Sustain Sci
DOI 10.1007/s11625-011-0150-4
SPECIAL FEATURE: ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Sustainability science: bridging the gap
between science and society
Hybridizing sustainability: towards a new praxis for the present
human predicament
Alice Benessia • Silvio Funtowicz • Gay Bradshaw
Francesca Ferri • Ernesto F. Ráez-Luna •
Charito P. Medina
•
Received: 30 September 2011 / Accepted: 13 December 2011
Ó Springer 2012
Abstract Sustainability science has emerged within an
essentially modern framework. We start from discussing the
inherent contradictions and paradoxes of this framing
model and then move to a new pragmatic defining space,
articulated through a plurality of epistemologies, languages,
styles of research, experiences, and actions, all coming from
a global civil society and defining a variety of epistemic and
normative stances and methods. We then propose and
explore a scenario in which sustainability is fruitfully
hybridized with artistic research and practice, with local
agricultural practice and indigenous culture, and, finally,
with animal culture for ‘‘nonhuman’’ knowledge and rights.
These hybrids can work as encouragements to abandon
modern divides and pitfalls and engage in a new kind of
collective diagnose and praxis for our present.
Handled by Francesca Farioli, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy.
A. Benessia (&)
IRIS, Interdisciplinary Research Institute on Sustainability,
University of Torino, Turin, Italy
e-mail: abenessia@yahoo.it
S. Funtowicz
Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities,
University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
G. Bradshaw
The Kerulos Center, Jacksonville, OR, USA
F. Ferri
Trio Francesca Ferri and O Thiasos Teatro Natura, Rome, Italy
E. F. Ráez-Luna
Environmental Sustainability Centre, Cayetano Heredia
Peruvian University, Lima, Peru
C. P. Medina
MASIPAG, Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines
Keywords Sustainability Contradiction Hybrid Art making Knowledges
Introduction
Sustainability science can be currently regarded as a tool
for envisioning, planning, and implementing radical changes in our collective being and agency (Gallopin 2002).
However, as we will see, in its foundation, the very notion
of sustainability is embedded in an essentially modern
framework, entailing a number of contradictions and paradoxes, which can be interpreted as epistemic and normative diversions and obstacles, preventing the needed
transformation (Dovers and Handmer 1993).
The starting point of this paper is to uncover the
founding contradictory pillars of this dominant discourse
about sustainability. In the first part of this work, we will,
thus, outline three main contradictions, all of which are
expressions of a paradoxical relationship between our
decision-making tools and our techno-scientific systems.
As we will see, these contradictions rest on a number of
inherently modern divides, such as the one between facts
and values, between reason and passion, and between
knowledge and experience.
We will then argue that, in order to tackle the present
human predicament, we need to elaborate and implement a
variety of approaches that merge these divides, exploring
possible paths to step out of the modern framework and its
delineated contradictions. The idea is not to put science sideby-side with so-called ‘local’, ‘traditional’, or ‘folk’
knowledge in an implicitly hierarchical interdisciplinary
pool (Liberatore and Funtowicz 2003), but, instead, to confront the more ambitious challenge of encouraging the
emergence of new kinds of hybrid knowledge and practice—
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a synthesis beyond the individual parts—through extended
participatory processes (Gallopin et al. 2001; Latour 1993).
In the second part of our work, we will then define and
examine a number of possible hybrids in the form of different case studies, articulated through distinct narratives
(Cronon 1992), arising from a multitude of corresponding
experiential contexts, epistemic cultures (Kastenhofer 2007;
Knorr Cetina 1999), and modes of research. These narratives of hybridization unfold from a variety of participatory
processes, in which sustainability science is confronted and
merged with different instantiations of traditional ecological
knowledge and experience (Berkes 2008).
Out of a manifold variety of possibilities, the selected
cases are neither optimal nor exhaustive, but they can be
considered as ‘exemplar’ in the pre-modern sense, overcoming quantitative types of analyses with qualitative
knowledge production processes and assessments (Hacking
1975). In particular, we understand these cases as a
founding set of narratives to explore and challenge the
complex and diverse modalities through which humans
stay committed to each other and to the ecosystems in
which they are embedded (Funtowicz and Strand 2011).
As we will see, each and every hybrid opens up a range
of new possibilities of radical changes in the direction of
sustainability, but concurrently and inevitably, it is prone to
new levels of contradiction. The point to be made here is
that, indeed, every epistemic perspective and normative
stance entails benefits and drawbacks, and, in this sense, we
are required to choose what type of compromise better fits
our common living and better defines our human personhood and hopes.
In the first hybrid, we challenge the modern divide
between the two cultures (Snow 1959), namely, between
the arts and humanities as purely subjective forms of
expression on one side, and the sciences as objective kinds
of knowledge production on the other, articulating the need
to recover the fundamental epistemic intuitive contribution
of the performing arts to sustainable living practices. From
the modern, standardizing narratives of techno-scientific
power and control, this kind of artistic participatory
experience promotes a shift to a framework privileging
cultural and natural diversity and, therefore, resilience
(Helander-Renvall and Mustonen 2004).
The enhancement of natural and cultural resilience
brings us to the second narrative, emerging from the context of agro-ecological practices (Altieri 2002; WaltnerToews and Lang 2000). In this participatory and systemic
approach to agriculture, which constitutes one of the most
fundamental technological lock-ins of human history, traditional ecological knowledge is fruitfully hybridized with
locally adapted techno-scientific implementations.
We then move to a narrative exploring the inherent
complexity, contradictions, and benefits of hybridized
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myths and cosmologies emerging in the interface between
indigenous cultures and modern techno-science in the
Peruvian Amazon, following James Kay’s integrated
approach to human and ecosystems health (Waltner-Toews
et al. 2008; Murray et al. 2002; Kay 2001).
Finally, from the human–ecosystems relationships, we
step into the most extreme hybridization, the one between
human and animal knowledge and rights, as emerging from
trans-species participatory processes. In this case, the pitfalls of considering all animals as epistemic and normative
equals, and of possibly ‘‘living like animals in care, compassion and wisdom’’, as the narrative entails and argues,
delineate a quite troubling framing of hybridized sustainability. Indeed, in addition to the desire we share of living
in full harmony with nature, we also treasure sophisticated
language and scholarly books and a diversity of cultural
expressions, although we are terribly grieved by the costs
of civilization for nature. We cannot and do not want to
literally live like animals, but we can engage with this
possibility as a fundamental provocative stance about our
privileged position on this planet.
Moreover, the idea of extending epistemic and normative
rights to other beings could be explored even further, to
include new kinds of hybrids, emerging from the blending of
humans, animals, and machines, such as cyborgs and robots
(Haraway 1991; Christiane 1998; Smith and Gibson 2005).
These latter issues are beyond the scope of this paper, but
they are mentioned here as driving forces to reconsider the
fundamental questions of sustainability, namely, What do
we want to sustain?, For Whom?, and To what extent are we
willing to accept technological substitutions?
