s attention was focused on issues of international environmental concern and it was tasked by the UN to formulate a global agenda for change. Four years later, the commission published a report titled Our Common Future.¹ It became known as the Brundtland Report, named after the chair of the commission, Gro Harlem Brundtland.² By the time the Brundtland Report was presented to the UN, environmental issues had risen in global importance, in part as a response to the ongoing Ethiopian collapse, the 1985 discovery of a large and dangerous hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, the radioactive and political fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, and a general thawing of the Cold War that allowed concerns other than national security to rise in priority.³

The term sustainable development was coined and defined in that seminal report. The report declared:

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

• the concept of needs, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and

• the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.⁴

This definition captured two essential principles. The first was the primacy of others’ needs—in particular that of future generations and the world’s poor. The second was that limitations imposed by technology, economic systems, and governance bounded the environment’s ability to meet current and future needs. Three decades later, these principles seem far from groundbreaking, controversial, or complex. But of course, their history is more complicated, linking the Club of Rome, the Catholic Church, the United Nations, sustainability’s early advocates—and the forgotten.

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In 1965, Aurelio Peccei, then the head of Fiat’s Latin American operations, was invited to address a meeting of business leaders and bankers being held in Buenos Aires. His speech was titled The Challenge of the 1970’s for the World Today and it caught the attention of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk.⁵ Rusk had the transcript translated into English. The transcript came into the hands of Alexander King, head of scientific affairs for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. King arranged a meeting with Peccei, which led to the creation of the Club of Rome, an organization made up of leading scientists, economists, and business leaders and included members from the Vatican. The studies it commissioned had a major impact on a generation of scholars studying global issues.⁶

At their first meeting in 1970 the Club of Rome commissioned a report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Limits to Growth was strategically published just three months before the highly publicized UN Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972. Limits to Growth was forcefully challenged at the conference by the developing nation’s representatives as too dismissive of the issues of poverty and social justice. Invigorated by Pope Paul VI’s impassioned call for environmental justice and alarmed by the developing world’s resistance to Limits, the UN formed the Brundtland Commission in 1983 and tasked it to prepare a more inclusive global strategy. With the Vatican’s direct representative (and several other deeply committed Catholics) on the commission, one of its primary sources became liberation theology.

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Liberation theology emerged from the social, economic, and political conditions of Latin America. The populist governments of the 1950s and 1960s in the region had advanced (and profited) from the widespread substitution of imports for local goods and services, creating a highly dependent form of postcolonial capitalism. This economic transformation encouraged military dictatorships to preserve and protect the plunder and concentration of capital by North Americans, Europeans, and their local partner elites. The poor of Latin America were left behind, exploited, and often worse.

While the Catholic Church was complicit (and its wealth increased accordingly), the 1960s witnessed an emergent religious response.⁷ Pope John XXII first called for an ecumenical council in 1959 and instructed that the council should emphasize the church of the poor. The Second Vatican Council began its work in October 1962.⁸ As described by Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff in their landmark book Introducing Liberation Theology, Liberation theology was born when faith confronted the injustice done to the poor.⁹ The Second Episcopal Conference of Latin America, a regional conference held in 1968 in Medellín, Columbia, officially launched the church’s theme of liberation theology. Theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez helped articulate the preferential option for the poor at a subsequent bishops’ conference in Puebla, Mexico—legitimating within the church certain civil actions to promote social justice for the poor in accordance with God’s plan. The 1979 papal synod led by John Paul II (who opposed some but not all of liberation theology’s principles) diluted the Medellín freedoms, but kept in place the priority of the poor.

Social activism by ardent local priests was