Nutty Logic: Listening to the Hazelnuts in Pavese and Fenoglio

Abstract

In “Our Common Future,” also known as the Bruntland Report, the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) defined “sustainable development” as development “that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” thanks to the management and improvement of “technology and social organization [ … ] to make way for a new era of economic growth” (WCED 16).1 More than thirty years later, the current definition provided by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) remains worryingly similar to the previous one as it states that “To pursue sustainability is to create and maintain the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony to support present and future generations” (EPA n.d.). As contemporary scholars contemplate the “fraught, paradoxical, contentious” concept of sustainability (Johns-Putra et al. 8), it is not surprising that some of the most recent scholarship...