Column 13 - 12.10.04

David Savvides becomes sustainable

Yes, I have become green. I have changed. I now live in a sustainable house in a sustainable community. I eat sustainable food from a sustainable source and wear sustainable clothes while listening to sustainable music on sustainable technology in my sustainable car.

I do this because the word sustainable now seems to mean anything anyone chooses it to mean.

Ever since the words 'sustainable development' leapt out of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit declarations, seeded in numerous policy groups across the world and sprouted Agenda 21 initiatives across the brown boroughs of Britain, the meaning of those words has bled like ink on blotting paper from the confines of its original definition into the loose lexicon of the specialist language I call - 'Consultese'.

Consultese has replaced Esperanto as the Euro-tongue. As the grandfather of spin, its deliberate imprecision and distortion clogs the thought processes of all but the wisest.

Alas, Jacques Derrida is dead: who will now deconstruct the reams of consultants' reports on how we can be sustainable? The only thing that seems to be sustainable is the consultants' careers.

As an example of how Consultese obfuscates, 'sustainable development' is pre-eminent. Its proper meaning is something like 'development which does not sacrifice the future for the present'.

To determine if something is sustainable you have to know what its effects are, from cradle to grave.

When I hear the words 'we will create sustainable jobs' I want to know if these are organic farmers and carpenters - probably not. When I hear the words 'sustainable homes' I want to know if, like the Hockerton houses (there's still only a handful in the country), it is completely self-sufficient in water and power, and made from local materials.

When I hear the words 'sustainable communities' I want to know if, like 18th century Paris, it will be growing all its own food and treating its own sewage. I can really imagine that happening in the Thames Gateway. When I hear the words 'sustainable business' I want to know if it is coommunity-owned or not-for-profit like Glas Cymru, the owner of Welsh Water.

When Forum for the Future puts out a joint report with TetraPak chastising the government on its recycling record I struggle with despair.

TetraPak has over several decades in more and more countries ended the sensible practice of refilling bottles with milk and soda and got everyone using packaging instead.

Now it is complaining because nobody recycles them and this makes Tetrapak look - unsustainable. Tetrapak's chief is one of the top five richest men in the country.

How has Forum for the Future let itself be bamboozled into supporting this unsustainable company instead of supporting the reuse of glass bottles? Because of consultants.

Obviously the greenest thing I can do is to kill myself. Then I will have an ecological footprint - a measure of how sustainable something is - of zero.

Failing that, I can consume the minimum, nurture my garden, and be generally nice to everything.

As I will never do any of these things, I will never be sustainable, and am consigned to my Rich Man's Burden of guilt for the rest of my days. Unless I, too, start speaking Consultese.

Which is where I came in.

[Please send any of your favourite examples of Consultese to the email address below]