Have you noticed the proliferation of phrases like “sustainable product” or “sustainable business” or “the sustainable university”?
It seems everyone and everything nowadays is aiming to sustain itself as if it were intrinsically a good thing to be sustainable.
But “being sustainable” is not necessarily the same as “promoting sustainability.”
In this post, I discuss the way in which the overuse of the simple word “sustainable” without the “-ity” at the end can be dangerously ambiguous and can actually hinder sustainability-thinking, sustainability education, and the sustainability movement.
This rhetorical practice may, in fact, promote sustainable ambiguity.
