Three Sustainabilities: Energy, Economy, Time

The Three Sustainabilities by Allan Stoekl seeks to (re)valorize the word sustainability, arguing that it is useful and raises questions of the role of humans in the survival of a world. He argues that there are three varieties of sustainability: self-sustaining, world under our control, and social and communitarian. Each is necessary, unavoidable, and intimately bound with, and infinitely distant from, the others.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 328 pages
Publication date: 25 October 2021
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

Sustainability, once reduced to a mere cliché, holds the potential for a meaningful and truly sustainable future. In his book, "The Three Sustainabilities," Allan Stoekl aims to (re)valorize this term, recognizing its practical utility. Sustainability encompasses the temporal aspects of objects, including their birth, persistence, survival, and demise. It raises crucial questions about the role of humans in preserving a rapidly disappearing world and potentially contributing to the creation of another.

Stoekl explores a diverse range of possibilities for the word, touching upon object ontology, psychoanalysis, urban critique, technocracy, and religion. He presents three distinct varieties of sustainability, each viewed from philosophical, cultural, and economic perspectives. The first involves a self-sustaining world "without us," the second encompasses a world under our control, ranging from corporatism to Marxism to the Green New Deal, and the third carries a social and communitarian charge, emphasizing meditation and gifting as means of affirming the energy of the "universe."

Each of these sustainability varieties occupies a unique space in the intricate relationships between objects, humans, and their survival and degradation. They are interconnected, indispensable, and profoundly distant from one another. Throughout the book, Stoekl cites a wide array of authors, spanning philosophers, social thinkers. thinkers, literary theorists, criminologists, anthropologists, and novelists. This beautifully written, compelling, and nuanced work is a must-read for anyone interested in ecological concerns, energy, the environmental humanities, contemporary theories of the object, postmodern and post-postmodern theories, and more.

Weight: 436g
Dimension: 140 x 216 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781517908188