The scholarship of sustainability

Our world is now afflicted with a crisis of sustainability, which is considered to be the greatest challenge that human civilization has faced in its recorded history. We, however, are yet to produce an effective intellectual tradition in addressing this crisis owing to a constraint that is presented by the prevalence of a compartmentalized division and narrowed vision in the exercise of human scholarship. As the problems of unsustainability exist in the totalities of things/realities, the provision of an effective intellectual treatment of sustainability would, therefore, require the creation of an intellectual capability for the production of sound knowledge on the totalities of these things/realities. This capability equates to an ability to systematically analyze various aspects and elements of knowledge that are associated with these things/realities.

The scope for the creation of this intellectual capability does, however, not align with the reductionist mode of inquiry owing to the epistemological and methodological limits of the latter, which, in the first place, had unwittingly facilitated the emergence of the current crisis of sustainability through the production of fragmented scientific and technological advancements that produce pragmatically less compatible or conflicting artifacts. While the creation of that capability—which represents a new mode of intellectual inquiry—would, instead, require the utilization of a wider, non-reductionist yet robust intellectual lens; the avenue of knowledge that is to be resulted from the exercise of this new mode of intellectual inquiry is termed as the scholarship of sustainability.