Is Sustainability Sustainable?

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Themost important concept in current environmental thinking is sustainability. Environmental policies, economic policies, development, resource use—all of these things, according to the consensus, ought to be sustainable. But what is sustainability? What is its ethical foundation? There is little consensus about how these questions ought to be answered. Many environmentalists are troubled by the plethora of understandings of sustainability in the literature. Andrew Dobson, for example, counts more than three hundred definitions! Others see this as a virtue, equating sustainability with other contested concepts such as happiness, justice, and rights. Either way, exploring the ethical significance of sustainability is a vital task. Surprisingly, almost nothing has been done to justify sustainability as an ethical constraint. My aim is to investigate whether that can be done. I shall argue that the chief conceptions of sustainability in the environmental literature are not themselves sustainable. They often have innocuous interpretations that are plausible but do little to advance the environmentalists’ or any other particular agenda. Their more radical interpretations, however, lack ethical foundations; they face obvious counterexamples when applied to individual lives and communities. There is no reason to take any of them as criteria that any environmental, economic, developmental, or resource management policy must meet, or even as goals toward which any such policy ought to strive. Acad. Quest. (2010) 23:84–101 DOI 10.1007/s12129-009-9152-4