The article below was in the March 2012 issue of Public Servant magazine. A concern I have with the way the article has been written is that the abstract and highlight both talk about sustainable growth, but there is only one mention of sustainable growth in the body of the text. All the other references to growth in the article, of which there are 15, leave out the word sustainability. Furthermore, there is nothing in the article to discuss the tensions between economic growth and sustainability (of which there are many), or the increasingly high-profile "green growth" agenda. These are some of the most important aspects of the sustainability debate, in my view. Indeed, it's entirely possible that the author of the article is only using the term 'sustainability' in the most superficial of meanings, ie 'growth that will occur for longer than the short-term', rather than meaning it to refer to the sustainability agenda around population growth, scarcity of energy, water, food and threats to biodiversity. I get the impression, therefore, that the author simply tacked on the word sustainability in the high-level soundbites to make the article appeal to a wider set of audiences, without actually tackling it in any meaningful way in the body of the text. Is this an example of sustainability being given lip-service, or even of the term 'sustainable' being misused altogether? Should a campaign be started, perhaps, to take possession of the term and clarify its most important meaning in the world we now find ourselves in?
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About the BloggerI'm David Calver - an Accountant with a passion for sustainability. Categories
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