Hybridizing sustainability with a variety of knowledges
and experiences means engaging with the inherent complexity, indeterminacy, and irreversibility of our contemporary open-field, techno-scientific experimentation over
local and global socio-ecological systems (Benessia 2009),
promoting a fundamental epistemic and normative shift
from searching what to do, to choosing how to do it.
Finally, going back to the initial reflection of different
meanings of sustainability, the approach that we would like
to explore in our work is founded on implementing in time
a variety of operational and pragmatic definitions of
hybridized sustainability, developed through participatory
processes, as opposed to waiting for a single epistemically
exhaustive and normatively pristine definition, elaborated
by isolated expertise, to rely upon for our future.
Waiting for sustainability: modern contradictions
and divides
The term ‘sustainability’ was coined to address an explicit
concern about the continuity and stability of humanity’s
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future on this planet, living in full harmony with nature. In
its original meaning, it implied the necessity to constrain
present actions in order to avoid compromising the wellbeing of successive generations by reducing the range of
possible futures. Such emphasis on the future privileges
science’s predictive abilities as the primary epistemic tool
for shaping policies and actions to conform to politically
responsible—that is to say, sustainable—ways.
In this sense, sustainability has, therefore, been defined
within the shared and implicit cultural frame of modernity,
according to which waiting for the unequivocal and certain
opinion of science is a fundamental requirement for legitimate and responsible action. This means giving up our
agency as members of civil society and, most importantly,
it implies a continuous procrastination, because the future
is, in fact, irreducibly indeterminate and intrinsically
complex (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1994).
Waiting for sustainability reflects the awareness that the
notion of sustainability in itself and its relationship with
science, technology, and governance are, indeed, multifaceted, ambiguous, and they can be characterized by a
number of tensions and contradictions, such as the one just
stated: the reliance on the control and predictive power of
science and the deployment of remedial technology to
make sound policy decisions for a sustainable future. This
framing ignores that future developments are made more
and more indeterminate precisely because of our greater
scientific and technological power to act and transform.
Calls to implement the precautionary principle can be
seen in this context as an attempt to solve the contradiction
as a Kuhnian anomaly, at a technical level, without discussing its implicit roots in the Modern model of governance. In this ideal, political decisions are made rational by
the deployment of scientific expertise, in Wildavsky’s
(1979) terms, ‘‘science speaks truth to power’’. Indeed, in
the precautionary framework, expert scientific knowledge
is still considered as fundamental, objective, and exhaustive. Certainty about future consequences of action is
supposedly substituted temporarily by statistically manageable uncertainty, that is, by risk assessment and cost–
benefits analysis. This type of technical fix bridges the gap
of legitimacy arising from the radical uncertainty involved
in the decision-making process, without modifying the
underlying assumptions that legitimize the policy action
(Funtowicz 2006; Tallacchini 2005; Benessia 2009).
A second level of contradiction and ambiguity consists
of another idea embedded in the same cultural frame of
modernity: the firm conviction that, by their own existence
and development, science and science-based innovation
lead the way to progress (life improvement and preservation on the planet). Our unprecedented power to manipulate
matter and energy, by which we experiment irreversibly
over large spaces and time-scales, is taken to be the way
out of the ecological and socio-economical impasse that we
are facing. The very same cause of the actual hyper-complexity and, therefore, extreme vulnerability of our lifesupporting systems on the one side, and of the massive
expropriation and deterioration of natural and cultural
systems on the other, is considered as the main and only
possible cure.
The notion of sustainability becomes, then, more
uncertain and ambiguous by the increasing pace of the
transition from normal science to innovation-driven science, from common open knowledge to corporate knowhow. ‘‘What to Sustain?’’ and ‘‘For Whom?’’ are issues
deeply modified by claims and goals in fields of technoscience, such as synthetic biology and geo-engineering,
promising endless substitution.
Techno-scientific—and economic—power and control
can be interpreted as fundamental axes along which planning and decisions are made, an essentially modern frame
of reference defining a space of reliance ad libitum. The
power of human agency on its surroundings becomes a
constant exercise of techno-scientific creative enhancement
of the known and prompt treatment of the unknown. In a
quite effective Italian commercial of tires, the US Olympic
phenomenon of the 1990s Carl Lewis appears at the
starting line wearing a pair of fancy red high-heel shoes,
and this eloquent motto complements the scene: power is
nothing without control. To safely drive the impressively
powerful car of progress means to be able to govern at will
the inherent complexity of the interaction between the
human techno-scientifically enhanced species and its ‘natural’ surroundings. In this modern ideal of control, radical
uncertainty, indeterminacy, and ignorance are, most commonly, improperly translated into quantifiable risks and
managed through the tools of statistical analysis and
numerical simulation, as if exhaustive matter-of-facts predictive technologies: in Sheila Jasanoff’s terms, ‘‘technologies of hubris’’ (Jasanoff 2003).
Here, again persisting within the same paradigm, as with
the case of the precautionary attempt to cancel the legitimacy gap, both the understandings of science and technology as cause and cure rely on the modern assumption
that traditional scientific and technological practices are
value-free knowledge production and implementation systems based on reason, as opposed to passion-based cultural
constructs, subjected to human economic, social, and
political values and interests.
This conception is increasingly challenged by the
unfulfilled promises of a growth-based and innovationdriven economy and the evident failure of technologies
designed to provide everything at the cost of nothing. The
governance fallout of the resulting public disillusion is the
emergence in Western democracies of important actors and
organizations that proudly dismiss the legitimatory basis of
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the Modern state. This is illustrated by what commentators
have described as ‘‘the cognitive divide—the split between
an evidence-based worldview and one that is rooted in faith
or ideology—one of the most important fault lines in the
United States today’’ (Freeland 2011).
A third level of contradiction is grounded in the still
widespread ideal of the epistemic privilege of Western
science, as conveying an evidence-based type of knowledge, universal and ubiquitous and, therefore, more sound
and effective, belief that is implicit also in the ‘‘cognitive
divide’’ above. All this seems to contrast with the actual
radical complexity, indeterminacy, and context-dependency of the issues and problems arising from the very
same application of its principles to the real world
(Funtowicz et al. 1998).
Urgency is typically invoked as a morally binding
necessity to bypass any delay in post-normal knowledge
production and decision-making processes (Funtowicz and
Ravetz 1993), in favor of a silver-bullet techno-scientific
and technocratic approach. Lack of time and high stakes
produce, then, allegedly compelling mono-causal framings, in which evidence-based knowledge and action
emerge as a ‘‘deus ex machina’’ from the modern ideals
of techno-scientific power and control. And when the
moral argument fails, there is always the pragmatic
argument at hand.
Thus, evidence, in spite of its ambiguous character, is
increasingly emerging as to what ultimately defines the
Modern state’s decision-making, regulatory, and judicial
processes. As promoted, it seems to be the result of wellestablished neutral and objective scientific processes, when,
in practice, it is intrinsically context- and value-dependent:
evidence-based policy and policy-based evidence can be
seen as the flip side of the same coin (Garnåsjordet et al.
2012; Liberatore and Funtowicz 2003).
All these contradictions constitute and are deeply
embedded in the perceived and actual systemic lock-ins of
contemporary societies and institutions, and they can then
serve the purpose of exploring our cultural, epistemic, and
normative constraints.
