Introduction

Abstract

As hard as it might be to believe, the world once made do without the words “sustainable” and “sustainability.” Today they’re nearly ubiquitous. At the grocery store we shop for “sustainable foods” that were produced, of course, from “sustainable agriculture”; ministries of natural resources in many parts of the world strive for “sustainable yields” in forestry; the United Nations (UN ) has long touted “sustainable development” as a strategy for global stability; and woe be the city dweller who doesn’t aim for a “sustainable lifestyle.” Sustainability first emerged as an explicit social, environmental, and economic ideal in the late 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s, it had become a familiar term in the world of policy wonkery—President Bill Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development, for instance— but the embrace wasn’t universal. Bill McKibben, perhaps the most prominent environmentalist of the past 30 years, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in 1996 in which he dismissed sustainability as a “buzzless buzzword” that was “born partly in an effort to obfuscate” and which would never catch on in mainstream society. In McKibben’s view, sustainability “never made the leap to lingo”— and never would. “It’s time to figure out why, and then figure out something else.” (McKibben preferred the term “maturity.”) Many others have since accused “sustainability” and “sustainable development” of being superficial terms that mask ongoing environmental degradation and facilitate business-as-usual economic growth. Those are debatable points that will be discussed in this book. But one thing is clear: McKibben was quite wrong about the quick decline of “sustainability.” One way to demonstrate this growing interest is to look at book titles that bear the word “sustainable” or “sustainability.” It’s difficult to find books published before 1976 that employ these words as titles or even as keywords. Indeed, as Figure 1 shows, no book in the English language used either term in the title before 1970. But since 1980 there has been an explosion of books and articles that not only use those words as titles but also deal with the many facets of sustainability.

Sustainability as a “magic concept”

“…As a result of the tripartite focus of sustainability (societal, economic, environmental) Goodland and Daly has noted that "sustainability" is turning into a "… landfill dump for everyone's environmental and social wishlists". 66 Magic concepts, like atoms with high valency, likes to clump together with other broad concepts. Sustainability is no exception.…”

Engaging with the Sustainable Development Goals by going beyond Modernity: An ethical evaluation within a worldview framework

“…From the start, Modernity's claim to knowledge, rationality and power and the process of ‘development’ has been contested from diverse corners, as is manifested in numerous resistance and opposition movements often given the label ‘Romanticism’. Aristocratic elites bemoaned the tendency towards materialist lifestyles; workers opposed harsh working conditions and unfair distribution of rewards; religious persons and artists feared erosion of community and ethical guidelines; and nature lovers and consumer groups started to resist the destruction of natural areas and the pollution of air and water (Caradonna, 2014; de Vries, 2013).…”