Sustainability and Google

Sustainability, the word -- About 46,000,000 results in Google until you click to page 11 then it changes to 59,500,000 results, 100 more than 10 minutes ago! Websites include EPA, non-profits, corporations, associations of professionals like architects, engineers and builders, schools, universities, blogs, state and city governments (Cleveland has an office of sustainability), entertainers, auditors (Deloitte), conference organizers and just anyone with his hand out for  government money or a fast buck. Never as a word meant so much to so many, but basically means wealth transfer.  It's the "greenwashing" of America. And that is "green" as in money and class envy, and green as in environmentalism.  If the purpose is political, it is to kill capitalism; if it's corporate, it's to grow capitalism; and if it's personal, it's spiritual.

And did you know, sustainability is displacing diversity as the campus craze du jour?

Diversity authorizes double standards in admissions and hiring, breeds a campus culture of hypocrisy, mismatches students to educational opportunities, fosters ethnic resentments, elevates group identity over individual achievement, and trivializes the curriculum. Of course, those punishments were something that had to be accepted in the spirit of atoning for the original sin of racism.

But for its part, sustainability has the logic of a stampede. We all must run in the same direction for fear of some rumored and largely invisible threat. The real threat is the stampede itself. Sustainability numbers among its advocates some scrupulous scientists and quite a few sober facilities managers who simply want to trim utility bills. But in the main, sustainability is the triumph of hypothesis over evidence. Peter Wood, Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 3, 2010