The Sustainability Story: Exposing Truths, Half-Truths, and Illusions

What is it about?

This chapter analyzes the growing influence of multinational corporations on the narrative of sustainability, demonstrating how over the past decade they have been turning a once critical discourse of the environmental movement into a business strategy of growth and control. Seeing the general understanding of sustainability losing its ecological meaning, some environmentalists are giving up on the concept. This chapter sees this as a mistake. The author argues for the ongoing value of the narrative of sustainability, calling for environmentalists to continue to infuse this narrative with principles of ecology, equity, and social justice, and to do more to challenge the half-truths and illusions underlying the corporate claims of sustainability progress and leadership. Scholars and students of global environmental politics, he contends, are especially well placed to help recapture the narrative of sustainability.

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