“No no no no…you’re monkey’s got it right, sir.”-The Restaurant at the end of the Universe by Douglas Adams

Thank you very much for bringing this to light. I am on the side of still using “sustainability”, but fighting the dilution of the meaning and insisting that “sustainability” is not enough. To put it in Raj Patel’s words, “The opposite of consumption is not frugality; it is generosity.”

A species has to do more than ‘balance’ things out because there are unpredictable, unexperienced random events (black swans) that must be dealt with, and those random events mean there has to be some excess usefulness banked away somehow. The problem is not the language, but our actual behavior of extraction instead of contribution to the ecology’s future. The only real purpose humanity can have for the ecology is our ability to see the future by making a model in our heads. We have advanced far enough to actually be protectors of the planet from some of its most dire threats, yet we have become one ourselves to most of the species alive (including ourselves).

Talking about “sustainability” just isn’t enough to reverse our concepts of economics so that our flow of labor and wealth goes toward the land and those who support it, not away from it. THAT is what sustainable means: contributing more to our future offspring’s resources than we consume.

We are physically capable of doing so and to stop seeing every other human as a competitor.

We probably won’t, though. Understanding this simple truth is where decisions and realizations get applied by those who really grok the problem. All things considered, we have only a choice now between “greenhouse” and “Venus” levels of luck.