Indeed, what we mean by contradiction here is a set of
problems or tasks that cannot be resolved within the
(modern) frame of reference in which they are conceived
(Ravetz 2006). A desirable way out of contradiction in
these terms is a creative resolution through an open-ended
dialogue between different kinds of knowledge, arising
from a cultural and natural diversity. The idea is to move
from a predictive and controlling mode, with its emphasis
on determining the future through the power of technoscience, to a diagnostic mode, with a commitment to the
present by reclaiming our agency through a plurality of
knowledges and life experiences. As articulated by Funtowicz and Strand (2011), predictive knowledge coming
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from a highly specialized and, thus, isolated expertise can
only appeal to and determine a technical fix, which is a
similarly isolated kind of agency. But for an effective
improvement of our common living condition to happen, a
collective agency must be triggered and enhanced.
A (responsible) reflection and action based on a constant feedback between short- and long-term concerns,
between natural and cultural-specific needs and global
issues, between the place-specific knowledge resource of
local communities and the science-based innovation, can
be achieved by sharing the experiences of scientists,
artists, policy-makers, and the civil society. As we will
see, these experiences are all embedded in a emergently
hybridized world (Latour 1993), where old distinctions
and barriers are blurred and revised by a growing
understanding about the need to extend exclusively held
rights to other ways of conceiving humanity and, ultimately, to other forms of life (Haraway 1991; Plumwood
1993, 2002; Wilson 2006).
As Beckett (1952) and Camus (1942) put it toward the
end of modernist theater, a way out of the Absurd
(although, for them, only to step into a more operational
and dignified tragedy) is the very awareness of its ironic
nature. This is precisely what we would like to explore in
the following sections, through the expression of diverse,
globally relevant communities and ecosystems crises, seen
as opportunities for present action and change.
The texture of voice and gaze: hybridizing
sustainability science with artistic research and practice
Centeno, Italy, 2008 ÓAlice Benessia
‘‘Without ambiguity, no change, ever.’’
Paul Feyerabend 1999
There are many possible individual and collective attitudes towards complexity, uncertainty, and, ultimately, fear
of the unknown. Two of them appear as lying at opposites
sides of a dichotomy: one consists on developing tools to
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deal with the future, minimizing the possible adverse
events and maximizing the occurrence of positive developments. The other implies working on becoming sufficiently aware of the present, and, therefore, ready for the
unfolding of time. The first attitude is centered on acting
primarily on the outside world, therefore, on developing
and maintaining power and control over natural phenomena, while the second is focused on preserving and refining
the capacity of human beings, and, more generally, of all
living beings, to react and to adapt; therefore, it is founded
on supporting and enhancing our individual and collective
resilience.
The contemporary techno-scientific apparatus, in its
highly contradictory and paradoxical nature, including its
undeniable successes, can be interpreted as a response
arising from the first kind of approach. In this scenario,
complexity is a hindrance to be designed out of the system,
to be simplified into manageable complication. Uncertainty
and fear are translated into risk assessment and risk
perception.
On the other hand, as we will see, indigenous, animal, and
traditional epistemologies and praxis can be correlated with
the second type of scenario. Complexity can become a
resource when connected with cultural and natural biodiversity. Uncertainty and ignorance can work as creative hinges.
In this overall framework, it is possible and fruitful to
rethink about the role of art and art making, regarding its
relationship with complexity and, more generally, with
the unknown. Collective esthetic experiences can be
proposed in public and academic settings, as ways to set
up a common arena for a constructive dialogue. What we
mean here by esthetic experience is the idea that one can
be engaged both emotionally and cognitively at the same
time, and this creates the possibility for unlocking an
internal space, to be then explored by sharing narratives,
experiences, and ideas. In this way, one can challenge the
modern divide between art, as founded on purely subjective expression, and science, as based on solely
objective observation.
Visual and musical languages are essentially polysemic
and ambiguous: they leave room for one’s own search for
meaning. They open up the possibility for some kind of
internal shift to occur. Hybrid performative artistic
researches—mixing traditional live polyphonic singing and
photography—can then be seen as open forms of knowledge production: they do not provide answers but they can
effectively trigger and address open questions. Therefore,
they can be considered as appropriate tools for dealing with
paradoxes, contradictions, and complex issues in the
framework of sustainability. We will attempt, in the following, to articulate some remarks on the rationale, the
effects, and the possible developments of this kind of
performative work.
The democratic forest: photography and the experience
of the unknown
‘‘In experiencing the humanity of another I can sense
my own humanity and my world expands in that
moment.’’
Philip Perkis 2001
‘‘Position is where everything happens from.’’
Frederic Sommer
Photography is usually associated with the act of seeing,
like modern painting. It was born in connection with science, as a tool for recording the results of neutral observation. In this framework, the photographer is not a poet
but a scribe (Fox Talbot in Sontag 1977) who aims at
becoming invisible, disappearing from the scene; objective
reproduction is conceived as an epistemic virtue (Daston
and Galison 2007). Scientific, naturalistic, and the more
recent theater photography are the most common instances
of this attitude.
On the other extreme, photography has to do with visual
hunting: the photographer has an intrinsic power over its
observable subjects and this power becomes part of the
picture making. Most fashion and street photography are
based on this approach: Antonioni’s vision in Blow Up or
Diane Arbus’s portraiture can be considered as examples.
In both cases—either disappearing from or prevailing
over a subject—what is central to this type of visual work
is capturing a, more or less, aware and recognizable object
in order to show it to viewers in different times and contexts. Walter Benjamin’s (1936) concern about the loss of
artistic aura is rooted in this kind of objectifying
displacement.
Indeed, photography can also be considered in a completely different way. A first step is to focus on the connections between things—the rhythm of the seen—as
opposed to the identity of the objects out there. In one of
his most famous books, ‘‘The Democratic Forest’’, the
renowned American photographer William Eggleston
(1989) argues for the necessity to ‘‘treat things democratically’’, in a poetic ode to systemic vision. The act of
photographing can be then performed with a paradoxical
stance: using a framing instrument in order to un-frame,
that is, to explore, one’s own capacity to see.
Moving one step further from this kind of systemic
approach, photographic research, practice, and fruition can
be undertaken as ways to work not only on vision and
perception, but on a more general state of being: reminding
and refining one’s own capacity to be present and, therefore, aware about what is there, and open to what will be
next. In this sense, it can be associated to a performative
art: learning to be in a definite space and time and ready for
internal and external events to happen.
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The idea is to develop a craft—camera adjustments but
also body adjustments in space and light—and then expose
this craft with intention and effort to the occurrence of
chance, in a specific chosen arena. In this framework,
intention becomes the conscious act of choosing a time and
place with a certain medium and skill, and chance involves
the occurrence of correlations between internal and external events. The images become evidence of encounters
between intention and chance, so defined, in the arena of
natural environments. This type of process has, then, to do
with experiencing complexity in nature and taking a
deliberate epistemic, emotional, and physical position in it.
