Meta-Sustainability – What I Mean By It
Why I work one level above the field, and what the word still asks of us
For more than thirty years, I have worked inside the sustainability profession. I was one of the first people in the world to hold the title — in a global manufacturing business, in the early 1990s, before the role had a settled shape. I have done the work in corporate offices, in research institutes, in standards bodies, in supplier audits, in policy rooms, and increasingly, in the last decade, in the kinds of quiet conversations where senior leaders say what they would not say in public.
For most of those years I carried a question I could not put down.
Why are we, arguably, less sustainable today on almost any metric you might name than we were when we first started down this road?
It is the wrong question to ask in a job interview. It is the wrong question to ask on a panel. It is the wrong question to ask in front of a board that has just approved its sustainability strategy. So I carried it privately, for a long time, while doing the work the role required.
This essay is the short version of where the question eventually led me. The long version is a book. But the position is stated in a few thousand words, and I want it stated plainly, so that anyone who encounters my work knows what it sits on top of.
• • •
The word lost most of its contents
In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development — the Brundtland Commission published a definition of sustainable development that was, on its face, simple. Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
That sentence is famous. It is also the only part of the definition most people remember. The original passage was more carefully constructed than the single line suggests. It identified two key concepts and arranged them in a deliberate priority structure. It instructed the reader to give overriding priority to the essential needs of the world’s poor. It tied the meeting of present needs to the regenerative capacity of the living systems on which all needs ultimately depend. It was not a slogan. It was an architectural statement.
Within a decade, almost all of that architecture had been compressed into a single word: sustainability.
I describe the compression in the book this essay points to as a triple amputation. Three load-bearing elements of the original definition were removed, quietly, in the ordinary process by which complex ideas get simplified for practical use.
The first amputation was the loss of the needs mandate. Brundtland’s instruction to give overriding priority to the essential needs of the world’s poor disappeared from the working vocabulary of corporate sustainability almost immediately. It was uncomfortable. It did not translate easily into a business case or a quarterly report. It was not argued against. It was simply not carried forward.
The second amputation was the loss of the generative instruction. Brundtland’s sentence begins with the words ‘meets the needs of the present’. It is an affirmative, forward-leaning instruction. Provide. Deliver. Design systems that work. In practice, the sustainability movement replaced this instruction with its opposite. Reduce. Minimize. Avoid. All of which is necessary. None of which is the same as the original instruction to meet needs.
The third amputation is the most consequential, because it is the most invisible. The object of sustaining was redirected. Brundtland was clear about what was to be sustained: ‘the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’, which depends on the continued functioning of the natural systems that make human life possible. As the language compressed and attached itself to business, the object of sustaining shifted. What most organizations mean now when they say sustainability is sustaining their operations, supply chains, competitive position, and growth. The word sustain remained. What it pointed to changed entirely. It pointed inward.
Once the object of sustaining has been redirected from life’s conditions to business operations, every tool, every metric, every strategy built on that foundation will optimize for the wrong thing. You can optimize beautifully. You can measure precisely. You can report comprehensively. And still be sustaining the wrong object.
• • •
Two questions that recover what was lost
At this point in the argument, some readers reach for a different word. Resilience. Circularity. Thriveability. The impulse is understandable. I have watched colleagues make this move, and I respect the frustration behind it. But replacing the word is the wrong response to the problem.
Changing a word does not change the beliefs underneath it. If the underlying beliefs about growth, value, nature, and human purpose remain unexamined, whatever new word is chosen will, within a few years, mean whatever the most powerful people in the room need it to mean. Just as sustainability did before it. The problem was never the word. The problem was the truncation of what the word was supposed to contain.
So I do not abandon the word. I recover it.
Sustainability, correctly understood, tells you something no other word in the environmental lexicon tells you. It tells you that something must be sustained. And it asks you to name what.
The recovery takes the form of a diagnostic. Two questions, in this order, asked of any specific use of the word.
What are you trying to sustain? And for how long?
That is the entire instrument. The first question forces the object to be named. The second question forces the time horizon to be named. Without explicit answers to both, the word has no defined content, and any claim built on it cannot be examined against evidence.
Apply the questions to the standard formulations the field has produced. A company commits to sustainable packaging. What is being sustained? The packaging, the company’s ability to continue producing it, the supply chain, and the market position it supports. For how long? The next quarter, the next product cycle, the use period of the customer, or the persistence of the materials, which for many plastic formats runs to centuries? The word sustainable, attached to packaging without explicit answers to either question, is a container that each reader will fill with whatever assumptions they bring.
A government commits to sustainable economic growth. What is being sustained? The growth, the conditions that make growth possible, the institutions that distribute its benefits, the ecological systems the growth draws on? For how long, the current administration’s term, the current generation’s working life, the geological horizon over which depletion becomes irreversible? Each interpretation produces a different policy, with different consequences.
The two questions are not academic. They are the discipline that returns the word to its original precision. Brundtland’s definition addressed both. The compressed word lost them. The diagnostic restores them.
