Just to let you know, dear Tom, I have been agonizing over your horrific misfortune to have been brutally dragooned by your employer to go spend a long long bitterly long weekend at Asilomar.  What unspeakable enslavement!  Poor poor Tom!  How you must be suffering!  My heart bleeds!

"Nice work if you can get it,
And you can get it if you try."  ; )

More generally, "sustainable" and "sustainability" are words that should be denounced whenever they appear in anyone's vocabulary, and should be denounced especially by environmentalists.

For, simply, they are lies.

What could "sustainable" mean, after all, other than, "of or pertaining to an activity which may be carried on indefinitely, the participant elements, factors and resources of which are inexhaustible."

Well, cari bambini, there is nothing within this physical limited universe like that.  True, hand washes hand, parts help parts, agents enable conditions for future agencies; but time is a spiral, and never returns to the same point.

There are at least three reasons why "sustainable" and "sustainability" should be deleted from environmentalist discourse and indeed vocabulary:

Cosmological: "The Universe is expanding."  Brooklyn too, says Alvy Singer to Alvy Singer's mother.  We can never return to this point in time.  (We do not even perceive this point in time, really, given the limitations of our senses -- "in real time" is a fiction -- , but that is another subject.)

Biological: "Life finds a way."  Well, sometimes.  But often.  Very often.  And that is enough.  Agricultural scientists are fools.

Anthropological: "Humans are pigs."  Well, sometimes.  But that is enough, and more than enough.  It was enough to impress one ancient Middle-Eastern culture to decide that all humanity should be condemned, for humanity's representatives' gluttony, to mortality and hard labor, the guys sweating awfully over their ploughs, the girls groaning awfully in childbirth.

Anyway, I for one shall look askance at every future unironic use of "sustainable" and "sustainability" in Grist and Gristmill.  As elsewhere.

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

This is a perfect trend.  Art and organic farming.  Quality of life versus walmart.  Cheap throwaway products and poisonous food for expendable cheap labor, consumers, and cannon fodder.

Versus quality of life, everyday a peak experience, of creativity, always becoming.  Never a cog or a commodity in a corporate machine.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Time is relative/sustainabilty is relative. If you chop all the trees down you run out of firewood. If you manage the trees you have a sustainable resource. Please understand how sustainability is used before condemning the entire movement. I have a farm which I believe is sustainable for a long time and I'm going to bet on myself and my knowledge in the long-run.

No, that is not at all what I am doing.  The movement sounds swell.  What I strongly dislike is the deceptiveness of the name, or code-word, "sustainability."  It is a form of the denial of death.

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

I'm not sure about "sustainability", but I will say that I do abhor the term "sustainable growth" for much the same reason.  There is no such thing as sustainable growth.  Any growth, if it continues long enough, will exhaust the capacity for further growth.  Maybe "non-parasitic growth" would be a better term.

that's interesting because at plenty of conferences I've been at with minority and immigrant farmers, it's often remarked about how the future of farming is with people of color. already, 15% of specialty crop farmers are minorities. it could just be (like many progressive movements) they are divorced and off the radar from their white counterparts and thus, they never get invited to these type of conferences. which is too bad. there are lots of minority farm groups out there they could invite.