Introduction

Rhetorics, Literacies, and Narratives of Sustainability is a study of textsliterary texts, multimedia texts, legal texts, digital texts, political texts, popular texts, and so on-that write the future of biotic and social worlds. The epigraphs from Cicero and Glacken remind us that the concept of sustainability exists because of a growing acceptance that human activity has lasting impacts on the earth’s ecosystems. That is, the quality of life for future generations depends on how we, as societies and civilizations, approach environmental and social development. Thus, sustainability is not a concept for preserving, conserving, or reserving the earth and nature solely for their own sakes, but also for their continuing benefi t to human society. However, one key problem for enacting change toward a sustainable future is that on local and national levels, sustainability is defi ned and enacted in a multitude of ways, often to serve special interests and political expediency. Consequently charges of “sustainababble” insinuate that the concept of “sustainability” is too diffuse to be meaningful. Thus, while sustainability and sustainable development are certainly laudable ideals, it is also incumbent on people and societies to look critically and skeptically at who is doing the defi ning and to what ends.