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> Anyway, at this point, "sustainability" means environmental decency in the general sense. Like the term "literally," it has evolved with usage.

The problem with this is, that now there is no way to talk about the original meaning of "sustainable". Since that is an important concept, much is lost when it can no longer be talked about.

Getting mad at etymology is a sisyphean torture. You will always lose at this game. It's the nature of language.

I'm mad at "literally," because it evolved out of a misunderstood cliche that became an "um word." Lowest form of etymology. I'm trying to get over it.

Sustainability evolved because it was used to describe slash and burn agriculture, overfishing and such. It evolved in a pretty natural way, reflecting the way ecosystems actually work. It also became associated with "sustainability practices" which really do improve sustainability in the narrow sense. Bycatch reduction does improve the sustainability of target species harvest. Bycatch reduction is also environmentally preferable regardless of target species sustainability... but it still gets called environmental "sustainability" even if the goal is not "continue doing what you are doing uninterrupted.

The broader sense of "sustainability" is also related to the narrow sense in practice. Oil pipelines leak and pollute, on average. If you try to build one today, locals will vigorously try to stop you. Leaky pipes do not directly prevent oil from being piped, but they do create a political reality where you can't continue to build them. Very few overground (or over-river) pipelines are being built in places that have political rights.

All this seems like a good, healthy, literate way for a language to evolve.

Overused, I agree... but still way better than literally.

> Getting mad at etymology is a sisyphean torture. You will always lose at this game. It's the nature of language.

There seems to be a lot of intentional evolution of meaning, and I believe the criticism of the article is based upon feeling that this is such a case. Using a word with a certain meaning in a different context uses the word's power without having the same meaning. The usefulness of the word as a rhetoric tool is the delta between the impact ("original sustainable") and the thing referenced ("modern sustainable"). It's why Peta calls dairy industry cow rape and speaks of Pig concentration camps: evoking emotions to further their agenda.

I would say this happens every time someone chooses one word over another in a sentence. Language is intentional and rhetorical by nature. "Cow rape" is a good way down the spectral extremity, but choice of words is always like this. Choice of words is what evolves the meaning of words. Metaphors become cliches, become idioms, etc. That's how we get homonyms, multiple meanings, archaics...and etymology generally. Evolution is neither deterministic nor random.

It's also true of how we interpret words. The term sustainability's most common modern usage means "ecologically harmful." The narrow sense of the term, "will conclude at some point," was never commonly used.

Objecting to the modern usage is intentional and rhetorical also. It signifies objection to the moralizing about the environment. It's a shiboleth, at least for now.

On this thread, the semantic objection earned top comment. An objection that doesn't address anything related to the article, but an objection nonetheless. That's a rhetorical win. An ad hominem is cheap, but this is inexpensive. Sweet spot.

That's kind of what "rhetorical skill" is. Chris Hitchens was one of the greats, IMO. Backed against the wall, he would hit back with inexpensive rhetoric. Inexpensive is ok, just not cheap. People can smell cheap.

There's a difference between a natural evolution of meaning and an artificial one. A similar thing (though in reverse) happened with "retarded" & similar words that started as neutral descriptions, had connotations added to them by the general population and then got intentionally pushed out by (I believe well-meaning but ultimately misguided) decision makers. They bring on the next word, the cycle repeats.

I do believe that it's important to point it out when you see it, because it's actively harmful to communication. Not only does it get harder to communicate (as words now become variables that can carry whatever meaning you currently want them to carry), it also destroys the trust between people, much like lying. The individual lie may not be a huge deal, but a society that loses any and all trust in each other does not have a bright future.

"Okay, yes, it's wrong, but let's not talk about that, let's focus on the topic now that we're here" isn't the right approach either, imho. I prefer the idea of "fruit of the poisonous tree" in that regard: if you start with a lie, you can't expect everyone to forgive and forget because you've now decided that it's not important and want them to focus on what you want to achieve. Agreeing to that is normalizing deviance.

