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We might not live in a sustainable age, but we’re living in the age of sustainability. The movement has gained a level of prominence in recent years that is difficult to dispute. The scholarly fields associated with sustainability have expanded dramatically; new tools and methods have appeared that help define, measure, and assess sustainability; and a broad range of organizations and communities have embraced the principles of sustainable living. Sustainability, in fact, has gone from marginal ecological idea to mainstream movement in a surprisingly short amount of time. We now see sustainability publicized at the supermarket, on university campuses, at the aquarium, in corporate headquarters, in government ministries, and in countless other places. A growing number of universities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and corporations in the Western world possess an “office of sustainability”— replete with sustainability plans and guidebooks—but none have an “office of green radicalism” or an “office of the status quo.” In a sense, this environmental discourse has won out over rival conceptions of humanity’s relationship to the natural world. This chapter is an attempt to sketch out the different ways in which sustainability has gained a foothold in contemporary society. It is not meant to suggest that our world is sustainable. On the contrary, many barriers and entrenched interests have kept our world rather unsustainable, and Mathis Wackernagel has even argued that, since the 1990s, we have exceeded the Earth’s capacity to sustain us; we are now living in a state of global overshoot. The goal here, rather, is to show the ways in which our society has constructively responded to our ecological crisis—to demonstrate the growth and elaboration of the sustainability movement and describe some of the successes it has achieved in counteracting our bad habits. As the philosophy of sustainability has developed, so too has it expanded its scope. If we recall from earlier chapters, the concept of sustainability began in the eighteenth century as a method of managing forests, and by the 1960s and 1970s it had become a reaction to industrialism and the trend toward ecological overshoot.

For the EU, environmental policy has been posited as both a source of legitimacy and an opportunity for international leadership. However, concerns have been raised that the 2007–8 economic crisis and its consequences have negatively affected the EU’s environmental ambition. This chapter addresses this issue by comparing the pre-crisis and post-crisis policy intensity of three EU environmental policy subsectors (environment–industry, climate and energy, and air-quality policy) using the Index of Policy Activity (IPA). The results suggest that average policy intensity has increased in these subsectors since the economic crisis. The pre-crisis policy intensity in the climate and energy subsector was significantly lower than environment–industry or air-quality policy, but a rapid increase has led to a post-crisis convergence.