Deep Sustainability: Narrative, Religion and Ethics

Drafting the latter chapters of The Human Remains has given me occasion to think in a sustained way about the possibilities and limits of narrative identity, including how the notion can be employed beyond humanity. In addition to revisiting Paul Ricœur’s work on narrative identity I have been grappling with the way in which Michel Serres extends the capacity for the production of narrative to the non-human world, as well as thinking through how Ricœur’s and Serres’s accounts of narrative might complement and challenge each other.

After some very stimulating conversations with my colleague Kate Rigby about narrative and ecology, I am delighted that we are embarking on a joint research project entitled ‘Deep Sustainability: Narrative, Religion and Ethics’, the aim of which is to develop a new approach to sustainability by integrating theories of narrative identity with ecological and religious thought.

Here is part of the rationale for the project:

The growth of environmental literary and cultural studies (‘ecocriticism’) since the 1990s has certainly been ‘dizzying’,^[1] but it is also attracting a chorus of disapproval from some quarters. Faced with the indictment that an ‘ongoing failure to move towards sustainability calls into question the focus of current research and policy’,^[2] one vision of its future, provided by its critics, gives a deflationary account of its potential to be truly cross-disciplinary and to generate new insights and approaches to questions of sustainability: ‘if ecocritics cannot articulate just how things stand between humanity and the natural world and the humanities and the natural sciences, then they can at least gain greater clarity about the limitations of ecocriticism itself, along with those of environmental literature, culture, and politics.’’^[3] There is, however, an assumption behind this deflationary critique, namely that ecocriticism cannot convincingly articulate the relation between humanity and the natural world, or between the humanities and the natural sciences.

We want to oppose this defeatist story with a new interdisciplinary theoretical approach to ecology called “deep sustainability”, building on recent philosophical work on communication in the non-human world and environmental ethics (including Ricœur and Serres inter alia).

The project seeks to answer the following question: “How can a new approach to sustainability, informed by contemporary philosophical and religious perspectives, transform the field of ecocriticism and provide a new model for public engagement with ecological questions?”

[1] Dana Phillips, ‘Ecocriticism’s Hard Problems (Its Ironies, Too)’, American Literary History 25:2 (2013) 455.

[2] Fischer, Joern et al., ‘Mind the Sustainability Gap,’ Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22:12 (2007) 621.

[3] Phillips, ‘Ecocriticism’s Hard Problems’ 457.