Top 10 Myths About Sustainability

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April 3—Can Sustainability Help You With Your Budget Crisis?, featuring SCUPer Kelly Cain of the University of Wisconsin, River Falls, and possibly another guest. Cain, along with his colleague Dale Braun, are faculty for a SCUP-developed sustainability workshop at SCUP–44. Discussants will include former SCUP president Nancy Tierney, senior Chronicle of Higher Education writer Scott Carlson, and Peter Bardaglio, senior fellow with Second Nature. Learn more or register now.

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At first, we thought this item from Scientific American might be too conceptually shallow, but we read it through and it's really a good walk through some definitional and conceptual understandings - and misunderstandings. Especially if you sometimes think you may not quite know enough about "sustainability," this is a good and brief review, which begins:

When a word becomes so popular you begin hearing it everywhere, in all sorts of marginally related or even unrelated contexts, it means one of two things. Either the word has devolved into a meaningless cliché, or it has real conceptual heft. “Green” (or, even worse, “going green”) falls squarely into the first category. But “sustainable,” which at first conjures up a similarly vague sense of environmental virtue, actually belongs in the second. True, you hear it applied to everything from cars to agriculture to economics. But that’s because the concept of sustainability is at its heart so simple that it legitimately applies to all these areas and more.

Despite its simplicity, however, sustainability is a concept people have a hard time wrapping their minds around.