Hijacking Sustainability

"Sustainability" is one of those feel-good terms that too often disguise a commitment to business as usual. Parr's illuminating interrogation of that tactic is a triumph of content over style. Despite routinely misty syntax, she offers provocative analyses of the "eco-branding" of corporations such as BP and Wal-Mart, the unintentionally comical implications of the US military's commitment to "sustainability", or the provision of culturally appropriate temporary disaster shelters. A clever chapter analyses the symbolic battle between successive administrations over the "sustainability" of the White House: Reagan removed the solar panels that Carter had installed; George W Bush had more solar panels installed but didn't publicise the fact.

Only occasionally are there hints of glib academic radicalism, as when, discussing Brazilian urban slums, Parr describes how her own preferred approach would "experiment with the material movements of life in all its variation". It's not obvious that poor people would be happy to be the subjects of an "experiment" that has "no pregiven foundation or telos", as Parr advertises it, rather than more confidently directed projects.