Seriously.

So here’s a confession. I’m committed to sustainability because it’s really very simple and shouldn’t be at all controversial: (a) take smart, solid design; (b) fold into it attentive analysis of how optimal systems operate. (c) Hit this mixture with a splash of dissatisfaction with Business-As-Usual and (d) top it with a heap of “don’t-dook-in-your-own-drinking-water” common sense (if only it were common¹). A hint of nose-thumbing at the truculent, the short-sighted, the fell, and the petty doesn’t hurt, either.

But that’s not the confession. I’m not exactly whispering to some priest behind a curtain about sustainability, am I? Sustainability itself is perfectly commonsensical, morally responsible, and scientifically and economically far sounder than its alternatives.

My confession is that I think “sustainability” is one of the ugliest words in my vocabulary. It’s abstract, six-syllabled, and consists of two Latinate suffixes (“-able” + “-ity”), one Latinate prefix (“sus”), and a Latin (maybe Indo-European) root (“tenere,” for “hold”). I get numb to it: the word. And if I am numb to it, who else must be, too? As Michael Pollan wrote last December, “The word ‘sustainability’ has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness.”²

Again, it’s not the concept that’s the problem, just the word. So I’m hunting around for another word. Anything prefixed with “eco-” or modified by the adjective “green” is out-of-bounds, even though the “eco-” in economics usually gets smuggled into acceptance. We have to be smart about this. If we want to offend the benighted, we want to offend them well. Nothing makes the backward see red more quickly than green.

(It’s too bad, speaking of offending, that the phrase “intelligent design” has already been taken— and worse that it’s been taken by people who seem to have stopped reading in 1779, when the argument from design, or the teleological argument, as it was called, was intellectually vaporized by David Hume³. That phrase “intelligent design” would have made such a nice replacement for the word “sustainability,” but now it’s beyond salvage.)

At this point, then, I’m pretty much open to suggestions. Here’s what I’ve got jotted down so far, as alternatives to the “s”-word:

• “eco-planning smartness,” which has the small merit of being transparent to everyone over the age of four, but if I have to explain why it won’t work….;
• “Hokmah,” the Hebrew word for “Wisdom,” which, according to Proverbs 14:1, “builds her house, while Folly with her own hands tears it down”;
• “Cradle-to-Cradle,” which is the title of one of the best books on sust , and which refers to smart design that tries to eliminate the very idea of waste (outputs, outgoes, outflows, that have to be discarded, discharged, disposed); the only downside is that I just had to explain it and that I’m probably breaking a copyright by even mentioning it;
• “permaculture,” which is a little woo-woo for my taste and therefore probably yours;
• “appropriate technology,” which I admittedly found from Wikipedia, but like a lot.

At this point, I really am open to suggestions. Seriously.

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¹ Re: Poop in the water, ask Chicago about its 19th century cholera epidemic. Oops!

² “Our Decrepit Food Factories,” New York Times Magazine (12/16/2007) www.nytimes.com.

³ The character Philo, ripping Cleanthes the natural theologian: “Thought, design, intelligence, such as we discover in men and other animals, is no more than one of the springs and principles of the universe, as well as heat or cold, attraction or repulsion, and a hundred others, which fall under daily observation” (Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part II).