Field note: a word wears out
In 1713, a Saxon mining administrator named Hans Carl von Carlowitz published a treatise on forestry with a practical worry: the silver mines were consuming timber faster than the forests could grow it. His answer was a new German word, Nachhaltigkeit; cut only as much wood as the forest can replace, so that your grandchildren can cut wood too. Sustainability was born as a rule for trees, written by a man afraid of running out of them.
The word had a long, quiet career until 1987, when the UN’s Brundtland Commission scaled it up to civilization: meet the needs of the present without stealing the ability of future generations to meet theirs. Then, three decades later, it exploded. Between 2019 and 2022, roughly between the European Green Deal and the COP26 summit in Glasgow, sustainability became the most fashionable word in Europe. Search interest hit record levels; its corporate twin, ESG, peaked in September 2022. Everything needed to be sustainable: sneakers, funds, festivals, airlines.
And then the word got tired. Companies now speak of it more quietly, when they speak of it at all; analysts even coined a term for the retreat, greenhushing. An observer arriving on this planet today would file a curious note: the species exhausted the word before solving the problem.
Here is the thing though. The idea underneath never wore out, because the idea is simply this: think in consequences, not in quarters. Take the long-term effects of a short-term action into account before acting. That idea is not tired. It was just aimed at the wrong target.
The autopsy
Why did the biggest vocabulary boom in environmental history change so little? Watch what the word was actually attached to, and the answer is uncomfortable.
Sustainability was applied to products and processes: to packaging, supply chains, emissions per unit. The standard model behind it, three overlapping circles labeled economy, society and environment, treated the economy as a separate sphere of equal rank, politely negotiating with the planet it operates inside of. That architecture invites trade-offs, and trade-offs invite theater. A 2020 European Commission study found that more than half of the environmental claims it examined were vague, misleading or unsubstantiated. Greenwashing was not an abuse of the model; it was the model working as designed, because the model measured products while leaving the producers, the consumers and the politicians exactly as they were.
The diagnosis, from one ET’s field notes: humans applied sustainability to everything except the one variable that causes the damage. Themselves. Products do not exploit anyone. People do; through the politics they tolerate, the relationships they normalize, the economics they celebrate. Products merely keep the score.
The missing adjective
So the concept needs a wider lens, not a retirement party. If thinking in consequences is valid for a forest and a factory, it is valid for everything humans do to each other.
What this planet actually needs is sustainable politics; decisions that survive their own election cycle. Sustainable relationships; homes that do not consume the people inside them. Sustainable economics; prosperity that does not eat its own foundations. Sustainable competition; rivalry that builds rather than destroys. In short: sustainable humanity.
Call it an approach rather than a framework, because frameworks are things you apply to companies, and this is a way humans deal with one another and with themselves. Its claim is simple to state and radical in consequence: ecological health is not a goal you engineer directly. It is the natural result of a species whose inner and social relations are in order; and it is unreachable for a species whose relations are predatory, because a predatory species will treat its habitat exactly the way it treats its members.
The reordering: layers, not pillars
The conventional model gives you three pillars standing side by side. Pillars are a misleading picture; one can fall while the others keep standing, which is precisely how a company can publish a carbon report during a harassment scandal. Sustainable humanity replaces the pillars with nested layers, and the nesting is the whole argument, because a nested layer cannot be skipped.
At the core: spiritual awareness and self-consciousness. The relationship of a person to themselves; the worldview that decides whether other beings are subjects or resources. This is not religion, and no dogma is required. The philosopher Arne Naess called its mature form the ecological self: an identity wide enough that protecting the living world stops being charity and becomes self-preservation. The cultural historian Thomas Berry compressed the entire shift into one sentence, that the universe is “a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” Where this core is missing, every tool downstream, every technology, every regulation, will eventually be bent back toward extraction.
Around it: social and human justice. The relationship of humans to humans; nonviolence, gender equity, structural fairness. A society that shrugs at the abuse of its own members, starting in its homes (this is where my oldest open file lives), lacks the cohesion that long-term stewardship of anything requires. The World Health Organization estimates that about one in three women worldwide experiences physical or sexual violence in her lifetime, mostly from a partner. A species with that number on its ledger is not going to save its coral reefs; injustice is a leak in the hull, and leaking vessels do not complete long voyages.
As the outcome: ecological stewardship. The relationship of humanity to its habitat. In this ordering, a healthy biosphere stops being a target to hit with offsets and dashboards, and becomes what it always actually was: the visible result of the two inner layers functioning. You can read a civilization’s soul from its rivers.
