ENVIRONMENT | The Avengers, Moses and the dilemmas of sustainability

The adoption of systemic reasoning when it comes to sustainability forces us to come to terms with the dilemmas and complexity that the impact of human life on Earth entails.
The benefits of acting responsibly come at a cost, which brings ethics and morals into play.
Not to mention risks, mistakes, and making sense of all that we do, which mustn’t be underestimated.

by Maura Gancitano


In the Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame films, the villain, a mutant named Thanos, decides to exterminate half of all life in the universe. What motivates him isn’t the simple desire for vengeance or destruction; instead, he aims to respond to a universal order that’s incomprehensible to humans: the universe is at risk of overpopulation and subsequent collapse, making it necessary to restore its balance.
     The Titan’s logic isn’t guided by human morals, but he isn’t acting out of pure evil either. Instead, he’s spurred to action by a higher ideal; he’s convinced he’s the chosen one, and he tells his daughter Gamora that he’s the only one who knows what the right thing to do is, or, at least, the only one with the courage and will to act. So, he travels between the planets, killing their populations without so much as a second thought to who deserves to live or die. His actions are guided by chance alone, and all that matters is the quantity of beings that live: one out of every two.
     As is often the case, the contemporary mythology of the Avengers is rooted in ancient legends and stories. One of them, found in the 18th surah of the Quran, tells the tale of a mysterious figure, al-Khid.r (‘the Green One’), so called because he once sat on arid land, turning it green and lush in vegetation. One day, the man helped Moses (Mūsā in Arabic), so Moses asked to follow and learn the knowledge he possessed, so that he may live a just life and find the true path (rushd). Al-Khid.r agreed, providing that Moses didn’t question his actions or ask for explanations, no matter what he saw. During the journey, Moses’s teacher sank the boat of a poor family, killed a boy, and rebuilt a wall in a city where no one offered them food. Ultimately, al-Khid.r revealed the motives behind each of his actions, which took facts and consequences unknown to young Moses into account: he had damaged the ship because a tyrant king was seizing them from poor families, but that tyrant would die the following day and the family could then retrieve their boat from the bottom of the river; he had killed the boy because he would have become an evil, violent person; he had rebuilt the wall to protect the treasure of a good man, which otherwise would have been stolen by the townspeople instead of found by his children.
     The actions of Thanos and al-Khid.r, despite being very different and linked to diverse planes of existence, can nevertheless help us grapple with an idea that’s often scorned in polarised times, like the one we’re living in today: that of a dilemma.
Having more data and information and imagining the future consequences of present-day actions doesn’t simplify the choices we make. It makes them more complex.
     Recognising a dilemma means realising that, when faced with a problem, choosing which action(s) to take isn’t easy or conflict-free, but instead comes with costs and benefits, or the juxtaposition of equally important values, which cannot be mutually exclusive.
     The thought experiment known as the trolley problem, presented in 1967 by British philosopher Philippa Ruth Foot, for example, describes a runaway tram speeding along railways tracks which soon come to a fork. On one side are five people tied to the tracks, unable to escape; on the other is just one individual, who is also tied to the tracks. The tram is currently heading towards the group of five people, but pulling a lever would switch it to tracks with just one individual. Standing in front of that lever is a person who doesn’t know any of the people tied to the tracks, but who can decide to pull the lever, changing the path of the tram, or not. What’s the right thing to do? Let the trolley continue in its path and kill five people? Or pull the lever and decide the fate of just one person?
     When we talk about sustainability, i.e., the capacity for the Earth’s biosphere and human society to coexist, we’re undoubtedly talking about scientific research, industrial manufacturing and climatology. However, we are also talking about the capacity to recognise the dilemmas and complexity that the impact of human life on Earth entails.
     Today we know that climate change is anthropic in origin and that the production and consumption models of recent centuries have upset the balance. We thus also know that, to compensate for the damage caused by unsustainable human actions, responsible and reasonable human actions are necessary. When we effectively go to change these models, however, we might realise that no action has only benefits and no costs, and that a responsible assessment therefore requires knowledge and comprehension of the potential losses in economic or social terms, for example. Those who claim that the actions to take are clear or have no chance of error are probably ignoring its contradictory consequences.
     Making our lives sustainable is possible, but it isn’t simple. It’s urgent, but it requires informed choices, and the ability to hold scientific data and economic models together with the plane of ethics and morals.
It’s a plane that leaves us standing before risks and mistakes, and which prevents us from believing that a perfect or just action, in the absolute sense, can exist. But it’s also one that pushes us to make sense of our actions and take full responsibility for them.