ABSTRACT
Sustainability is both a badly misused, and abused term. It's misused when those who speak it and act in its name do not understand what it means. It's abused when it is used by agents that know they do not understand it, but use it as an attempt to fool others into thinking that they do. The central idea of sustainability-as-flourishing, then, is a way of capturing many of the individual elements of the problems and solutions that make up the sustainability agenda. Sustainability pertains to a generic property of systems to produce something we want over long periods. Sustainability-as-flourishing is a vision that can guide us away from our self-destructive ways. The many parts of the system have to be coordinated properly by human agents for the quality to emerge. Nothing can emerge from a mechanical system alone, that is, from a machine.
