Can We Please Stop Saying ‘Sustainability’?
At least for what isn’t. Which is, in fact, almost everything.
Here’s a scenario you might recognize. While browsing the website of a large multinational whose name you are perhaps most familiar with from its notoriety in the media headlines, you notice a page title that reads ‘Sustainability’. Somewhat surprisingly to you considering its reputation, the company asserts to value this concept — so much so that it prominently graces its homepage and there’s an entire subpage dedicated to it.[1] [2]
Or maybe this one. At a party, a co-worker proudly tells you about her new electric car. What’s great about it is that it’s ‘sustainable’, because instead of an internal combustion engine it has a lithium-ion battery (whose raw materials were extracted in a rare earths mine, leaving a toxic and radioactive wasteland in its wake).[3] [4]
Or this one. You come across an ad for an energy company that offers clean, green and ‘sustainable’ electricity from hydroelectric and solar power (for which once fecund rivers were dammed, communities displaced and ecosystems poisoned).[5] [6]
You’ve probably experienced one or more situations like this, or at least recognize the commonness and frequency with which we encounter claims to ‘sustainability’, even to the point that to our ears it’s become little more than a buzzword. A hyped phrase that is thrown around in different contexts so often that it simply doesn’t mean much anymore. And it doesn’t.
Unless by sustainability we mean sustaining the speed and efficiency by which we’re currently destroying the planet. To illustrate, recent extinction rate estimates vary anywhere from 25 to 150 species per day.[7] At the same time, only 2% of primary forests remain, and the amount of plastic particles in the oceans outnumber stars in our galaxy by 500 to 1.[8] [9]
Of course this is nothing new. In fact, the realization that something’s amiss is one of the main drivers behind the term’s popularity. As a result of growing public concern for the state of natural communities and the bleak prospects for humanity itself, there is an increasing awareness that life as we know it is in fact unsustainable, and that we ourselves are responsible. As that realization turns into a combination of guilt and fear, policymakers, corporate enterprises and finally consumers[10] look for ways to (at least in the public eye) diminish their culpability. With a problem as globally threatening and with stakes as high as with climate change, then, it’s not so strange that it’s turned into a pissing contest for marketeers and political campaigners alike to see who can brand themselves as the most ‘environmentally responsible’.[11]
But I get it. For many genuinely well-meaning brands ‘sustainability’ is a way to summarize their corporate social responsibility efforts. It concisely describes one of their organizational values using a widely accepted phrase which many people more or less understand. In the more legitimate cases, what they’re really saying (or should be, at least) is that they actively strive to minimize the environmental harm of their output.
For many not-so genuinely well-meaning brands and organizations, on the other hand, it’s more a marketing catchphrase than anything else, devoid of any true meaning or value. Or, as an article in Harvard Business Review puts it, it’s become “a new form of public relations … used to describe moneymaking activities that happen to benefit society”.[12] To take credit for an incidental positive side-effect or to internalize environmentally beneficial goals into your organization may look similar on the surface, but are worlds apart in meaning and value. Although surely the degree of intentionality varies, the fact remains that in many cases claims to sustainability are misleading at best and false at worst.
And not only that, but I would argue that it’s harmful to how we perceive the single most pressing problem this culture is facing: how do we prevent further permanent environmental damage and reverse the countless trends of growing pollution, extinction and ecocide? Among all the noise of a word so easily used, we become numb to its actual meaning.
“It’s not so strange that it’s turned into a pissing contest for marketeers and political campaigners to see who can brand themselves as the most ‘environmentally responsible.’”
The website SustainableBrands.com gives the following definition of ‘sustainable’: “Enduring. In the design of global enterprise and economic systems, to support our human need to thrive physically, but also to experience our full potential for happiness and well being in both the present and for the very long term.”[13]
For now leaving aside the arrogance of a definition that explicitly only considers the prosperity of human beings, there are some problems with this definition.
The first one is the ambiguity of “the very long term”. This is incorrect. The meaning of something to be sustainable is for it to be ‘continuous’, as in ‘forever’, as in ‘barring any unforeseeable external circumstances, following current conduct the status quo can be maintained in perpetuity’. Much different are the implications when we lower the bar to resources being able to support our “full potential for happiness and well being” for “the very long term”. This gives off the impression that so long as we can find new sources of exploitation for a long time to come, we can keep telling ourselves that whatever we’re doing can be maintained until eternity. This is not sustainability. This is ignoring reality.
