A poor choice of words?

I’ve been thinking (for several years) that “Sustainability” is a really poor choice of word to describe the business practice that considers people and planet, as well as profit.

For one, it’s easily misinterpreted – in business terms, sustainable also means a business that can maintain it’s cashflow and keep itself in business.

But also, in my view “Sustainability” implies a softly-softly approach… being sustainable means keeping things as they are without causing further damage. Compared to causing damage, this is very good – but it assumes that no damage has been done yet, which isn’t the case. Technically if we all kept driving our petrol cars pollution levels would be “sustained”, but we actually need them to drop.

Regeneration is a term that is becoming more preferred amongst the green community, and I wonder if we need to be talking about regeneration rather than sustainability.

Regeneration helps restore things back to how they should be, rather than simply keeping them as they are.

It sounds impossibly huge – but what’s cool about this is there are solutions that exist to help us add regenerative processes to our business already.

We don’t all need to start trying to restore the land around us tomorrow, but just having this on your radar for the moment is a pretty good step forward.