Spirit, then justice, then ecology. Reverse the order, as the last forty years did, and you get what the last forty years got: improving metrics, worsening reality, and a very tired word.
Not mysticism: the evidence trail
An objection arrives on cue: this sounds spiritual, therefore soft. The evidence points the other way.
The systems scientist Donella Meadows, in her classic ranking of leverage points, places to intervene in a system, put parameters, taxes and standards at the shallow end, and the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises at the very deepest. Forty years of sustainability policy worked almost exclusively at the shallow end; the deep end was left untouched, and the results followed Meadows’ prediction with embarrassing precision.
The research frontier has since moved. Sustainability scientists at Lund University and elsewhere now treat inner transformation as a deep leverage point for climate action, and the Inner Development Goals initiative, backed by researchers and, notably, by businesses, exists because the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals kept stalling on a missing ingredient: the human capacities, being, thinking, relating, collaborating, acting, needed to deliver them. The most sober institutions in the field arrived, by data, at the conclusion mystics were mocked for: the bottleneck is inner.
The realignment
Which brings this file to its conclusion, and the conclusion is a realignment; not a new metric, a new order of operations.
- Consciousness first. Cultivate the awareness, in individuals and institutions, that harming another person or ecosystem degrades the whole to which you belong. Everything durable starts here.
- Justice second. Treat the eradication of systemic violence and exploitation, beginning inside homes, as infrastructure for planetary survival; not as a social nicety to fund after the important things.
- Ecology as the outcome. Keep the environmental engineering; it matters. But expect it to finally work only when the two inner layers stop sabotaging it.
Knowing is the first step to caring, and only those who care contribute to fixing anything. That chain is why I make documentary films about these subjects, and why this site works the way it does; the open files are where the evidence gets gathered, one question at a time.
We do not need a resupply mission, and we do not need to flee to another planet. We need a species willing to apply its own three-hundred-year-old idea to itself.
We don’t flee to outer space. We fix the planet.
What this means for Brussels
If sustainable humanity is right about the ordering, then European policy is currently being reorganized in exactly the wrong direction, and it is worth saying so plainly.
In March 2026, the EU’s Omnibus directive entered into force, sharply narrowing the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive; fewer companies covered, obligations delayed to the end of the decade, the requirement to implement climate transition plans dropped. A year earlier, the Commission moved to withdraw the Green Claims Directive, the law that would have forced companies to prove environmental claims before making them; it now sits dormant. Simplification is the stated goal, and simplification is legitimate; European reporting had genuinely become a paperwork industry. But look at what was cut through the nested-layer lens: due diligence is not paperwork. It is the justice layer, the law that asks how a company treats the human beings in its value chain. Brussels kept the dashboards and cut the relationships, which is the old paradigm in its purest form.
So, three recommendations from this desk.
First, finish the anti-greenwashing job. The Empowering Consumers Directive starts applying in September 2026 and will ban generic green claims; good. But the dormant Green Claims Directive was the half with teeth, the substantiation and verification regime. Parliament has signaled readiness to resume; the Commission should let it. Exempt micro-enterprises if that is the price; do not abandon the principle that a claim about the planet requires proof. A union that regulates the ingredients list on a yogurt can regulate the word “climate neutral.”
Second, use the Omnibus review clause to restore the justice layer. The final directive contains a review clause on the scope of both laws. When it comes due, the test should not be “how much reporting burden was saved” but “did European companies’ treatment of people in their supply chains improve or deteriorate.” If the answer is deteriorate, due diligence scope should come back; and member states transposing the directive now retain the freedom to keep stronger national due diligence rules. They should use it.
Third, treat the violence-against-women directive as sustainability policy. The EU adopted Directive 2024/1385 on combating violence against women and domestic violence, with transposition due by June 2027. In Brussels’ org chart it is a justice-file; in the nested model it is the load-bearing wall. Heads of state who want a legacy in sustainability should fund shelters, prosecution capacity and prevention education with the same seriousness they fund grid interconnectors, and say so in those words. A continent cannot be a climate leader and a bystander in its own living rooms.
None of this requires Brussels to become spiritual; institutions do not meditate. It requires only that the people running them notice which layer of the system they are standing in, and stop mistaking the scoreboard for the game.
Further reading: Carlowitz and the origin of the word; Donella Meadows, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System; Arne Naess and deep ecology; the Inner Development Goals; Christine Wamsler’s research on inner transformation and sustainability at Lund University.