The divide between neutral observation and subjective
expression is critically challenged: the idea is not to control
and eliminate unwanted noise in order to produce perfect,
esthetically standardized reproductions of a reassuring
objective or conquered reality, but, instead, to witness the
occurrence of complex correlations between the inside and
the outside world. Presence is preferred to perfection.
It is hoped that the viewers—ranging from the scientific
community to the civil society—can then be exposed to the
intuition and the immediate experience of a complex,
paradoxical, and creative relationship with the unknown
and develop their own, by taking an open, adaptable, and,
yet, definite position towards it.
The texture of voice: traditional singing as a relational
practice
For millennia, human beings were hunters and they learned
to follow the traces of their prey from invisible clues:
tracks in muddy soil, small droppings, hair clumps, stagnant odors, etc.. Sophisticated procedures were transmitted
not on paper, but, indirectly, through tales, legends, and
myths: an immense cultural heritage, based on knowledge
about how to perceive, interpret, and classify infinitesimal
traces and instantly perform complex mental and physical
operations, in the depths of the woods or in the open unsafe
prairies.
In traditional singing, the flaws, the less discernible and
standardized features of voice—tones, silences, and
breaths—reveal the mark of a profound and stratified
knowledge. The capacity to deduce a complex reality from
experiential data, the faculty to create a narrative from
them, ‘‘maybe the idea of narration in itself was born for
the first time in a society of hunters, from the experience of
decoding traces’’ (Ginzburg 1989).
When studying, performing, and listening to traditional
songs, this scenario has to be taken into account. One must
avoid the temptation of reducing the complexity of this
kind of vocal music to trivial and already known sounds, of
mitigating them in order to please our ears. Quite on the
contrary, when needed, one must stress their discrepancy,
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dissonance, and sharpness, and, in this way, acknowledge
their specific esthetic dignity.
Traditional songs constitute an immaterial epistemic
heritage that we can decode and enhance, looking for
sound traces, like hunters. They are fragments of embodied
life and they can, therefore, awake the capacity to listen, to
be present. Their esthetic and their ethical function can be
recomposed into a unity typical of indigenous cultures: a
sound is ‘satisfying’ if it is culturally—and spiritually—
effective.
Working today on this heritage is not a merely philological act or a nostalgic reminder of the ‘‘good old times’’,
but a way to bring to life and experience a whole variety of
possible complex and embodied insights about the relationship between human beings and their cultural and
natural environments.
Traditional vocal polyphony requires a constant and
creative adaptation between external spaces—the sound
landscapes—and internal spaces—the different expressions
of the soul. In this relational process, a contact is established in which the inside and the outside respond to each
other. Moreover, polyphonic singing in open spaces,
without any technological aid, implies letting go of individual certainties in order to serve the necessity, equilibrium, and truth of the performance, in a constant mutual
adaptation between singers, in their surroundings.
The contemporary vocal performance in theaters is
ordinarily based on standardized esthetic concerns, sterilizing the experiential and epistemic content of performing
and listening, in its essential dialogue with life. To deny the
complexity of what cannot be controlled and determined—
the texture of voice and landscapes—means to limit the
creative and transformational power of the experience of
music.
In the movie by the Japanese director Takeshi Kitano
called Zatoichi, the main character, a blind samurai, can
uncover the smallest details from hearing alone. He can
even predict the dice winning combination from the sound
they make on the table. Everything in him seems to obey to
a paradoxical norm in which all most obvious principles
are reversed in the name of an irreducible complexity.
Similarly, performers and audience can access, for a
moment, to a subtler intensified perception of the interconnections between human beings and the historical,
cultural, and natural environment in which they live.
Visual and musical performance in the framework
of sustainability
The interplay between images and sounds coming form
these two kinds of artistic research is conceived like a
fugue, in terms of a double integrated score. Each element
complements the other, creating a hybrid performance. The
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relationship with natural environments emerging from the
photographic and the vocal path is based on taking individual and collective esthetic, epistemic, and emotional
risks, experiencing and constantly adapting to chance,
uncertainty, and fear of the unknown. Living sustainably
implies developing relational skills and the awareness of
complexity and ignorance as resources of being. Art
making and art experience can promote this kind of change
(Borer 1997).
Action research for a sustainable agriculture:
hybridizing sustainability science with local practice
Constant adaptation to the present and resilience
enhancement through the preservation and recovering of
natural and cultural biodiversity are the founding pillars of
agro-ecological knowledge and practice (Altieri 1995,
2002).
In order to maximize efficiency, industrial agriculture
and breeding increasingly replaces traditional biological
varieties with hybrid seeds and breeds—produced by a few
big commercial corporations—and traditional knowledge
and practices with standardized, corporate techno-scientific
know-how (Giampietro 1994, 2009). This transformation
necessarily reduces our collective natural resilience and
progressively forces our reliance on further (bio)technological fixes, leading to yet another—destructive—paradoxical situation. The modern narratives of control, power,
and urgency applied to the agri-food enterprise are
embedded in this sterile epistemic and normative circular
loop (Benessia and Barbiero 2012).
Once again, a way out of the paradox is to reconsider
our relation with food and food production altogether, and
move to a hybridized sustainable complex model (WaltnerToews and Lang 2000), in which what we eat is not defined
in the generic terms of yet another commodity, nor in the
reductionist terms of required calories and nutrients, but it
is embedded in a democratized constellation of social,
cultural, and ecological public values.
As an exemplar case of this hybridization between
sustainability and traditional knowledge and action, we will
now explore a participatory approach to natural resource
management, based on agro-ecology principles (Altieri
2008; Bachmann et al. 2009), emerging from a partnership
initiative among farmers, scientists, and non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) for agricultural and rural development in the Philippines, known as MASIPAG (http://www.
masipag.org).
Back in 1985, at the Bigas (Rice) Conference held in the
Philippines, there was a first open acknowledgment of the
Green Revolution’s numerous pitfalls, in terms of loss of
local varieties, increase of inputs and costs, raise in the
number of pests and onset of new biotypes, acidification of
soils, and general environment degradation (Folke et al.
2011; Giampietro 2009; Pearse 1980; Steinfeld et al. 2006).
In this scenario, farmers had forgotten how to grow rice
and were more indebted; as a result, rural poverty
expanded.
MASIPAG was born in 1986 as a partnership between
farmers and some committed scientists, in response to these
issues. The partnership has since grown into a network of
small-scale farmers, farmers’ organizations, scientists, and
NGOs. The name stands for ‘‘Magsasaka at Siyentipiko
para sa Pag-unlad ng Agrikultura’’ or ‘‘Farmer–Scientist
Partnership for Agricultural Development’’. MASIPAG
aims at empowering and improving the quality of life of
resource-poor farmers, by bringing back and optimizing
traditional varieties, and by minimizing the cost of production inputs. The network reaches today approximately
35,000 farmer members in the three main regional zones of
the Philippines: Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao.
The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD)
report of 2008 states that a radical change is needed in
agriculture policy and practice: ‘‘Business as usual is no
longer an option’’. Any benefit from production and yields
has been, and still is, at the expense of environment and
social equity. Industrial farming, which is input- and
energy-intensive, marginalizes small-scale farmers and it is
no longer tenable (Giampietro 2003). Traditional and
indigenous knowledge of farmers and local communities
should then be tapped and work in partnership with formal
science and technology (IAASTD 2008).
