Future or Stretched Present? Sustainability and the Legitimacy of a Socially Produced Future

The paper develops an alternative approach for the EPT with an analytical and a normative perspective. In a first step the paper identifies the main objects of the EPT like environmentalism and sustainability as different variants of a socially produced future. Every society produces different kinds of future at any time and these flourish as competing ideas within discourses or they even transform the social practice. However, the paper argues in the next part that sustainability is unique. For this, it discusses the context of their production on three levels: the process, the causality of the product, and the status of the product. The first level affects questions according to the groups who are involved and the quality of the process (transparency, chances of influence). The next level deals with the relationship of the present and the future. It provokes the question for the distinction of both, while future should transform the present. Does sustainability open or close the future by stretching the present? The level of the status affects the modus of the competition between different kinds of future. Is it a fair competition for better arguments or rather a struggle for power? By answering these questions the paper elaborates a constructive approach, which reflects the empirical and normative conditions of the sustainability. Therefore, the existing concepts of sustainability are products of a minority of specialists with a blurred distinction of present/future as well as diffuse opponents. Contrary to these, the paper argues in a third step that a legitimate sustainability needs a majority, who produces an unambiguous concept of the future with a clear distinction of the present and the future. This insight would be urgent for the further discussion, which especially concerning the global scale of sustainability and the challenge of a transcultural production of future.