I think I disagree at the fundamental level. There is no dividing line between artificial and natural. Artificial means made by people. Language is always made by people.

Language evolves naturally. It's very hard to control and thus not under control of decision makers. As you said, some people try to introduce terms such as "cow rape." It doesn't work easily though. The term feels unnatural.

Language is also natural to us. We're wired for dealing with its complex ambiguities. That's why we have no problem using the word "natural" to communicate things that have a very abstract relationship to the core meaning of the word. Natural beauty. Good natured. It comes naturally to me.

This is how language works.

The evolution of language also reflect values. The term cow rape is more likely to off in vegan subcultures.

It is also, obviously, used intentionally in rhetoric. The term "sustainability" was spread, intentionally and unintentionally by those in green circles.

The key point about the word "sustainability" though, is that it does mean "environmentally friendly." This is not a lie. This is the literal (meant literally) definition. If you read about sustainability in the newspaper, or it is discussed by legislators... they are talking about the modern definition. That means it is the literal definition.

In terms of dishonest rhetoric, lies... Insisting that "sustainability means continuation without disruption" is a lie. It's a lie in the sense that it is untrue. This isn't what the word means in most cases, including this one. It is also a lie in a more abstract and important sense. The purpose of the argument is not to argue about words, but to take a conversation into the weeds.

Insisting on the archaic usage also almost always reflects values, intentionally or otherwise. Cow rape is marginal enough (at least currently) to trigger a neutral observer. To be triggered by the term sustainable, you usually need to really disagree with the implication. In this case, that we should protect oceanic ecosystem protections from commercial fishing more.

I also think these things are important to point out when seen. Taking a semantic left turn to avoid substance is, to paraphrase one famous campaigner, the "flood with shit" approach. It's effective, insidious and Orwellian. It worked a charm here.

> Artificial means made by people. Language is always made by people.

Artificial in language, to me, means "made by decisions" vs "made by accident". Some things evolve because plenty of individual people see the value and use them in a new way, other things get forced into language because some people see the value of framing issues in a certain way. To me, the former is natural progression of language while the latter is artificial. Much like you can have traditions and religions be created over time in a region or population, that's quite natural. If an army comes and forces them to adopt different traditions and religions, those are artificially implanted.

That Peta isn't able to push some term doesn't mean that there's no term-pushing happening or that it's not successful. Framing is a popular tactic.

> The key point about the word "sustainability" though, is that it does mean "environmentally friendly."

But it really doesn't. Sustainability is quite literally (!) the ability to sustain. Environmentally friendly is very vague and can mean lots of things to lots of people. Factory farming is very sustainable on its own, but it's not environmentally friendly.

Sustainability is generally not used as a synonym for environmentally friendly neither, otherwise we wouldn't talk about environmentally sustainable policies, we'd just talk about sustainable policies - but that would be confusing, because there are also economically sustainability issues that have nothing to do with the environment, as are plenty of others, e.g. manually sorting each letter in a country can be done, but it can't be done sustainably.

> The purpose of the argument is not to argue about words, but to take a conversation into the weeds.

My reaction is the opposite. When someone claims that there's a "white genocide", I disagree and generally discount their argument because it's not strong enough to stand on it's own and therefore they mix in the word "genocide" to create an emotional impact. Pointing that out isn't about derailing the conversation, it's about keeping a minimum level of honesty in communication. Don't use words while massively changing their meaning to advance your agenda, don't do silly card tricks to win an argument by confusing the audience. It's important to insist on it, otherwise you get what Trump has demonstrated quite nicely: if language has no shared meaning any more, the person who says the most outrageous things, delivers the best zingers, talks the loudest or makes the most expressive faces wins every argument because he'll go "they murdered that guy", reap the effect of making people believe somebody was murdered, and when confronted "well, I used murdered in a modern meaning".

