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As the folks over at TerraPass point out,

These articles are almost always an excuse for lame contrarianism. Did you know that a Prius is worse than a Hummer!?!?!! Did you know that farmer’s markets kill panda bears!?!?

Agreed. That's why this article from Scientific American is so useful:

When a word becomes so popular you begin hearing it everywhere, in all sorts of marginally related or even unrelated contexts, it means one of two things. Either the word has devolved into a meaningless cliche', or it has real conceptual heft. "Green" (or, even worse, "going green") falls squarely into the first category. But "sustainable," which at first conjures up a similarly vague sense of environmental virtue, actually belongs in the second. True, you hear it applied to everything from cars to agriculture to economics. But that's because the concept of sustainability is at its heart so simple that it legitimately applies to all these areas and more.

Despite its simplicity, however, sustainability is a concept people have a hard time wrapping their minds around. To help, Scientific American Earth 3.0 has consulted with several experts on the topic to find out what kinds of misconceptions they most often encounter. The result is this take on the top 10 myths about sustainability. And after this introduction, it’s clear which myth has to come first....

Adam Stein, at TerraPass, sums up a few of them on the list:

Myth 2: Sustainability is all about the environment.

Is climate change an environmental issue or an economic issue? Are we killing the planet, or just making it an inhospitable place for humans?

Myth 4: It’s all about recycling.

Recycling is important, but the outsized grip it has on the public imagination puzzles a lot of environmentalists. Do you recycle religiously, eat a ton of fast food, and drive thirty miles to work every day? If so, your environmental priorities may be out of whack.

Myth 7: Consumer choices and grassroots activism, not government intervention, offer the fastest, most efficient routes to sustainability.

We obviously need grassroots activism, consumer awareness, and government intervention. But in a world of tradeoffs and priorities, this all-of-the-above formulation can be a bit of a cop-out. What problems can we reasonably expect individuals to address, and what areas require a strong policy framework?

Myth 9: Sustainability is ultimately a population problem.

In a trivial sense everything is a population problem: no people, no problem. Unfortunately, this formulation fails to provide any leverage on a solution. The challenge for humanity is, how do we support this number of people on this Earth, in a sustainable manner?

But don't take Adam's word for it, check out all ten myths!

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