According to Peter Senge (from Environmental Leader):

Using the term “sustainability” does not spur society on to an ultimately better solution. Rather, it is a “negative vision,” said MIT Sloan’s Peter Senge, founder of the Society for Organizational Learning.

“It’s just a bad word. It’s technically what we would call a ‘negative vision,’” said Senge, in an interview at MIT Sloan Management Review.

To Senge, Senior Lecturer in Behavioral and Policy Sciences at the MIT Sloan School of Management, sustainability is about recognizing that global commerce tends to put most of the wealth in few hands, with devastating results in consumption patterns and resulting environmental and societal damage.

“We don’t want the unsustainable, we don’t want civilization to collapse, we don’t want the human species to fail. Well, of course we don’t want that, but those images don’t move people. ‘Survival’ is not the most inspiring vision. It motivates out of fear, but it only motivates for as long as people feel the issues are pressing on them. Soon as the fear recedes, so does the motivation,” he told MIT Sloan Management Review.

Instead of considering sustainability, society must look at reinventing its way of living, because population growth and commerce will render today’s version of sustainability unsustainable. He said a preferred term may be “All about the future.”

Senge has noticed a trend of companies going from being “less bad” to “more good,” the interview notes.