> To be triggered by the term sustainable, you usually need to really disagree with the implication. In this case, that we should protect oceanic ecosystem protections from commercial fishing more.

No. To be against torture of terrorists, you don't need to be pro-terrorism, you just need to be anti-torture. That is, unless all those words have been assigned random new meanings, then it may very well be true.

You are missing the point. If I say that "poisoning birds of prey on your farm is unsustainable," that is not a claim. The meaning of the term is not "cannot go on."

"Can go on" is another definition of sustainable. This why dictionaries have multiple definitions, wikipedia has disambiguation pages, etc.

The archaic definition is relatively rare, and easy to discern from context. Environmental sustainability has a wikipedia entry. Ability to sustain does not. Also news articles, book titles, legislative literature, academic literature. etc.

I don't know what more I can say. Words mean what they mean, and that evolves over time.

Insisting that the modern usage is wrong and the archaic usage is correct is basically using a "loaded" term. No one writing or speaking about sustainability in an intellectually honest way expects the narrow, archaic usage.

Environmental sustainability almost always has a wider definition. If we are having a discussion about environmental sustainability and someone insists that a practice is sustainable "really" means "can go on" regardless of environmental harm.... then they are loading the term.

It's an attempt to change the meaning of the term, as it is commonly used, while keeping the moral connotations. Why would anyone care about environmental sustainability in the narrow sense?

Inexpensive rhetoric. Disingenuous.

It's disingenuous even if it is semantically correct. In this case (and often) the argument is factually wrong. This is what makes it good red herring. It's effective at rallying even if factually incorrect.

What would you like to talk about under the original definition of sustainable, then? It seems to me like we're still discussing all this stuff just fine. In fact, this whole subthread seems to be a deliberate attempt to sidetrack discussion of important ecological policy with a pointless war about linguistics.

Even taking all that, I don't see how we're breaking with the spirit of the word anyway. If you have a fishery that preserves the population of one target species, but is steadily depleting that of another (the bycatch), why should we call that "sustainable", exactly?

We're not discussing things fine if different people mean different things with the word.

That is how communication dies and people misunderstand each other.

Exactly the opposite.

This is how human language works. Our brains are specifically designed to work out these ambiguities. That's why NLP is hard. It's what the "L" means.

This is why you did not have any trouble understanding the author.

Humans are also good at creative problem solving. In your case, the problem is that the article is well reasoned and hard to argue against. Semantics are always easy to argue though. So, you argue that we must use the term "sustainability" in in the way it was used back when no one used it.

I wonder why this even works. The author's usage is obviously and demonstrably correct. It is a far more common usage than yours. Homonyms exist. Somehow this nonsense makes top comment on half the threads on HN, and everywhere else... derailing actual conversations about actual stuff.

I reckon it's the same brain bug that makes reality TV popular. The conversation about nothing adjacent to the conversation about something.

> In your case, the problem is that the article is well reasoned and hard to argue against. Semantics are always easy to argue though. So, you argue that we must use the term "sustainability" in in the way it was used back when no one used it.

It's fascinating how you made all that up. The inner motivation of someone you've never met. The claim that I argued against the article. What I'm supposedly arguing for.

None of that is in what I wrote. It all happened in your mind.

> In fact, this whole subthread seems to be a deliberate attempt to sidetrack discussion of important ecological policy with a pointless war about linguistics.

The fight for marriage equality was a "pointless war about linguistics" in those jurisdictions where the same-sex couples already had the same substantial rights? The choice of signs is important; in particular some carry more respectability than others.

The word choice does matter if what you're doing is taking a concept that the public already supports, and tack on additional meanings to advance your agenda. If all that mattered in a discussion

> Even taking all that, I don't see how we're breaking with the spirit of the word anyway. If you have a fishery that preserves the population of one target species, but is steadily depleting that of another (the bycatch)

The article doesn't make that argument.

