Sustainable meaning: ubiquitous term eludes simple definition.

• Author: Lewis, David

Sustainability is everywhere, no kidding.

For proof we turn to Google, the oracle of the age (with apologies to Oracle), where a search for "sustainability" yields 39.2 million results and "sustainability" and "business" together display 31.6 million pages.

More impressive still is the result of a search for "sustainability business plan," which shows 10.7 million pages, some of them darn helpful, or a search for "sustainability business management," which turns up 16.5 million results.

Meantime, sustainability has of late made the covers of Fortune, BusinessWeek, Fast Company, Newsweek and Time. Gigantic corporations everywhere are surveying suppliers about their sustainability practices--General Electric, Unilever, Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, Kaiser Permanente, IBM, Pepsi--to name a few, with more announcements all the time. Outside the corporate realm, eight of Colorado's 10 largest municipalities have significant sustainability initiatives under way.

But here's the sustainability conundrum:

Despite all its successes, the sustainability movement has yet to reach millions of U.S. businesses and other institutions.

On the other hand, some businesspeople already seem weary of dealing with the demands of sustainability as well as the apparent ubiquity of its message.

In sum, too many people today regard "sustainability" as a royal pain.

Pete Dignan, executive director of Denver-based CORE, Connected Organizations for a Responsible Economy, put it best.

In January, Dignan wrote a Colorado Biz guest column that began with this plea from a participant in the Statewide Sustainability Roundtable: "Make 'sustainability' less annoying!"

Dignan wrote that he thought the pleader meant that sustainability has become a pervasive but loaded term.

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"I was talking yesterday to a woman largely responsible for sustainability at a large natural-gas company, and she said she never even uses the term 'sustainability' inside her company because it is just too loaded," Dignan wrote. "She uses other terminology more acceptable, more palatable to the people she is working with.

"'Sustainability' is a lot like words like 'beauty' or 'truth' or 'justice': They are big, powerful words, but we could argue all day about what they really mean," he points out.

Dignan's solution to the annoyance of the background buzz of sustainability is to unpack its meanings and actually get stuff done:

"You drill down and come up with, for instance, 'What can we...