Sustainability Today: From Fringe to Mainstream

The green movement is one of the world’s most successful social move-ments. Over a relatively short period, it has succeeded in raising world-wide awareness about the impacts of unchecked development on both nature and humanity. The early days of a seemingly alarmist green fringe warning of impending ecological crisis has been replaced, five decades on, with many people alert to such crisis. Indeed, the growing recogni-tion of environmental problems has seen many former adversaries of environmentalism, including the corporate sector, now embracing it. Many are heartened by this turn of events. Others are more circum-spect. ‘Success’, after all, is a highly fluid term, and many argue that the success the green movement now enjoys has been won at much cost — to both the environment and the movement’s social change capacity as a whole. Few would nonetheless disagree that the environment move-ment has launched a convincing case for a planet in peril that many social actors, including business and governments, have to lesser or greater degrees now heeded. The penetration of the term ‘sustainability’ into the contemporary global vernacular is testament to this.