Idea
What is Sustainability? A Critique
A word that has appeared in every corporate report and every state policy for twenty years has, by that success, lost the ability to name anything.
Abstract
Sustainability began, three centuries ago in a Saxon silver mine, as a hard operational constraint: do not cut the forest faster than it grows or the mine stops. The essay traces how that concrete accounting discipline became a floating signifier — attached to fashion collections, banking products, and diplomatic communiqués — and argues that the vagueness is not accidental. When a term can mean anything, it is doing political work, not descriptive work.
5-Second Answer
Sustainability started as an accounting rule for a specific system. It became a marketing word because vagueness serves the actors who prefer no rule at all.
Key Arguments
- The original 1713 formulation was quantitative and constrained: never harvest more than the system can regenerate.
- As the word migrated from forestry to policy to branding, the numerator (impact) blurred and the denominator (capacity) disappeared.
- ‘Sustainable’ now most often means ‘less bad than the current baseline’ — a claim that is unfalsifiable without a specified reference system.
- The vagueness is politically useful: it lets institutions defer structural questions about consumption, growth, and distribution.
Analysis
The essay is a genealogy of the word rather than a definition of it. Hans Carl von Carlowitz, in 1713, faced a technical problem: the mine's demand for timber outran the forest's growth. His answer — ‘Nachhaltigkeit’ — was an operating rule, not an ethical stance.
Three centuries later the term is used in contexts where no such rule can be written: sustainable finance, sustainable fashion, sustainable AI. In most of those uses the claim is comparative rather than absolute — this option is less harmful than the last one — and no one specifies the system that would be sustained.
The piece treats that emptiness as diagnostic. When a term is retained despite its uselessness, it is because someone benefits from its uselessness. The full argument, and the response to standard defences of the word, live in the Turkish original.
Counterarguments
The strongest defence is that vague words are useful in coalition-building; a term precise enough to be operational is often narrow enough to exclude allies. This is true, and the essay concedes it — but adds that the coalition-building phase has now lasted three decades, and the operational rules have still not arrived.
Implications
For institutions: when using the word, name the specific stock being sustained and the horizon over which the accounting applies. For readers: treat unqualified ‘sustainable’ claims as a request for scepticism, not for assent.
References
Signal, not noise.
A monthly briefing on AI, sustainability, and the future of human judgment — filtered from global reports, research, and emerging debates.
Join the BriefingMore ideas