Tony Fry, a Director of Team D/E/S and founder of the EcoDesign Foundation, argues for the idea of 'sustainment', rather than the older idea of 'sustainable development' that was popular in th 1980s

In this Introducing the Sustainment, a plenary paper for the 2050 ‘Building the Future’, conference at RMIT, Melbourne 2006 Fry says that:

Our starting point is to recognise that an the idea of sustainability is lodged in a limited and now largely debased agenda. It’s about propping up the status quo rather than making the means of redirection towards viable futures. De facto, much ‘sustainable architecture’ and many ‘sustainable products’ are implicated in sustaining the unsustainable. Equally, ‘sustainable development’ is bonded to ‘development logic’ – the ‘logic’ of continual economic growth – rather than the development of sustainment. It does not add up to the fundamental directional changes essential if the human race is to stay around. Likewise, so much of the rhetoric of sustainability avoids speaking the horror of the unsustainable. Of course, bad news is a turn-off, however, false optimism is dishonest, it’s a lie. A precondition for solving a problem is to confront it, to know it, to face it square on. The rhetoric and practices of sustainability do not do this.

Fry illustrates this with the issue of the anthropogenic nature of global warming.

Dominantly, thecurrent debate is preoccupied with the question of emissions reduction and low or zeroemissions technologies. This is based on the assumption of life going on as usual while making changes to how and what kind of energy will service this way of life. Whereas, the first and immediate action should be demand reduction, which is in large part a question of cultural and economic conduct, i.e., changes in ways of life. Technological means to reduce emissions come next. Next, socio-cultural and technological changes converge on adaptive action – at best we have a problem that will be around at a significant level for several centuries (the atmospheric life of CO2 being over 200 years); at worst climate chaos will be triggered when a critical, andas yet unidentified, threshhold is crossed.