Sustainability: I know it when I see it

Anyone trying to communicate and implement sustainable practices quickly runs into definitional difficulties, which translate into operational difficulties. Simply put, sustainability, and its predecessor term, sustainable development, mean different things to different people. How can we hope to achieve a shared vision when we're not certain what vision we are sharing? This is not simply a rhetorical question - businesses and other organizations require measurable, manageable objectives to achieve progress in this area of endeavor.The challenge of defining sustainability has already been noted by a number of writers. The most common definition, “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” first appeared in the World Commission on Environment and Development's report, Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), but there are many, many more definitions and interpretations.This note takes a different approach. Rather than seeking or proposing yet another definition of sustainability, it uses Wordle, a web-based data visualization tool, to generate a “tag cloud” of the common elements in over one hundred previously-published definitions. The result is a visually-appealing menage of terms providing a composite picture of the essence of sustainability.