SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND THE PROCESS OF JUSTIFYING CHOICES IN A CONTROVERSIAL UNIVERSE

All in all, neither the path of the generic principle nor that of the reduction to existing principles would appear to be fully satisfactory as the basis for establishing the legitimacy of sustainable development or as a way of making sustainability a principle of legitimacy by its own. We should probably resign ourselves to seeing in this idea a composite construction, still striving towards the formation of a new "superior common principle", without this principle yet being able to be completely clarified and validated. What we have here is an example of the sort of "compromise" described by Boltanski and Thévenot (1991, p.338): "In the compromise, the participants abandon the idea of clarifying the principle of their agreement but endeavour to maintain a frame of mind aiming at the common good." If we want to consolidate the compromise developing around sustainability, it would be well advised to seek the support of tests using well-formed objects. To this end, steps should be taken to move the emphasis away from long-term and unknowable sustainability requirements and closer to secondbest criteria focused on the transitional developments and possible risks of intentional human action, the ways of managing the linking of the different temporalities in play -- as regards the biophysical phenomena, their understanding and the main worlds of legitimacy (Godard, 1992) -- and the introduction of deliberation within the present generations as to what they feel best describes their identity, those things they would like to pass on

Non-native Species and the Aesthetics of Nature

Howhumansperceiveandjudgenatureandrelateittotheirlifeisshaped by emotional, cognitive, cultural, and social factors. Whether a species is consid- ered native, non-native, or invasive can affect such aesthetics of nature by interact- ing with our emotions, affronting or confirming our cognitive categories, or engaging in our social, economic, and cultural worlds. Consequently, how humans perceive and judge the presence of such species, or how they judge an ecosystem or land- scape change triggered by them, is not fixed or easy to define. Here, some of the psychological, cognitive, and social dimensions that influence how humans judge non-native and invasive species and their effects on ecosystems are reviewed. It is concluded, at least in the case of non-native species, that the reduction of aesthetics to a ‘service’ is problematic, for it occludes the complex psychological and social processes that shape divergent perceptions of changing species distributions