When the friends of John Wycliffe set about translating the Bible, about 650 years ago, they came to the bit in St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians about charity, ‘which endureth all things’, and chose to make their own translation: ‘susteyneth alle thingis’. The Latin word it translated was sustinet and the original Greek hupomenei. The Wycliffites meant the same as King James’s committees in 1611: to endure.
Yet when David Cameron and his disciples speak of a ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’ they do not, I hope, mean that we must presume housing is something we must endure, a lasting blot on the landscape. What they do mean is by no means clear.
Sustainable development is a hooray term.
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