“Sustainable”: to “sustain”. It means that something is viable over a long period of time. Current practices in various industries and nations are unsustainabl

“Sustainable”: to “sustain”. It means that something is viable over a long period of time. Current practices in various industries and nations are unsustainable because they depend on conditions which are only possible over the short term. For example, cheap fossil fuels. Some other practices are unsustainable in the grand scheme of things, because they are partly responsible for an environment which is itself unsustainable. For example, costs externalised to the environment which has a delayed reaction of several decades. “Polluting” is not unsustainable by itself as long as you have a way to counterbalance it. You can have a sustainable system which extracts resources and exhausts co2. “Green” is worthless as an environmental adjective because it has whichever definition you want to apply to it. If you say “sustainable consumption”, though, there’s no problem creating that. Nature itself is a closed system of sustainable consumption.