MASIPAG’s work is based precisely on this kind of
collaboration and hybridization. A bottom-up approach
is used, prioritizing community needs, problems, and
aspirations. Partnerships between farmers and scientists
are established in planning, research, monitoring, and
evaluation.
Specific farmer-managed trial farms are implemented
for research, technology generation, and training. Technology transfer and seed diffusion is then carried out
directly from farmer to farmer. These trial farms are,
therefore, conceived and implemented as farmers’ laboratories, where site-specific varieties and technologies are
developed, seed banks are created, and socio-environmental issues are identified and managed collectively.
Work is done also in terms of advocacy, both within the
network, by supporting local actions and mobilizations,
and outside, by raising public awareness on the need for a
genuine land reform and on intellectual property rights
(IPR) issues such as biopiracy (Shiva 1997).
All these synergic strategies are developed through a
number of programs, involving agro-diversity conservation, breeding of indigenous species, soil fertility and
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alternative pest management, diversification and integration of farming systems, local processing, and marketing.
We will briefly describe two of them as examples of
effective empowerment and biodiversity enhancement
practices.
The so-called CIMME program (Collection, Identification, Maintenance, Multiplication, and Evaluation)
involves the creation of seed banks to tackle and reduce the
fast decline of rice and corn biodiversity. The seed banks
are decentralized in the trial/research farms, in different
regions around the country, in order to facilitate access for
breeding and production. Traditional rice varieties (TRVs)
are collected and improved, and seeds are exchanged on
the basis of specific needs. With this program, farmers can
then develop and access locally adapted alternatives to
mainstream varieties which are more resilient to local
environmental and climatic stresses and less heavily reliant
on external inputs. Through this kind of participatory rice
breeding methodology, 1,104 TRVs were collected and
maintained, and 1,069 MASIPAG rice varieties were
developed.
Another program of the MASIPAG is defined as
Diversified-Integrated Farming Systems (DIFS). The idea,
in this case, is to diversify crops and livestock and integrate
them in terms of ecological functions and nutrients cycles.
Corn varieties are conserved and bred together with vegetables, trees, and fruit trees, and integrated with chickens,
ruminants, or fish, depending on the agro-ecosystems and
on the farmers’ choices. By restoring the local biodiversity,
this kind of strategy allows achieving the maximum benefits from the farm as well as control over agricultural
production. Moreover, this kind of practice entails the extra
advantage of encouraging organic production by default.
The assessed results of this overall agro-ecological
network of strategies and policies are very positive in terms
of food security and poverty alleviation. The yield of
MASIPAG rice grown organically is equivalent to the one
of rice developed in the formal industrial sector and grown
with chemical farming. Concurrently, MASIPAG farmers’
net income per hectare has reached a 50% increase compared to the value of conventional farmers. The livelihood—defined as the net income plus the value of
subsistence crops—of the poorest MASIPAG farmers was
one and a half times higher than the income of poorest
conventional farms. Finally, the food security of MASIPAG organic farmers is assessed to be significantly higher
than conventional farmers, in terms of a far more diverse
and healthy diet.
These high ecological, social, and economic performances are in line with the most recent acknowledgment of
the fundamental role of agro-ecology and participatory
approach to farming in order to confront the problem of
global food security.
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In a recent report by the United Nations Human Rights
Council in Geneva, Switzerland, the author and Special
Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter,
emphasizes the urgent ‘‘need to adopt the most efficient
farming techniques available’’ and he then ascribes to
agro-ecology a key role in revolutionizing farming for
the better: ‘‘Today scientific evidence demonstrates that
agro-ecological methods outperform the use of chemical
fertilizers in boosting food production where the hungry
live—especially in unfavorable environments’’ (De Schutter
2011, see http://www.srfood.org).
One of the key factors of the success of MASIPAG is
the constant dialogue and interface between technological
innovation and the local social and environmental fabric.
Technological solutions are conceived and implemented in
order to be flexible and adaptable enough to fit specific,
local agro-ecological, economic, or cultural needs (Altieri
and Nicholis 2005). By experimenting directly in their
farms and collaborating with scientists on their site-specific
needs, farmers acquire a sense of ownership and leadership
in creatively generating the change they necessitate and in
collectively affecting the broader transformation towards
not only food security, but also food, energy, and technology sovereignty (Altieri 2009).
The experience of MASIPAG in farmer-led agriculture
shows that sustainability science can and should be
democratized and hybridized with local knowledge and
action, in order to tackle effectively the current multiple
and interrelated socio-environmental crises we are facing.
The non-dialogue of myths: hybridizing sustainability
science with indigenous culture
As we have explored so far, sustainability, in its original
meaning, implied the necessity to constrain present actions
to avoid compromising the wellbeing of future generations
of human beings. In other words, sustainability was about
caring for the future of our species. At the extreme, sustainability was about caring for our survival and—by
extension—caring for all life. In order to survive, the
members of any given society must constrain their actions,
for the lack of constrain might spell disaster.
This quadrangle of meaning between sustainability,
future, survival, and self-constraint is particularly relevant
to Amazonian Indians, who, as it is very well known and
documented, have struggled for more than 500 years to
survive—both biologically and culturally—against successive invaders, who tried to enslave them or destroy
them: the Inca empire; the Spanish empire; the oligarchic
Creole republics with their rubber, gold, and timber barons;
Maoist guerrillas (Peru, 1980s and 1990s); and globalisation (Escobar 1999; Mayor and Bodmer 2009; Yashar
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2005). Many Amazonian nations have been wiped out
already. Claude Lévi-Strauss recorded that, between 1900
and 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 native languages
disappeared from Brazil (Dosse 1997). In spite of the
enormous loss, we still can identify about 60 different
ethnic groups in the Peruvian Amazon alone, living in
more than 1,500 indigenous communities (Instituto del
Bien Común [IBC] 2009). It is an extraordinary feat of
survival, as it is also extraordinary that indigenous rights
are now globally recognized and legally instituted by most
Amazonian countries, particularly in Colombia, where
indigenous territories extend over more than 30 million
hectares (Instituto Colombiano para el Desarrollo Rural
[INCODER] 2006).
Unfortunately, it might be too late already. Indigenous
peoples all over the world are faced with sweeping global
changes that challenge their identity and survival (Murray
et al. 2002). One could say that those who lose their
identity have lost the battle of survival.
The practical contradictions of sustainability facing
Amazonian Indians in their interaction with modern/Western science and technology can be seen as revolving
around a double question: (1) how much of another culture’s technology can any given people assimilate before
they themselves assimilate and lose their own culture?; (2)
how much modern/Western technology can be appropriated by non-industrial societies without losing the sustainable links to their land and natural resources that
guaranteed their cultural (and biological) survival?
