ABSTRACT
It is worth restating the point that the notion of sustainability has to be taken beyond its current bland usage and interpretation, as best illustrated by politicians and daily media pundits. If it remains a ‘buzzword’ which can be so widely interpreted that people of very different outlooks on a given issue can all use it to support their cause, then it will suffer the same distortions to which discourses such as ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘development’ are commonly subjected. All of these terms, and others, are frequently and regularly distorted by most of our politicians – see Chomsky (1989, 2000), Postman (1985), Curran et al. (1986) and Beder (1997) for analyses of such distortions.
