Language and sustainability: the danger of dilution

Language is a living entity and the principal communication vehicle upon which humans depend. Words contain content and we use them to express thoughts, emotions or situations in the most realistic way possible. However, so that this reality acquires meaning, it is essential to structure it through language. In this way, language constructs reality. Philosopher and critic George Steiner said that what you cannot conceptualize, you cannot say, and what you cannot say, cannot exist.

 

                                      “Language constructs reality. What you cannot say, cannot exist”

 

But what happens when the words we use lose their coherence through what we are trying to express? The speed with which we now communicate, facilitated by the use of technology, is causing many words to be abused or used superficially. This brings with it a progressive reduction in credibility and a consequent loss of trust in their meaning.

 

Fashionable words losing their real meaning

A symptomatic example is the word paradigm, which, according to the dictionary would be a model that we accept without question and which serves as a basis for advancing knowledge. Yet the term has entered the business world and become a useful word with which to allude to any variation of the rules that governs a determined business. It has also entered politics, meaning any kind of regulatory or ideological change. Then a paradigm change was discovered by journalists and, from there, by the general population, lending the sensation that we live among continually varying forms of unquestionable knowledge

As such, little by little, many terms become fashionable words and we all know how volatile trends are. Concepts such as globalization, populism, nationalism, totalitarianism, vulnerability, inclusion, responsibility and sustainability, are repeated until they extend to all kinds of domains,  and then lose meaning, importance and credibility among the population.

The word sustainability is another clear example. The food that nourishes us is sustainable, the packaging in which it is distributed is also sustainable, as are the methods used to transport it. The clothes we wear are sustainable, as is the furniture we sit on and the tourism we undertake. We live in the era of sustainability, or at least it seems that way. Yet, if we go back to the dictionary, we will see that the adjective sustainable refers simply to that which can sustain itself.

 

A short history of the term sustainability: from the Brundtland Report to today

The sustainability concept, although it seems always to have been with us, did not emerge until 1987. A clear example of what is not said, does not exist. That year, several countries drafted a report for the UN with the intention of analyzing the fact that social progress was developing at the risk of causing great environmental damage.

What came to be known as the Brundtland Report incorporated the concept of sustainable development to define the need to change patterns of production and consumption in a way that could satisfy the needs of present generations without endangering those in the future. The verbalization of a necessary concept was thus born to laud a socioeconomic model in which productivity and competitiveness would conciliate economic with social and environmental development.

 

                                   “We live in the era of sustainability, or at least it seems that way”

 

In Spain, the Real Academia Española did not include the word sustainability in the Spanish Language Dictionary until 2014, when it accepted appeals from various citizen groups. One of these was the Sustainability Platform for Dictionary Inclusion, set up by social actors and private companies, which managed to gather over 500 definitions of the term, bearing evidence of its growing use and alluding to a conciliatory development between people and the environment. For many years, however, the term has been used so widely, it is being applied to just about anything.

 

Sustainability: from concept to cliché

By exploiting a growing interest in caring for the planet, we see how a term that was disseminated as a social and environmental need comes to be applied increasingly to almost any product, activity or initiative that has its roots, no matter how tangential, in ecology. As such, we are witnessing a generalization of the term sustainability, such that the initial reference to which it alludes is becoming diluted into a sort of general drop box for anything with a social or environmental connection.

 

“We are witnessing the generalization of the term sustainability, such that the initial reference to which it alludes is becoming diluted”

 

Such a semantic process leads to economic models and initiatives based on true sustainability losing their power, due to the inappropriate and excessive use of the term. More unfortunately, the abuse can lead to its rejection.

 

Recovering the value of words

Beyond simply associating sustainable as being something “good” or “modern”,  an exercise in reflection would allow us to recover the profound and necessary meaning of a word that should only represent a real necessity. It is essential to preserve language as the main tool for expressing our reality. We should, before incorporating any fashionable word into our regular language, analyze its exact meaning and check it is applicable to that which we are trying to express.

 

“It is essential to preserve language as the main tool for expressing our reality”

 

Preserving the value of words is a way of caring for the world we are building by using them. Sustainability, like many other concepts borne out of the need to guide profound transformations, deserves responsible and conscious use. Only then can we continue to be the motor of change and not simply an empty echo chamber among discourses. At a time when the urgent and frequent displace the important, stopping and thinking about the real meaning of what we are saying is perhaps one of the most sustainable acts we can perform.