A Heavyweight Main Event: Environmental vs. Sustainability

The question is: "what is the difference between 'environmental communication' and 'sustainability communication'?" At the root level, it is only the semantics that separate them, built by business opportunists and capitalists -- or marketing specialists -- primarily the past two decades to create enough specialization for enterprise. Sounds almost counterintuitive to place capitalist enterprise and holistic ecological concerns in the same breath, but there is simply no other reason for segmenting an ideology into narrow slices -- though one might make an argument it is exactly what religion did to the universality of Love and God. What are we left with after all the slicing and dicing except a lapse in the very outcome we seek? In environmentalism vs. sustainability, did we forget the overall goal?

Ecological design, green building, sustainable development, environmental planning, deep ecology, eco-efficiency, among others are all examples of germinations of relatively new fields of intellectual inquiry relating to the naturalistic approach of ordering our built world. You can spin yourself around all these terms in internet searches on your own. Most academic subjects have now prefixed sub-disciplines using "environmental" or "eco-" in subjects such as planning, policy, law, politics, education, economics, architecture, engineering, and so forth, as though it were a new concept. Join the bandwagon, it's stylish and trendy. Watch as we wage war over natural "faiths" now, further distancing humans from healing the planet. As Richard Louv has pointed out to us in his books, the nature-deficit disorder is symptomatic of many reasons, one of which is the continual removal of ourselves from actually sitting by a tree or feeling the earth.

Though it is no mistake that these new hybrid fields share recognition of the fundamentally ethical nature of environmental problems and social solutions, and the need to question the underlying premises of traditional theories and methods, they have in great part overlooked the significance of designed objects, structures and settlement patterns in the creation of virtually all our environmental problems. Remaining is process-focused in lieu of outcomes-oriented impediments to true sustainability in our world. In short, the role of the built environment (cities, products, landscapes, public spaces) has been overlooked due to marginalizations in favor over preventative design.

The emergence of entire industries built around such "fashions" is practically sickening. Equally so is investing time in analyzing the semantics of words molded by marketing gurus to spin a trend for gain. In lieu of rhetoric, was it even considered the role of nature in man's existence over the course of human's historical existence? In fact, half the world -- our brothers and sisters representing the Eastern model (Asia) could impart evidence of a long-held inner belief that nature and man are inseparable. Unfortunately, particularly in the Western hemisphere, nature has increasingly been relegated to the province of environmentalists while cities and towns have been turned over to developers and planners.

Missing is the notion that pursuing "environmental" or "sustainable" is in fact separated from any action or endeavor we embark. Truth is: we (humans) have separated them over history through distancing ourselves in pursuit of conquest over nature. Suggestion: read a book such as "Earth's Insights" by J. Baird Callicott and glean a multicultural survey of ecological ethics around the globe. Embrace other perspectives. Consider the underlying deep cultural approach such as Vastu Vidya, or Taoist thinking to matters of design.

A faithful thinking might surmise that the cyclical nature of the universe will allow the pendulum to swing back the other direction -- that a synergistic and holistic honoring of nature will respect her in every action human hands touch. Certainly, the intensity of using buzzwords and rallying "green" concepts has either prompted, or responded to, a shift in the collective consciousness toward our view on nature. This can only propagate future evolution in the positive direction, a premise hold dear by this author.