Adaptive Sustainability

It's been thirty years since I first stepped into the ring as a student activist in the Pacific Northwest. Back then, it was the Endangered Species Act-protected spotted owl versus the logging industry that fed my family. Now, in 2026, I see a familiar tremor in the hands of business leaders.

Many are whispering, keeping their heads low, wondering if "sustainability" is a word that will get them sued or sidelined.If you are tempted to retreat into the shadows, don't.

You aren't watching the death of a movement; you are witnessing a high-stakes evolution.

The Theater of Compelled Speech

The courtroom has pitted the interests of society and the environment against those of business for decades, maybe centuries. Do not be surprised by its current manifestation. In Texas, we saw anti-ESG legislation stumble because the defense successfully argued that state-mandated boycotts restricted free speech. Meanwhile, in California, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has sued the Air Resources Board (CARB) to delay SB 261, using that same freedom of speech as a shield—arguing that companies cannot be "compelled" to disclose climate risks.Speech is now being used as both a weapon and a shield. Meanwhile, the political uncertainty does not alter biophysical reality: 8 billion people on a planet with limited resources and in this reality the companies that are clean, circular, and just will win.

The Coevolutionary Arms Race: The Lesson of the Caterpillar

In his book The Forest Unseen, David Haskell returns to the same tiny patch of old-growth Tennessee forest over the course of a year, carefully observing the natural changes that occur.Haskell explains that birds are gifted visual predators. They don't just look for, for example, caterpillars themselves; they have evolved "search images" for the tell-tale signs of a caterpillar's presence: ragged holes in leaves.So, birds have evolved to associate damaged leaf tissue with a nearby meal. Instead of scanning every inch of the green forest, they "filter" their vision to look for the specific geometry of a chewed leaf edge.To counter this, many species of caterpillars, like the Promethea moth have evolved "hygienic" or "sanitary" eating habits. After they finish eating a leaf, they don't just move to the next one; they snip the petiole (the leaf stem) with their mandibles. The evidence of their meal falls to the forest floor. To a bird flying overhead, the tree appears perfectly healthy and untouched, effectively "cloaking" the caterpillar from the bird’s evolved search image.Sustainability is currently undergoing this same coevolutionary arms race. It is changing its flight pattern. It is changing it's behaviors and its form to "Resilience," "Reliability," or "Operational Excellence".Is this a retreat? Only if we lose the original recipe. The bird remains a bird and the caterpillar becomes a moth (or butterfly). This a change in form not substance.

The AI Paradox: Data Centers on a Sustainability Operating System

This mutation is most visible in what speakers at Davos called the largest industrial project in US history: the expansion of Artificial Intelligence. We are watching hyperscalers like Google and Meta grapple with a brutal paradox: their algorithms are becoming more sophisticated while their physical metabolism—their demand for energy and water—becomes increasingly ravenous.For data centers, the word is reliability, resilience, and efficiency while maintaining safe construction and operating environments. This is all running, as I see it, on a sustainability operating system whether people are using the word or not.

Reliability depends on stable sources of energy and water. AI rests precariously on top of a Jenga tower made up of blocks of kilowatt-hours and gallons of water. There is no "cloud" only large buildings filled with computers and powered by burning things while sucking from a straw you poked into someone's aquifer.

Resilience relies on high performance chip supply chains where a single fabrication plant can use 3 - 5 million gallons of water put through energy-intensive purification. Even before fabrication, the value chain is brittle due to contamination of waterways from rare earth elements mining and transforming quartz sand to silica.

Efficiency demands ever more compute from ever smaller chips. Jevons paradox takes over as per unit energy use decreases while absolute (total) energy use increases along with heat and the water use to maintain safe operating temperatures (for servers and people).

The Global Inexorability

While we perform our jurisprudential gymnastics in the U.S., the rest of the world is moving on:

• China is dictating the velocity of the renewable and EV markets with more than 70% of global production of EVs in 2024.
• India is pulling off a historic feat, developing at a breakneck pace with less carbon-intensity China required at the same stage. At an comparable income level (around $11,000 per person, adjusted for purchasing power), India is consuming less coal and oil per person than China did.
• ISSB and CSRD continue their relentless march, standardizing the language of risk regardless of whether U.S. firms are ready to speak it

The Verdict: Strategic Adaptation

The caterpillar learns to disguise its lunch, the bird to adjust its search engine, and the sustainability profession her language, networks, and tools.

1. Recommit to Substance: Don't let the name change distract you from the mission: protecting the ecosystem of investors, suppliers, and humans that performance relies on.
2. Stay Flexible on Form: If you need to call it "Efficiency" or "Resilience" or just a good business decision to get the budget through, do it.

Focus on the "Original Recipe": Sustainability was born from the link between poverty, equity, and the environment. Don't trade that complexity for a simplified check-box version that won't withstand this crisis or the next.Keep the substance. Work harder to understand the systems you hope to change. Adapt, adapt, adapt.