It wasn't a fight over linguistics, it was a fight for the right for same-sex couples to be able to enter into the same legal contract as any other couple. the idea that there existed a "separate but equal" set of rights under a distinct legal contract is questionable, but also not a fight over linguistics.

"Net zero"?

> For relatively little economic size. This isn't oil & gas

Don't underestimate it. Maybe is not obvious, but the majority of humans, many millions of people do not starve to death because fisheries save them each day providing the main and only reliable source of protein in their daily intake.

The impact of all fishes vanishing tomorrow would be devastating for the world. A thousand of countries would burn in war in less than a year, and there would be huge, massive, migrations towards the North Hemisphere.

Point taken.

I didn't mean to be trite. Fishing is nutritionally important, and economically important to a lot of people in the world. This shouldn't be measured in gdp contribution. I also don't take the cultural element lightly. Fishing is culturally essential to many cultures and subcultures wherever there is water.

There is a reason fisheries are still one of the main diplomatic issues to this day.

Dollar amount is, on the other hand, meaningful in the ways that it is.

Oil & gas are "unsustainable" in the "considering that we live on this planet" sense... the same sense that many fishing industries are unsustainable. The environment would be significantly better off without them. But, it's only recently that we can even see ourselves living without oil and gas. Those mines and pipelines, leaks, coal coughs and refineries still power us. Energy touches all of us, a lot. Ocean fish... we eat them sometimes.

..and oceanic ecosystems are not something that we can destroy regardless of economics. It's morally wrong.

That’s wildly inaccurate, the largest percentage of fish come from aquaculture not wild capture. ~90 Million tons of fish sounds like a huge number but quite a lot of that’s ends up as animal feed etc. Pork by comparison adds up to ~120 Million tons per year and people actually directly consume the majority of it. People get well over twice as much protean from cows than wild fish. Add in chickens for 130 Million tons per year for even more perspective, before looking at plant based sources.

Serious analysis shows wild fish are critical for a few communities, but have a minor role in the global food supply.

In 2018, 150 million tons of fish and shellfish were used directly for human food. This is more than pork (113 millions in 2018). Other 29 millions were used to feed animals. (Source: FAO)

> People get well over twice as much protean from cows than wild fish

This is an eurocentric point of view.

To start, around 65% of the humans in the planet are lactose intolerant. The second most populated country in the planet will not eat cattle, and Jews and muslims will not eat pork. US people eat 100Kg of meat/year on average whereas Hindi survive with 5Kg of meat/year on average.

> wild fish are critical for a few communities

There is not modern aquaculture without a regular supply of wild fish flour provided by fisheries. Remove all the seafood suddenly and Japan or Singapore would not survive two years. Not as we know it currently. Neither would do India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, China, Chile or Peru.

Just the muslims would have a hard time to not starve, and one of each four people in the planet is a muslim.

Of that 150M tons of fish ~90 was from fish farms and ~60 Million tons was from the wild. Yes, some of that wild fish is used to feed fish farms, but you don’t turn 29M tons of wild fish into 90M tons via fish farms. It’s simply one of several cheap protein sources used in fish farming.

Overall fish farms are ~50% more important than fishing and trying to combine them when I already noted the difference is disingenuous.

And no this is not Eurocentric these are worldwide totals. Cow meat on it’s own provides more protein than wild fish and that’s less important than cow milk. Worldwide cow milk represents 85% off all milk consumption it’s somewhat regional though still plenty global.

I suggest you actually look into milk and meat consumption in say India which you said would be devastated without fishing. ~1/4th of Indians consume zero meat of any source they would be completely unaffected by fishing being banned. Cattle consumption in India is 2.7 million metric tons which actually puts it reasonably close to the worldwide average in terms of ocean fishing : beef consumption ratio. https://www.statista.com/statistics/826722/india-beef-and-ve...

PS: Further confusing the issue the majority of India’s fish come from fresh water.

