Sustainability is an idea whose time has come. Clearly, in an age of mounting finite resource scarcities, rapid climate change and continuing global population growth – combined with the growing clamor for economic “development” Western-style – the sustainability movement is not going to go away. Sadly, the meaning of sustainability and sustainable development remains highly contested and subject to ongoing and fierce dispute. Today, this state of affairs is evidenced by the growing shift away from the language of sustainability and its variants to the increasingly popular – and easier to swallow – term, “green.”

In his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America (2008), author and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman both criticizes this confusion over “green” vs “sustainability” and abets it (dubbing the needed sustainability transformation in book subtitle and text as a “green” revolution). His critique in most respects is right on the money. Pointing to the proliferation of books and popular magazine articles on the many ways of “going green,” he scolds: “In the green revolution we're having, everyone's a winner, nobody has to give up anything…That's not a revolution. That's a party. We're having a green party” (Friedman, 2008: 251). What really separates a “green party” from a genuine sustainability revolution? And what light do these two terms shed on the other gradations on the environmentalism to sustainability continuum that have entered the global sustainability debate?