I hate ‘Sustainability”.
Well, actually, I hate the word ‘sustainability’. And I hate ‘biodiversity’. And I hate ‘environmentalism’. And ‘ecology’. I am not very keen on ‘conservation’ for that matter.
But ‘sustainability’ is down there as the absolute worst.
It is a clunky, ugly, pretentious, polysyllabic ,agglutinative invention. totally lacking in any compelling emotion or ‘gut feel’
What is it with the international ‘nature protection’ community anyway that we keep coming up with these posh, long, Greek or Latin based terms to communicate urgent ideas that are after all very simple…? Novellist Thomas Hardy insisted on using nice, short, visceral Anglo Saxon words to communicate, and that is true of pretty much any great writer or poet in any language or any culture.
I once heard enviromentalist Jonathan Porrit speak on the definition of ’sustainability’ . He chose to turn it all round . What , he asked, is the opposite? What is ‘non-sustainability’ …?
And non-sustainability is of course … ‘death’.
Now, there’s a nice, short, visceral, anglo-saxon word that really gets your attention.
We (and that includes the international zoo community) need some better words!
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