ABSTRACT
The word “sustainability” is all around us. In the speeches of politicians and business leaders, in billboard-size fonts and in the fine print on consumer products, in the words of friends and family concerned about climate change, it is a term that permeates contemporary life, even as its meaning has become increasingly difficult to pin down. Nominally, “sustainability” refers to the use of resources in a manner that ensures their replenishment and continued availability for future generations. Yet critics have long noted how even this general meaning of sustainability has been diluted, even describing it as “one of the least meaningful and most overused words in the English language” (Owen, 2011: 246). Indeed the word continues to multiply across all scales of social, political, and economic life, popping up in expected and quite often unexpected places (see Chapter 1). Today, “sustainability” seems to be so deeply ingrained in our everyday communication practices that it is difficult to grasp how “the world once made do without the word” (Caradonna, 2022: 1).
