ABSTRACT
Sustainability has become almost universally used in business, education, or government to refer to whatever they are doing to reduce their impacts on the natural world and on inequality. The positive reaction to unsustainability was a plethora of remedial programs, largely carried out by businesses. Businesses found that the new term had a nice ring to it with more market power than greening. Greening and sustainability struggled to solve the problems they were designed to counter. The tie between sustainability and its predecessor, sustainable development, is development, and particularly economic development, which points to growth as what is to be sustained. Growth as the objective of sustainability, even if tempered by eco-efficiency, is a self-defeating norm. The broad, but fuzzy concept of sustainability was reduced in the everyday vernacular to catchphrases like the triad of environment, economy and equity/ethics/social, or people, profits, and planet.
