Recovering the Moral Center of Sustainability

A review of Machlis, Gary E. Sustainability for the forgotten. 2024. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.

In this brief and highly readable book, Sociologist Gary Machlis grounds his understanding of sustainability in the 1987 United Nations Brundtland Report's articulation of a radical sustainability philosophy, one that demands the reordering of power and redistribution of resources around the globe. As Machlis makes clear, that radical philosophy is not guiding sustainability investments in the world today.

The book's introduction, “Freedom to Starve,” takes its name from the published diaries of Paul Gallet, a French priest whose experiences in Brazil in the 1960s had him pondering how it could be that such large populations of the poor could be so terribly forgotten. For Machlis, Gallet's work, and the broader religious movement called liberation theology, inspired the question that drives this work: “What of sustainability for the forgotten?” (p. 2) Machlis argues that sustainability policies have underplayed social justice. The goal of the book is to reframe sustainability, reset its aims and tactics.

Machlis begins by reasserting the Brundtland Report's emphasis on the needs of others, both future generations and the world's poor. He describes Brundtland as a response to the earlier Limits to Growth (1974) focus on natural resource exhaustion and population stresses. Brundtland's authors, on the contrary, integrated liberation theology ideals developed in Latin America in the 1960s. However, most sustainability policies, activism, and discourse since Brundtland have focused on future generations rather than current disempowered populations, a point Machlis drives home with a short description of the massive literature on sustainability, a description that emphasizes the flexibility of the concept. Much of the discourse leaves aside the “forgotten.” Machlis gives examples of authors who have intentionally left out the Brundtland Report's emphasis on the poor, a truncation that “reflects the strategic exclusion of the core moral concerns of the Brundtland Commission.” (p. 20).

Machlis is surely right that accounting for the poor and suffering will require new strategies and tactics among sustainability practitioners. The book makes this case clearly enough, but unfortunately, readers will find little guidance about how remembering the poor will change policy. The book remains largely focused on righteous philosophy rather than messy politics. Indeed, Machlis is not concerned with explaining why so many government officials and environmental activists removed the needs of the poor from primary consideration in the pursuit of sustainability to begin with.

Part I of the book offers a brief tour of global poverty, oppression, and injustice, spanning centuries and the globe. Machlis establishes a metaphorical residency for diverse disempowered people on “Desolation Row,” a phrase he borrows from Bob Dylan. He quickly describes the fate of refugees, the stateless, and the poorest of the poor, something like 10% of the globe's population, most of them living in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Machlis is quite inclusive, moving from Afghanistan and the victims of war to Ukrainian victims of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster to Puerto Rican victims of Hurricane Maria in 2017. The incarcerated and the oppressed, from the Roma in Europe to transgender citizens in the United States, also garner attention.

Ironically, all these stories about these forgotten people will be familiar to anyone who reads the news with any regularity. In that regard, they are hardly forgotten, hardly out of sight. In fact, Machlis leans on the work of other fine scholars, including Matthew Desmond, whose Evicted (2016), a sociological study of the “war on the poor” (p. 80) in Milwaukee, has clearly informed Machlis's thinking, as has Steven Stoll's Ramp Hollow (2017), which tells the history of dispossession in Appalachia. Machlis uses Evicted and Ramp Hollow to describe two of the means by which the powerless are disempowered: eviction and dispossession. Other means of disempowerment include imprisonment, expulsion, expropriation, exploitation, and erasure; the last referring to genocide, as practiced in Darfur in 2004 and by North American colonizers centuries ago.

Part II of the book, which concerns what can be done, opens with a somewhat rambling discussion on policy. Machlis's optimism shows here, as he asserts “a potential set of resource practices that are at once optimally ecologically possible, culturally adoptable, and individually gainful” does exist (p. 111). This discussion remains mostly theoretical, but when Machlis gets specific, as in the case of deodorant packaging at Walmart, it seems tangential to recentering the poor. The connection between Walmart forcing producers to supply deodorant without superfluous packaging and the mitigation of conditions for those on Desolation Row isn't clear. Indeed, the distance between US policymaking, both corporate and governmental, and most of the poorest of the poor makes the connections difficult to establish or imagine.

At points Machlis' later chapters read like a progressive wish list, which is not uncommon in sustainability literature. Machlis wishes for the world clean water, food security, health care, less discriminatory policing, less prosecutorial misconduct, less pollution, more parks, universal minimum income, rent subsidies, removal of the statues of white supremacists, and a disruption of rape culture. All good causes, of course, but this lengthy list suggests one of the reasons why “sustainability” is simultaneously powerful and impotent. It means too much to some people, and nothing to others.

Despite the breadth of the topics he covers, Machlis rarely strays far from his goal of reemphasizing priority for the poor in the United Nations sustainable development goals, the first of which is to end poverty everywhere, the second to end hunger. Machlis notes that these goals seem to get lost or underplayed in municipal or corporate sustainability plans. Repairing sustainability will require reestablishing its moral center. Unfortunately, Machlis has the habit of employing passive voice at critical moments. What needs to be done? Everything. Who needs to do it? Everyone, I guess.

The book concludes with a chapter on COVID and sustainability, which may have seemed necessary when Machlis was writing in 2022, but it seems less useful already. At the very end, Machlis circles back to Paul Farmer, the Catholic humanitarian physician who inspired the author through his good works, and who died while Machlis was writing. Machlis compares Farmer to Father Gallet, whose “Freedom to Starve” opens the book, and he closes with a declaration of hope that the poor will be remembered. No doubt the residents of Desolation Row hope he is right.