Sustainable nostalgia

Abstract

The ecological ideal of ‘sustainability’ is defensible, but controversial. It valorizes a certain way of inhabiting the world not by defining it directly, but by imagining its perpetual reproduction. I argue that what sustainability offers us is a way of being nostalgic for the future.The sustainable present will become our true home because it is the point to which the future will always recur; we look nostalgically to the future because it is there that the present will be inhabited as our home. Nostalgic imaginings are not, then, just a regulative ideal for ecological praxis. Nostalgia is called upon as an ethical principle, and the characteristics of this memory-work will affect the shape of our future.