ABSTRACT
Sustainability has become a ubiquitous buzzword in our society. We now see the concept publicized in grocery stores, on university campuses, in corporate headquarters, in governmental departments of environmental management, in natural resource management, and in numerous other domains. Indeed, sustainability has been a standard feature of public and political discourse ever since the United Nations adopted the concept in a series of conventions and reports in the 1980s. By the 1990s it had become a familiar term in the world of policy wonkery—we might think of President Bill Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development, for example—but sustainability had also garnered its first criticism. In 1996, the environmentalist Bill McKibben called sustainability a “buzzless buzzword” that was “born partly in an effort to obfuscate” and which would never catch on in mainstream society: “[It] has never made the leap to lingo—and never will. It’s time to figure out why, and then figure out something else.” (McKibben, for his part, preferred the term “maturity.”) 1
