Image by London Permaculture via Flickr

Remember when people used to talk about “saving the Earth?” It always struck me that this was a dumb idea. The planet will be just fine once we’ve squandered its resources in ways that bring about the collapse of human civilization, thankyouverymuch.

Now people talk about “sustainability,” which is a very different idea. Sustainability is about whether our behavior can serve our own interests over the long haul. It’s really about protecting our own asses, and the pivot by environmentalists from betting on our capacity for enlightenment to betting on our instinct for self-preservation is part of the reason things have started to turn Green all over America.

Sustainability in Social Marketing

The concept of sustainability is a useful one with respect to social marketing as well. This struck me reading an excellent post by Sarah Perez in ReadWriteWeb this morning, about how marketers have begun to use Twitter in spam grey zones that don’t serve the interests of the community. From the piece:

What’s actually more concerni