Most people on the globe relate to modern technology
without any scientific or historical framework. Most of us,
who use laptop computers, cell phones, satellite TV, and
the Internet every day and matter-of-factly, are oblivious to
how recent these inventions are, we would be lost trying to
explain how they work, and would be completely unable to
build the most unsophisticated electronic device from
scratch. Thus, not only for indigenous peoples, but for
everybody, modern technology operates as magic and
apparently detached from science. In short, there is no
scientific knowledge involved in the use of modern technology, and there is no awareness that technology used to
be very different just a few years ago. This is a serious
problem, because without an understanding of basic principles—such as the laws of thermodynamics—and without
an awareness of history, it is not possible to understand
sustainability’s call for self-constraint.
If technology is magic, then science is a myth. But the
point has been made many times that sustainability itself is
a myth, and that the sustainable relation that non-industrial,
egalitarian, tribal cultures seemed to have with their environment was strongly influenced by severe technological
and cultural constraints that kept mortality rates high and
population densities low (Denevan 1992; Cleary 2001).
The point has also been made that ‘‘development’’ is a
myth, and a very damaging one, because it justifies a very
unequal world order, and even serves to prescribe it
(Escobar 1999).
‘‘Development’’, as we know, has replaced ‘‘progress’’,
and the division of the world into progressive and backwards peoples. Progress, at its turn, replaced Christianity,
and the division of the world into true believers and
pagans. None of these myths has been able to replace very
real racism and ethnocentrism, a highly mutable human
passion.
Thus, we see Amazonian Indians (and many other
indigenous peoples) using information technologies, cell
phones, GIS, the Internet, and modern medicine to better
defend their rights, their territories, and ensure their survival. By doing that, indigenous peoples, particularly those
of the Amazon, have become ‘‘an active force in the contemporary world’’ (De la Cadena and Starn 2010). However, they cannot use modern technology without changing
themselves, in terms of their relation with the land and in
terms of their cultural values. Technology never comes for
free; it is always value-laden and it carries political charges. Modern technology, in particular, forces the loosening
of traditional cultural constraints; it creates new conflicts,
political rearrangements, and shifts of loyalty within the
indigenous societies and within the indigenous movement.
The noble savage has never been so mythical.
How do indigenous people cope with the challenge? A
project led by biologist Heidi Rubio Torgler of Fundación
Natura, at Utrı́a National Park, in the Colombian Chocó
region (not the Amazon, but also Neotropical rainforest),
can be relevant in order to explore these issues (Ulloa et al.
1996; Rubio Torgler et al. 2000). In this hybridized work,
the scientists, after 2 years of participatory research, recommended wildlife refuges, hunting bans, and the raising
of domestic fowl to reduce pressure on game wildlife that
was being over-hunted for subsistence purposes. The Embera Indian hunters, partners in the project (their ancestral
territory overlaps with the park), had a slightly different
understanding of things: game had disappeared because it
had been hidden by a powerful, legendary shaman, angry at
the carelessness of hunters, who were not exercising selfrestraint. The solution had to include complicated rituals to
appease the shaman. The beauty of it is that scientists and
indigenous leaders, after 1 year of large assemblies and
long dialogues, agreed to try both types of solutions, and
resources were allocated to both the scientific and the
indigenous methods. This project won the national conservation award in Colombia, and was listed as one of
a handful of successful conservation projects in Latin
America at the end of the 1990s by the IUCN (see http://
www.faae.org.co/html/ganadoresanoc.htm, 1997). What we
know about that project is that the Embera continue
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managing the wildlife refuges and practicing seasonal
hunting bans many years after the scientific team, formed
by biologists and anthropologists, left.
In this rare case, scientists from very different disciplines were able to establish respectful dialogue with a
non-scientific culture. They managed to temporarily suspend their disciplinary biases, to become ‘‘undisciplined’’
(a term coined by Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar), in order to achieve a socially productive outcome, in a
sort of productive solidarity.
This is, in our view, the challenge facing any form of
sustainability science in its interaction with real issues and
real people: to develop an ability to constantly re-create
itself, to be ‘‘undisciplined’’ within the context of solidary
action, without losing its scientific edge and rigor (Kay
2001). This can only be achieved if we avoid the pitfalls of
pseudo-dialogue and non-dialogue over mythical concepts
that hold very little reality or require extremely careful
reworking in order to be used productively. Commitment to
their own identity, but also openness and self-awareness
about the influence of different knowledge systems on
themselves, become the ultimate solidary act for public
scientists. In this way, they may not only move closer to
people, but they may regain their sense of belonging to a
hopeful, more sustainable society; a society of the future,
but also a society with a future.
Living like animals: hybridizing sustainability science
with animal culture for ‘‘nonhuman’’ knowledge
and rights
‘‘One does not meet oneself until one catches the
reflection from an eye of other than human.’’
Loren Eiseley
Millions of great apes and other animals are captured
and confined to serve humans. The majority is used as
‘‘animal models’’, experimental surrogates in zoos and
laboratories to entertain and explore the human mind and
body. The suffering of these individuals is all too painfully
obvious. Ceaseless swaying of elephants in concrete zoo
cells, contorted screams of laboratory chimpanzees, and the
dull eyes of a mouse stupefied by pharmaceutical tests find
their human counterparts in psychiatric wards, prisons, and
camps. Roger Fouts, who worked for decades in language
acquisition studies and then for their recovery and care,
encapsulates this understanding when he speaks of chimpanzees with whom he has worked.
‘‘In my eyes, there was no difference between Pan,
who couldn’t sign at all, and Booee, who knew thirty
signs. Or between Manny, who had two signs—
COME HUG—and Ally, who had 130 signs. All of
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the chimps felt the same pain of loneliness and a
terrible fear about their strange new surroundings.
Each of them had the same deep need that you or I
would for the comfort of physical contact and
affection. That was the tragedy of putting these social
creatures in solitary cages that dangled above the
floor. Ally and Nim weren’t suffering because they
knew sign language; they suffered because they were
chimpanzees.’’ (New England Anti-Vivisection
Society [NEAVS] 2011)
What we intuit with body and mirror neurons is validated by theory and data. All animals have the capacity to
feel, think, and experience life comparable to our own
(Bradshaw and Sapolsky 2006). A common model of brain
and mind describes all animals, including humans. The
same structures and processes of the brain governing
cognition, affect, and consciousness are found throughout
the animal kingdom. Our intuitive connection with other
animals is reflected in details of the mind: structures and
processes governing consciousness, cognition, emotions,
sense of self, and other faculties are shared among vertebrates. Critically, ‘‘a great deal of evidence now indicates
impressive homologies in subcortically concentrated,
genetically-provided emotional and motivational systems
(i.e., key brain areas and chemistries) among mammals’’,
showing that there are ‘‘substantial cross-species consistencies with abundant predictive robustness’’ (Narvaez
et al. 2012). Cortical, limbic, and autonomic structures that
process and regulate socio-affective information and
associated psychophysiological and behavioral traits (e.g.,
maternal behavior, facial recognition, moral development,
play, sexual behavior, fear, aggression, affect regulation)
are highly conserved evolutionarily. Importantly, socially
mediated neuroethological patterns and neurobiological
structures affected by trauma (cortical and subcortical areas
of the right brain, including the right orbitofrontal cortex,
anterior cingulate, amygdala, hippocampus, and posterior
areas of the right hemisphere) are also conserved across
species (Bremner 2005; Schore 2002, 2003).
