What System Are We Trying to Sustain?
A reflection on the difference between sustainable outcomes and sustaining existing systems.
Essays
Essays
Reflections on sustainability, economic systems, corporations, development, and the future.
The Sustainability Mirage began with a question.
Over time, that question led to many others.
These essays explore the ideas, contradictions, observations, and historical forces that shape our understanding of sustainability, development, corporations, and economic systems.
Some challenge conventional assumptions.
Others simply ask uncomfortable questions.
None claim to offer definitive answers.
All are written from the perspective of someone who spent more than four decades working inside the systems being examined.
"The most useful questions are often the ones that refuse to disappear."
Why Essays?
Books are finished.
Ideas rarely are.
The essays collected here allow individual questions to be explored in greater depth than a book alone permits.
Some expand on themes found in The Sustainability Mirage. Others emerge from current events, conversations, research, or observations gathered over a lifetime working in sustainability, international development, entrepreneurship, and global supply chains.
Together, they form an ongoing inquiry into one of the defining questions of our time:
What system are we trying to sustain?
Foundational Essays
These essays introduce the central ideas that inspired The Sustainability Mirage.
The Difference Between a Mirage and a Lie
Why sustainability may be neither a fraud nor a failure, but something more complex.
Coming Soon
Why Sustainability Keeps Expanding
As sustainability challenges grow, so do the institutions, standards, frameworks, and industries designed to address them.
Coming Soon
The Sustainability Industry
Exploring how sustainability became an economic sector of its own.
Coming Soon
Why Medieval Institutions Still Govern Modern Economies
How legal structures developed centuries ago continue to shape corporate behaviour today.
Coming Soon
Forty Years Inside the System
Personal reflections from a practitioner who spent decades working across international development, supply chains, and sustainability.
Coming Soon
Coming Soon
Future essays in preparation.
07
Why Growth Became the Objective
Forthcoming08
The Sustainability Paradox
Forthcoming09
Measuring Progress, Missing Outcomes
Forthcoming10
The Corporation and the Common Good
Forthcoming11
The Limits of Transparency
Forthcoming12
Responsible Missiles
Forthcoming13
The Critical Minerals Dilemma
Forthcoming14
What We Mean by Development
ForthcomingContinue the Conversation
The Sustainability Mirage is not a collection of answers.
It is an exploration of questions that deserve continued examination. Become a Founding Reader to receive new essays, reflections, and updates as this conversation evolves.
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