> Of that 150M tons of fish ~90 was from fish farms, you can't convert 29...

There are several confusions here. One is that those 150M tons of fish are composed of just fish. There are clams also, there are oysters, mussels, crabs and shrimps. You can produce 100M tons of mussels even if you have only 29M tons of flour fish available. They don't need it at all.

The other wrong idea is that fish farms equal fishes of non wild origin. This is not necessarily true.

The 60M tons of wild fish is also mussels etc, it’s also largely irrelevant in terms of nutrition thus the generic term fish. Aka crab fisherman even though crabs are not fish.

If you really want to be specific some of that of that 29M tons of wild “fish“ is also fed to cattle, chicken, and pigs etc. But, it’s really only a net benefit of ~3M tons worth of increased output for human consumption across all intermediaries. The basic cycle of feeding stuff to animals we prefer eating is extremely inefficient, but to world food surplus is so massive and that 29M tons has such a low value it’s not a big deal.

Getting back to the main point, I think I have clearly demonstrated how irrelevant fishing is in global terms.

> it’s also largely irrelevant in terms of nutrition, thus the generic term fish

In English. To assume that marine molluscs or cnidarians are "a type of fishes" is a mistake that the majority of languages did not commit.

For millions of people shellfish is an excellent, healthy, nutritive and easily available food. Very far from "irrelevant". This point of view is (probably, I could be wrong) not so widespread in the anglosphere, but this is just a cultural thing. More for us.

If cooked properly, Mussels, crabs, lobsters and sea urchins are delicious and highly appreciated among connoisseurs, that's for sure.

It’s not a linguist mistake, it’s overloading a single word which happens a lot in most languages. The same thing is going on in English when referring to a group or generic unknown people as male.

Anyway, I will accept this as a backhanded agreement and leave it at that.

> Environmental sustainability doesn't "scope creep" for the same reason as other morality terms (eg justice). It scope creeps because of the nature of environmental sustainability. Affecting non-target species (bycatch etc.) tends to have unpredictable effects on target species... and longer time horizons yield more complexity. That's what ecosystems are, interdependent sets of population dynamics.

But even under this interpretation, the article doesn't attempt to argue that the bycatch is causing the mammal populations to collapse. Instead, it focuses on the damage inflicted on _individuals_. Incidentally, this is the kind of advocacy that often pits animal rights activists against conservationists, for instance when the latter resort to culling or even simply let a large percentage of a population die of hunger.

It's not really an interpretation. This is what the word "sustainable" means. This is the way the author is using the term sustainable. When she says "a key independent labeler of sustainable seafood..." she's referring to a stamp using the term this way. It's even used this way in legislation, diplomacy, etc.

Past a point, I find the semantic discussion boring. This is just how language works. Words have multiple, often related meanings. It changes over time. You are not encountering it for the first time.

I was just pointing out that the evolution of the term has a logical etymology to it. There's a logic to "environmental harm" having acquired the near synonym "environmentally unsustainable." That has nothing to do with the author though. The word just means what it means.

Why does the author need to argue that the bycatch is causing target fish populations to collapse? That's not what she's writing an article about. She's just using the english language how it is spoken, especially in the context she's writing within. She didn't invent it.

Anyway... I kind of feel this is going in a silly direction. The article is about something important. The top comments are me and you having a stupid conversation about the history of words.

If you disagree with the author, you should have argued with what she has to say.. as opposed to the semantics. I'd say that onus applies more than the other way around.

Yep. The kelp forests in California have been devastated in the last few years, due to "sea star wasting disease". The sea-star population crashes, sea stars are a no longer a major predator of purple sea urchins, sea urchins like to eat the "holdfast" where the kelp attaches to the seafloor, and boom, no more kelp forests. The resulting denuded landscape (seascape?) is known as an "urchin barren". Instead of a lush underwater forest teeming with crabs, snails, and fish, you have mostly bare rocks and urchins. The ocean truly is a system.