Neural correlates match ethological observations about
animal culture, esthetics, intelligence, memory, sense of
self, and emotions. This suggests reconsidering the human
affinity to the natural world, renewing our sentient relation
with nature in order to understand how core elements of
our humanity are defined by the natural world (Abram
1996; Berkes 2008; Wilson 2006). Some researchers even
posit that the roots of human religion and spirituality can be
found in animal societies (King 2007). Not surprisingly,
whether human or hippopotamus, or fish or frog, external
appearances may vary but, underneath, we function the
same. The recent move to ban animal experimentation
reflects this understanding and an effort is underway to
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make better the lives of animals who suffer for the very
reason that they are like us. What differs is what they do
and don’t do with these capacities. No other animal has
created weapons of mass destruction or created and normalized institutions of torture and trauma, which are
known benignly as industrialized farming, vivisection, and
captivity.
But what about language? The idea that other animals
could possess something akin to what humans possessively
consider to be uniquely human seemed impossible. Yet,
2007 marked the publication of a remarkable peerreviewed scientific article entitled, ‘‘Welfare of apes in
captive environments: comments on, and by, a specific
group of apes’’ (Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 2007). Its purpose
was to produce a table of needs and rights of chimpanzees
living in captivity. The research leading to the publication
of the 2007 article on great ape welfare was conducted at
the Great Ape Trust, in Des Moines, Iowa, USA. For over
30 years, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has dedicated her life to
chimpanzees, a species which shares 99% of their DNA
with humans. The singular nature of the paper lies less in
its in content than its authorship: Sue Savage-Rumbaugh,
human (Homo sapiens) and Kanzi, Panbanisha, and Nyota
Wamba, three bonobos (Pan paniscus; also referred to as
pygmy chimpanzees) who live and work together with the
scientist.
On the surface, this research appears largely to provide
insights into the origins of human language: how and why
Homo sapiens developed communications dependent upon
linguistic strings of sounds and symbols that are embodied
today in speech and letters. Because of the evolutionary
proximity of apes and humans, apes are regarded as a
perfect subject to investigate the roots of rational thought,
culture, morality, and the ability to ‘‘acquire symbols,
comprehend spoken words, decode simple syntactical
structures, learn concepts of number and quantity, and
perform complex perceptual-motor tasks’’ (Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 2007). However, Savage-Rumbaugh and her
bonobo collaborators do something far grander. They have
forged meaning together across species lines, exchanging
ideas, thoughts, feelings, and wishes. They commune and
communicate in a common language and, in so doing,
create a trans-species community whose members are
distinguished more by individual than species differences.
This bicultural Pan/Homo community has developed a
system of 400 lexigrams, spoken English, and bonobo
vocalizations to communicate complex meanings, decisions, and judgments to each other. Countless hours of
videotaped sessions document how chimpanzee and human
effortlessly commune with each other about a range of
subjects and emotions that comprise intimate living.
Through this trans-species science in the making, human
and nonhuman apes engaged in participatory action
research (PAR). The bonobos served both as subjects and
authors to ultimately produce the published manuscript.
The bonobos ‘‘contributed directly, through conversation,
to important aspects of this work. Their listing as authors is
not a literary technique but recognition of their direct
verbal input to the article. They are not able to write, but
they are able to speak, to use lexigrams, and to answer
questions’’ (Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 2007).
By rigorous academic standards, the bonobos qualify for
authorship. In the exchange of information on objects,
states, and processes, humans and bonobos have created a
bicultural system of knowledge and meaning. They have
dissolved artificial constructs of ‘‘human’’ and ‘‘animal’’ by
dispelling the myth that language and science are the
unique property and privilege of Homo sapiens.
The result of their research is a Pan/Homo bonobo Bill
of Rights. The manifesto looks remarkably similar to
human Bills of Rights (Table 1). They both articulate the
need for basic freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom
from violence, and critically, the right to an environment
that guarantees wellbeing for present and future generations. Animals and humans alike demand sustainability for
themselves, the ability to live, eat, and love in perpetuity.
However, other animals have been prevented from
sustainable living by civilization: humanity’s demand to
make the world conform to its desires simultaneously
denies other animals from continuing their sustainable
living. It is also what prevents humans today from living
sustainably. Overpopulation, violence of a magnitude and
type never seen among animals, industrialization, capitalism, and other ‘‘isms’’ that attend human progress have
brought bonobo, elephant, indigene human, and the entire
planet to the brink of social and ecological collapse.
Others are also calling for eschewing modernity
regressive ‘‘progress’’. Startled by the near epidemic of
asocial attitudes and behavior among today’s children,
neuropsychologists and other health care works are calling
for the restoration of ancestral human mammalian milieu
(AHMM) to replace Western culture (Narvaez and Gleason
2012). Our ancestral hunter–gatherer small band (HGSB)
peoples exhibited amicability, empathy, egalitarian politics, conscientiousness, and a rarity of interpersonal violence. This alternative cultural baseline re-contextualizes
modern civilization from an absolute to an elective. It also
reconfigures the relationship between the Western academic community, its theories and methods, with those of
other cultures. Instead of merely being anecdotal ‘‘museum
artifacts’’ and ‘‘ethnographic data’’, HGSB peoples emerge
as epistemic leaders of social innovation.
Further, science’s trans-species leveling does something
else. The AHMM expands to a nonhuman, animal-inclusive paradigm, an AHIM (animal human-inclusive milieu;
Bradshaw 2011).
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Table 1 Comparison between bonobo rights and human rights (after Bradshaw 2010, 2011)
Bonobo rights
Human rights
1. Having food that is fresh and of their choice
Having an environment that is not harmful to health or wellbeing
2. Being able to travel from place to place
The right to freedom of movement
3. Going to places they have never been before
The right to leave the state, to enter, to remain in, and to reside
anywhere in the state
4. Planning ways of maximizing travel and resource procurement
Every citizen has the right to a passport
5. Being able to leave and rejoin the group, to explore, and to share
information regarding distant locations
The right to form, join, and maintain cultural, religious, and linguistic
associations and other organs of civil society. The right to access of
information
6. Being able to be apart from others for periods of time
Persons belonging to a cultural, religious, or linguistic community may
not be denied the right, with other members of that community, to
enjoy their culture or be denied the ability to practice their religion
and use their language, to form, join, and maintain cultural, religious,
and linguistic associations and other organs of civil society
7. Maintaining lifelong contact with individuals whom they love
Having their environment protected for the benefit of present and
future generations
8. Transmitting their cultural knowledge to their offspring
The right to use the language and to participate in the cultural life of
their choice, and to receive education in the official language or
languages of their choice. Persons belonging to a cultural, religious,
or linguistic community may not be denied the right to enjoy their
culture, practice their religion, and use their language
9. Developing and fulfilling a unique role within the social group
The right of freedom of expression
10. Experiencing the judgment of their peers regarding their capacity to
fulfill their roles, for the good of the group
The right to choose their trade, occupation, or profession freely
11. Living free from the fear of human beings attacking them
The right to freedom and security of the person, and to be free from all
forms of violence from either public or private sources
12. Receiving recognition from the humans who keep them in captivity
of their level of linguistic competency and ability to self-determine
and self-express through language
Everyone has inherent dignity, and has the right to have their dignity
respected and protected
Not only does trans-species science expand the all-toonarrow definitions of normative, but it compels modern
human society to regard other species as moral, cultural,
and epistemic exemplars, and eschew ethics and behavior
that destroy animals and their societies. As our neuropsychological peers, other species qualify for what we Westerners have coveted for ourselves: life, liberty, selfdetermination, and, implicitly, sustainable living.
