Sustainability of what, and development for whom?

Sustainable development is mediated by economics. It asks what can be financed, measured and managed. That framing has produced real progress and it is not moving at the pace the science requires.

Habitability asks a different question: what does it take to live in partnership with the Earth’s processes? It treats nature and society as one thing rather than two, and it refuses to insert new modes of profit-taking into the web of life.

Getting there means confronting how the climate crisis was built. Extractive capitalism, plantation monoculture, human exceptionalism, colonialism, race and gender are not context for anthropogenic climate change. They are its infrastructure. The average US citizen’s carbon footprint is nearly ten times that of the average Indian. Nine of the ten countries most exposed to rising seas are low or middle income.

The humanities are how a society works out what it means. That is exactly what adapting to environmental change will require.

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