Rethinking Sustainable Development in the Context of Climate Change: Self-Development, Social Transformations and Planetary Realizations

[…] there is a concurrent geographic imaginary that gestures towards the universal and the epic, that of the Anthropo scene: The Geological Age of Humans. The framing of human activity as a geomorphologic force summons up to the imagination what might be termed, after the French philosopher Michel Serres, ‘the plates of humanity.’ The destructive nature of these ‘plates of humanity’ to other forms of life raises questions about how we imagine and understand the collective human condition, the longevity and sustainability of Homo Sapiens, and the impact of humans on nonhuman [..] worlds.

Since rice cultivation makes a large contribution to the release of green house gases, the adoption of a system of rice cultivation that does not require huge amounts of water and chemical fertilizers, with a proven track-record of much higher yields would be an effective solution. This is referred to as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) which holds good for the most of the cultivated rice varieties. Above all, SRI greatly benefits small and marginal farmers with limited/little resources for chemical inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Mitigation of methane emission from rice cultivation could also be by altering water management, particularly promoting mid-season aeration by promoting nerobic degradation through composting or incorporating it into soil during off season drained period, etc. (Swaminathan and Kesavan 2012: 4–5).

I try to teach across time and beyond time. I, like the French philosopher Rousseau, have thrown away my watch. [….] The only response is to take sustainability personally, to begin the slow process of remembering who we are and activating the multilayered strands that underpin an integrated sustainability that can generate transformative educational practice (Bussey 2008: 143–144).

An appropriate vocabulary and language of the commons are essential for the health of the surviving commons. At present the dominant paradigm is so pervasive that the language of property is used to describe and regulate the commons. In many cases, there is no vocabulary to describe and, therefore, the language of property is imported and deployed. Even those with legitimate constitutional backing term restoration of commons as encroachment or, in the case of MST Brazil, as ‘invasions.’ These should instead be seen and named as land restoration and liberation. It is only then that the legitimacy of retrieving the commons for commonness is affirmed with the empowering knowledge of legitimacy. This is the required ‘vocabulary of commoning’ needed for the active process of returning the resources to the commons and the commons to the community of commoners (2011: 515).

Cheri and Edwin use the term communing which challenges us to realize commons as a verb and it is in tune with what social theorist Laurent Thevenot calls ‘…composition of commonality: which further challenge us to go beyond the all-embracing liberal grammar and other grammars of commonality’ (Thevenot 2012: 19).