The present quest to define sustainability is an implicit
rejection of modernity. However, the quest remains endless
because of a fatal framing error: the exclusion of other
Earth beings as epistemic and ethical equals. Defining
sustainability in terms of human progress and civilization
employs the same assumptions and perceptions that caused
the present social and ecological crisis. Our tools of
Western civilization fail grotesquely because they do not
match reality. The past half-millennium qualifies the West
and its adherents for a unique place in human history as
the engineer of the Sixth Great Extinction: an unprecedented sequence of genocides that have afflicted human
and nonhuman species throughout the planet. The political
and economic agendas that caused these genocides and
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undermined positive socio-moral parenting in tribal human
(e.g., fatherlessness in African-American and South African families; Flood 2003; Hunter 2006) and animal (e.g.,
great ape captivity, Bradshaw et al. 2008; elephant psychological and cultural breakdown, Bradshaw et al. 2009)
societies are also responsible for today’s socio-moral crisis
in modern communities.
Dramatic moral decline and its neuropsychological
correlates directly map to Western cultural and political
constructs. Subsequently, while various models of evolution may explain the mechanics of socio-moral decline, the
real, meaningful ‘‘discovery’’ is that the symptoms scientists now seek to cure are generated by a politico-economic
agenda embraced by Western culture. The fact that violence and asociality are no longer confined to any particular
social-ecological setting means ‘‘the modern West can no
longer be quite distinguished from its victims’’ (Pfaff 2005,
p. 48). Given that tribal people such as the Columbian
Nukak, who have lost half their population to disease and
suicide since 1988 after the first contact with Westerners
and continue to figuratively and literally lose ground
(Survival International 2010), coupled with dire predictions
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of mass extinctions within decades, there may not be
anything left on the planet but ‘‘abnormal’’ behaviors.
The Pan/Homo experience reifies what indigenous
peoples have said and lived for millenia: nature is not a
‘‘resource’’ or ‘‘service’’ but a vast population of fully
functioning ‘‘who’s’’ with voice and epistemic authority
with knowledge of how to live sustainably. Knowing about
animals is not enough. It is necessary to listen to them as
epistemic equals: chimpanzees, alligators, turtles, parrots,
turkeys, orcas, and the rest of the wonderful animal world.
‘‘Why’’ asserts Savage-Rumbaugh, ‘‘rely solely on the
judgments of human beings when one can ask the apes for
their own opinions?’’ (Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 2007). The
Age of Anthropocentrism is over. Science and our own
sensibilities and necessities have propelled us into the Age
of Animals.
Together, indigenous animals and indigenous humans
provide the beginnings of a trans-species Magna Carta: a
handbook laying the path for implementing sustainability.
Sustainability and animal self-determination are intimately linked. Sustainability can only be attained if
humans emulate and live like animals. Let us return, then,
to live like animals, literally, in compassion, care, and
wisdom.
Concluding remarks
‘‘Even in the midst of scientific uncertainty about the
future, the presence of harm or even evil may be quite
certain.’’
Funtowicz and Strand 2011
The variety of styles, epistemologies, languages, and
experiences explored in this collective work reflects the
existence of a plurality of creative possibilities already at
work; the task is to make them explicit, and to recognize
and to reduce the existing suffering and structural violence
perpetrated on humans and other beings, which seems to be
inherent in our way of living. Scientific and cultural divides
can be—and are de facto—merged and hybridized in the
process of dealing with clear and existing issues and
practical problems.
We believe that sustainability has to do with a collective
commitment to the present and, more fundamentally and
explicitly, with an extension of epistemic and normative
rights. This extension of rights starts from recognizing the
fatal framing error of persisting with the same model created at the emergence of the Modern state, in its co-evolution with Modern science: a closed epistemic and
normative loop explored through multiple voices which,
we argue, prevents from radically changing our inherited
modes of action.
A first step for opening up the black box of this contradictory, perverse, and paradoxical framing has been to
consider art and art making as valuable tools to enhance
our listening and relational skills, as essential qualities for
humbly and fruitfully co-producing knowledge and ways of
action. Art making and deployment can emotionally,
intuitively and cognitively, evoke a move from an absolute
reliance on—and dependence from—our technological
capacity to manipulate, control, and fix the complexity of
the world we live in, to relative resilience, defined as the
capacity to embrace change and complexity and creatively
adapt to them, as they unfold.
A different path from reliance on (bio)technological
fixes to socio-ecological resilience is expressed within the
narrative of an agro-ecological successful experimentation
in the Philippines. When experimenting in a participatory
process with locally adapted technologies and seeds for
responding to their specific subsistence, livelihood, and
ecological needs, small farmers are, in fact, shaping novel
pathways towards a fruitful hybridization between sustainability science and traditional knowledge and practice.
The possibility of successfully implementing transcultural, hybridized, and ‘‘undisciplined’’ participatory
research and action constitute a third dimension in our
polysemic space of definition for sustainability. When coproducing knowledge and policies, public scientists and
indigenous tribes are continuously remolding their identity,
uncovering, recovering, and discussing all the ambiguities
of their respective mythologies, populated with evidencebased and other knowledge systems.
Finally, nonhuman knowledge and rights are taken to be
a fourth fundamental axis of reference in the quest to
pragmatically re-define sustainability: the inclusion of
other Earth beings as epistemic and ethical equals. Modern
science and civilization can be confronted with their own
limits and drawbacks by opening up a democratic space of
trans-species cognitive and normative dialogue.
We have, therefore, outlined three main contradictions
in the modern framing of sustainability, essentially founded
on three kinds of belief: techno-scientific control (of the
future), power (to cure), and evidence (of data). We have,
then, outlined and explored a different frame of reference,
opening up a space of hybrid possibilities, defined by four
fundamental axes, challenging each and every emerged
contradiction. The first axis is suggesting a deeper intuitive
awareness and cognitive diagnose of the present, the second and the third are encouraging to cross and abandon the
divide between traditional and evidence-based knowledge
systems, and the fourth is manifesting the need to include
actors other than humans as equals.
All of them require a deep redefinition of our own
identity, as scientists, artists, members of a global civil
society, and, plainly, as human beings.
123
Sustain Sci
Acknowledgments We are most grateful to Jerome Ravetz, Bruna
De Marchi, Francesca Farioli and anonymous referees for their constructive comments during the preparation of this manuscript.
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