• • •
Meta-sustainability
When the two questions are asked honestly, traced back to where they actually lead, the answers are not difficult to state.
What is being sustained, at the level above all sectoral and corporate uses of the word, are the conditions that allow life on Earth to exist. Not business operations. Not a competitive advantage. Not quarterly returns. The conditions required for life to exist.
For how long? Forever. There is no other defensible answer at this level. Any finite horizon places the speaker at the center of a calculation in which future generations, and the species and systems they will inherit, are discounted to nothing. The honest answer to the second question, at this level, is the indefinite one.
This is what I mean by meta-sustainability. The species-level recognition that humans, as the dominant species on this planet, hold responsibility for stewarding the unique conditions required to sustain life on Earth over an unbounded time horizon is the foundation beneath every smaller use of the word sustainability that any of us will make in our work.
There is a name in my own framework for what accumulates when this stewardship is not held. Vitacide Risk. The Latin roots are exact: it is the risk that life-supporting conditions are being killed, slowly and structurally, by decisions optimized against the wrong object. Most organizations do not intend Vitacide Risk. It accrues anyway, in the gap between what is being sustained and what life requires, because the operating systems through which decisions are made were built before the meta-sustainability question could be asked.
The meta-sustainability claim is not moralistic. It does not blame the business. It does not blame customers. It does not exempt anyone. It places responsibility at the level of the species and then distributes it across individuals and institutions without hierarchy. We are to live and work in whatever ways we feel drawn to. We are also to ensure, simultaneously, that the conditions required to support life in all its forms continue to exist. The two are not in conflict. They are simultaneous objectives. The work is to hold both.
• • •
The belief gap and the structural reason persist
If meta-sustainability is the position, the question that follows is why it has not already been adopted by serious institutions in any operative form.
The answer, I have come to believe after long observation, is not effort, intelligence, or funding. The answer is belief. What an organization says about its sustainability commitments and what its operative decisions reveal about its actual beliefs are not the same. They diverge. There is a gap. In many organizations, the gap has widened into a chasm.
The structural language for this distinction was developed in the 1970s by Chris Argyris, who named the difference between espoused theory — what we say we believe — and theory-in-use — the belief that really governs our decisions. The two are rarely identical. In sustainability work, they are almost never identical, and the field has built an entire infrastructure of reporting, certification, and disclosure that operates on the espoused side without examining the operative side.
I have spent the last several years building an instrument for examining the operative side. The Belief Architecture DiagnosticTM surfaces twelve belief pairs that, taken together, determine whether an organization’s operative decisions can ever produce the outcomes its espoused commitments describe. The diagnostic does not propose new beliefs. It surfaces the ones already governing. The work that follows — if the organization is willing — is the work of examining those beliefs in the light of what the organization says it intends.
This is what I now do. The frameworks that support the work — the Tactical TetrahedronTM, which gives sustainability the structural and fractal architecture the 2D list-based models have never had; Design Like NatureTM, which sequences the practice of working with the recovered word; Vitacide Risk, which names the liability the recovered word makes visible — are the instruments I have developed across a long career to do this examination at the level that meta-sustainability requires.
• • •
Why now
There is a particular urgency to stating this position in 2026.
Artificial intelligence is now accelerating the propagation of the truncated definition. Models trained on decades of corporate sustainability literature are absorbing the conflation, the missing hierarchy, the optimization against the wrong object, and reproducing all of it at industrial speed. The old, incorrect information is becoming the default information, more confidently asserted, more widely distributed, more deeply embedded in the decision-support systems that will shape the next twenty years of corporate and policy choice.
At the same time, the regulatory environment is changing. In Europe, enforcement mechanisms that require sustainability claims to be substantiable against the operative decisions that produced them are arriving in the second half of this year. The claim and the belief beneath it are about to be examined in ways that the previous decade did not require.
And the practitioner generation that built the current architecture is moving on. Senior sustainability professionals are leaving the corporate function in numbers the field has not seen before, to work outside the field that trained them. The question of who is positioned to ask the meta-sustainability question, from where, with what instrument, is now open in ways it has not been open before.
This essay exists to state, plainly, where I stand. I work in meta-sustainability. I recover the word rather than replace it. I name the triple amputation that hollowed it. I hold the two questions — what is being sustained, and for how long — as the discipline that returns the word to its original precision. I name Vitacide Risk as the liability that accumulates when questions are not answered honestly. I work with senior leaders, when they are willing, on the operative beliefs that determine whether their organizations can meet the conditions for life as a simultaneous objective alongside the business objectives they already pursue.
Our Common Future Now: The Belief Problem Business Has Not Yet Named is where the full argument is set out. It publishes on September 10, 2026.
This page is where I send anyone who wants to know what the work sits on before they read the book or take a call. If anything here resonates, the conversation that follows is the work itself.
— Ken Alston
If you would like to take this further:
Read the book. Our Common Future Now publishes on September 10, 2026. Download the Prologue → before pubication.
Explore the frameworks. The instruments developed across thirty years of practice.
Have a conversation. The entry point is a free call, no obligation. Book a call →