Keeping humans at the heart of sustainability

Sustainability is not a fact to be read off from ecosystems, but an evaluative framework shaped by human judgements about what should be sustained, for whom, and at what cost. Posthuman and more-than-human approaches, which seek to decentre the human by foregrounding ecological interdependence and the agency of nonhuman actors, offer an important corrective to crude anthropocentrism, but they risk obscuring human normative agency when decentring the human is treated as sustainability’s self-evident direction. This commentary argues that sustainability cannot and should not escape its human normative centre, and proposes ecologically informed humanism, a position that keeps this centre explicit while holding it ethically, politically, and ecologically accountable. Implications follow for sustainability research, governance, and education.