Sustainable Advocacy: Voice for and before an Intergenerational Audience

Abstract

Science has shown humans’ abilities to affect the Earth in generations beyond their time. This awareness comes at a moment when massive social change pressures national and international speech within terministic screens (Burke, 1966, p. 45) that prioritize short-term economic growth and political needs. “Sustainability” and related terms restrain that way of thinking, prioritizing the long-term well-being of the environment, the economy, and society as they come into contact with one another. Even given this standard definition, though, the term is abstract enough to be manipulated. Some polluting corporations, for example, take advantage of it as a propagandistic buzzword. Even in more legitimate applications, the term is ambiguous. “Sustainability” sometimes denotes a field of arguments about justice within and across generations, while it also symbolizes a criterion for value judgments regarding present environmental claims and policy solutions. Groups and individuals attempt to find useful ideas of sustainability to solve entrenched problems facing societies. Yet they fail to account for the possibility that these global and intergenerational problems produce demands that cannot be addressed by existing models of communication. Just as Plato advocated philosophical dialogue as a model to combat the demagoguery of Athenian democracy, we contend that existing approaches to advocacy need to be re-envisioned for our present dilemma.