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discourse emerged. The discourse framed problems as interrelated and requiring integrated

solutions. At first focus was on social and economic dimensions in addition to the

environment, and then eventually culture was put forward as a distinct matter. Consequently

the sustainability discourse expanded its narrative and institutional makeup to correlate with a

discourse of cultural diversity (e.g. multiculturalism policies were part of this discourse).

Culture served a new function on an international level in environmental debates. In

particular, global inter-governmental bodies such as the UN mobilised culture and argued that

the inclusion of culture was a necessary process for the future of the world and of humanity.

A four-pillar model of sustainability emerged as an integrated (social, economic,

environmental and cultural) solution to interrelated problems. Thus with the dawn of the new

millennium came the dawn of culture as a bastion of earth’s future. The 2002 World Summit

of Sustainable Development forwarded a particular vision of culture through the notion of

cultural diversity. At the Roundtable for Cultural Diversity and Biodiversity for Sustainable

Development (one of the summit events), diverse stakeholders presented critiques of

environmental management programs, highlighting the cultural biases of such programs, and

forwarded the position that cultural plurality existed in relation to environmental knowledge

and forms of management. Not only did the roundtable put forward an agenda of pluralism, it

also established a correlation between cultural diversity and biodiversity. This united the two

streams of cultural and biological diversity, which had previously been separate UN interests.

As a result nature and culture were conjoined in discourses of sustainable development.

In the current chapter I examine the paradoxes of the overarching goal to

simultaneously attend to each realm of the integrated model, including the paradox of a

universal value of cultural diversity. The addition of culture on the sustainability agenda

certainly opened the way to appraise the cultural dimensions of environmental management

and science, as well as cultural aspects of environmental conflicts. Yet while ‘the genius of

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