It's time to ditch sustainability

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Nothing is sustainable, but you'd never know it. The term sustainable is in such wide use these days — sustainable business, sustainable mining, sustainable futures — you might be tempted to believe the exact opposite.

Practically everything, it would appear, is or can be sustainable.

Sustainability as a concept has good intentions, but the term itself has become so co-opted that it now gets in the way of real efforts to fundamentally change the way we relate to one another and do business.

To create lasting change, we need to change how we talk about the challenges of the work ahead: health vs. health care, farms that restore soil and water as a consequence of producing healthy food, forestry that increases species diversity and C02 storage while generating a return to its owners, green buildings that reduce energy use and improve workforce productivity, credit for small businesses that come largely from community banks, and diverse local energy sources that don't rely on a stable Middle East. We need to talk about solutions that arise naturally, tangibly and practically from the initiative and needs of community residents and the very particular and distinctive character of the places in which we live.

Innovation is a deeply natural process that arises gradually from the bits and pieces of our collective and connected experiences. We should toss the term "sustainability" and try "natural" instead, for the language we use shapes our worldview.

Today we waste far too much precious hope, time and energy waiting for traditional institutions of government and large corporations to solve our fundamental problems. Why wait on national political solutions when there is so much good work to be done at home? A truly adaptive, resilient, and more natural form of development comes most easily from the very intimate relationships between people and place.

With rights to more opportunity and a better life naturally come responsibilities. In the face of a changing and unpredictable world, in a nation in which national debt is growing at twice the rate of our most optimistic projection of growth, local and regional enterprise is a scale and framework in which we can most effectively create jobs, not find them, and take matters back into our own hands. Restoring faith and trust in country might come less from sustaining existing institutions than from private initiative, from the bottom up, naturally.

Nothing is sustainable and thank goodness for it. No one wishes his or her friend a sustainable wedding; there is no joy there. Life is measured more by adapting than sustaining. Nature works that way, and so do economies. Healthy ecosystems and economies are measured best by their diversity, savings, and resilience; their ability to bounce back after stress, and their ability to constantly differentiate their goods and services in the face of changing economic, environmental and social conditions.

Sustainability was originally meant to promote a development model that improves social, environmental and economic conditions. From the beginning, however, the fear was that sustainability would be co-opted and become an addendum to the reigning oil-based industrial economy rather than a reforming concept. That fear is becoming reality.

Spencer B. Beebe is the founder and president of Ecotrust, and the founding president of Conservation International. His new book is Cache: Creating Natural Economies. He last wrote for SBO about the "nature state" approach to prosperity.