Sustainability has been a significant movement in American higher education for about a decade. For about half that time, the National Association of Scholars has been calling attention to it as an emergent ideology that weaves together some relatively innocent concerns, such as cutting campus costs for heat and power, with more doubtful and sometimes extreme positions. Sustainability, for example, has provided the most popular rubric for advancing the idea that the best approach to the fundamental economic problem of scarcity is the maximal conservation of existing resources. The role of human inventiveness and the possibility of material progress are derogated by sustainability advocates in favor of what amounts to a neo-Malthusian view of human circumstances. We are running out of resources and, with that shortage in view, must needs be prepared for some stringent forms of rationing.
Sustainability has
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