The second problem is that the definition above hijacks the meaning of the word to twist it into something supposedly having to do with “global enterprise and economic systems”. This incorrectly implies that it is inherently related to business and economy, whereas those are simply two examples of what it may apply to. I doubt that any non-industrial, actually sustainably living indigenous peoples, for example, would agree with this.
A much better definition that I’ve found is “pertaining to a system that maintains its own viability by using techniques that allow for continual reuse”.[14] Apart from being a much more widely applicable definition, the key difference with the former is the fact that it explicitly includes maintaining “its own viability”. In other words, it includes the aspect of being regenerative, thereby allowing for “continual reuse”. See the difference between this and allowing to use “for the very long term”?
By definition, any system or activity that uses or consumes anything at a higher rate than it can be replenished is not sustainable. Unfortunately, this is the case for many of the foundations that modern civilization is built upon.[15]
Like anyone else, I applaud efforts to turn this ship around, whether they come from the commercial, political or any other sphere. But as long as there are any species going extinct on a daily basis, as long as industrial agriculture[16] is a widely accepted method for food production, and as long as hydrocarbon exploration continues, to name just a few, we have a long way to go. So for the sake of transparency — better yet, for the sake of actual sustainability, which must remain the collective goal — let’s call these efforts what they really are.
The way we use language not only illustrates, but also influences how we perceive the world. As long as we allow ourselves to use a vernacular that, knowingly or not, serves to keep reality at bay, we will not stand a chance to change our perception of the world and thereby our behavior towards it.
Source list
[1] Bayer, https://www.bayer.com/en/sustainability.aspx (accessed August 17, 2018)
[2] Shell, https://www.shell.com/sustainability.html (accessed August 17, 2018)
[3] Wade, Lizzie, “Tesla’s Electric Cars Aren’t as Green as You Might Think,” Wired, March 31, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/03/teslas-electric-cars-might-not-green-think/ (accessed August 17, 2018)
[4] Bontron, Cécile, “Rare-earth mining in China comes at a heavy cost for local villages,” The Guardian, August 7, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-village-pollution (accessed August 19, 2018)
[5] “Sustainability,” Hydropower.org, https://www.hydropower.org/sustainability-0 (accessed August 17, 2018)
[6] Kaiman, Jonathan, “Rare earth mining in China: the bleak social and environmental costs,” The Guardian, March 20, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/rare-earth-mining-china-social-environmental-costs (accessed August 19, 2018)
[7] Pearce, Fred, “Global Extinction Rates: Why Do Estimates Vary So Wildly?,” Yale Environment 360, August 17, 2015, https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_do_estimates_vary_so_wildly (accessed August 17, 2018)
[8] Jensen, Derrick. The Myth of Human Supremacy. Seven Stories Press, 2016. Ebook.
[9] “‘Turn the tide on plastic’ urges UN, as microplastics in the seas now outnumber stars in our galaxy,” UN News, February 17, 2017, https://news.un.org/en/story/2017/02/552052-turn-tide-plastic-urges-un-microplastics-seas-now-outnumber-stars-our-galaxy (accessed August 17, 2018)
[10] The fact that this has become a widely used label for citizens is, I believe, in itself a major sign of the problem we’re dealing with.
[11] Holt, Douglas, John Quelch and Earl L. Taylor. “How Global Brands Compete,” Harvard Business Review, September, 2004, https://hbr.org/2004/09/how-global-brands-compete (accessed August 17, 2018)
[12] Ibid.
[13] SustainableBrands.com, https://www.sustainablebrands.com/about (accessed August 17, 2018)
[14] Dictionary.com, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sustainable (accessed August 17, 2018)
[15] Hemenway, Toby. “Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?,” Toby Hemenway, June 1, 2011, http://tobyhemenway.com/203-is-sustainable-agriculture-an-oxymoron/ (accessed August 17, 2018)
[16] “Industrial Agriculture,” Union of Concerned Scientists, https://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/food-agriculture/our-failing-food-system/industrial-agriculture#.W3SneX7ZAWo (accessed August 17, 2018)
