Perspectives · Language & Common Ground

Sustainability Is Not Partisan. Our Words Made It Look That Way.

Each time I open a talk or a workshop, I ask the room the same question. "When I say the word sustainability, what is the first thing that pops into your head?" The answers are the same in every country I visit. Environment comes first, then future, green and future generations. No one has ever answered with the name of a political party.

Outside those rooms, the word now works like a party badge. Say "sustainability," "climate" or "ESG" in a meeting and half the people at the table decide what you think before you finish the sentence. Some nod along. Others stop listening. I am tired of it. A word should not decide who is allowed to care about clean water, a fair price for power, or the land their children will farm.

Sustainability is a human problem. People on the right, including people on the far right, and people on the left already hold priorities that sit inside it. The terms we use hide that overlap. The survey data and the research on framing show how much.

Voters in both parties still agree on land, water and waste

In January 2026, Colorado College surveyed 3,419 registered voters in eight Mountain West states: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. A Republican pollster and a Democratic pollster run the survey together. Eighty-six percent of voters said cuts to public lands funding are a serious problem. That included 76 percent of Republicans and 75 percent of voters who identify as MAGA supporters. Ninety-one percent said existing national monument designations should stay in place.¹

National data shows the same pattern in daily life. In a Pew Research Center survey of 3,524 U.S. adults in March 2026, 95 percent said they regularly turn off the lights when no one is using them. Among those people, 78 percent said saving money is a major reason. Far fewer said they do it to help the environment.² Cutting waste to save money is a sustainability practice, whatever name people give it.

Some ground is shared even where the parties split. In that same March survey, 54 percent of Republicans said the federal government should encourage nuclear power, compared with 38 percent of Democrats.³ And 54 percent of Republicans supported the United States taking part in international efforts on climate change.²

Support moves when the label moves

Look at what happened to renewable energy. In 2020, 65 percent of Republicans said the country should give priority to wind and solar over fossil fuels. By March 2026, that share was 28 percent. Democratic support slipped as well, from 91 to 83 percent.³ Over those six years, solar panels and wind turbines stayed the same kind of machine. What shifted was the meaning of the words and the side that seemed to own them.

Part of the shift reflects real concerns. The same Pew survey found that 67 percent of Republicans see wind power as less reliable than other energy sources, and 43 percent say solar costs consumers more.³ Reliability and cost are fair questions. They have measurable answers, and the people asking them deserve straight ones.

Research explains another part. In 2013, Matthew Feinberg of Stanford University and Robb Willer, then at the University of California, Berkeley, studied how environmental messages are written. Most of the op-eds and public service announcements they examined framed the environment around harm and care, values that liberals hold more strongly. When the researchers rewrote the message around purity, keeping land and water clean and undefiled, a value conservatives hold more strongly, the gap between liberal and conservative attitudes largely disappeared.⁴ A good share of the divide was in the message.

Wind farms, cover crops and hunting licenses show the same overlap. Texas generated about 28 percent of all U.S. wind power in 2025, more than any other state.⁵ Texas farmers planted 1.55 million acres of cover crops in 2022, the most of any state, with the largest increase since 2017.⁶ Federal excise taxes on firearms, ammunition, archery and fishing equipment, a system hunters and anglers have backed since 1937, have delivered more than $31 billion to state fish and wildlife agencies.⁷ Most of the people doing this work would not call themselves environmentalists. They are protecting soil, income, land and a way of life.

The priorities of the right and the left are already inside sustainability

Ask people on the right what they want to protect and you hear about self-reliance and energy independence. You hear that wasting money is wrong, that owning land means caring for it, and that local decisions belong to local people. Many people of faith speak about stewardship of creation. Many families want to pass the farm or the business to their children in better shape than they received it, and they do not want to hand those children debt. On the far right, the word is often sovereignty: the nation should not depend on rival powers for fuel, medicine, food or the minerals its factories need.

Every one of those is a sustainability priority. Energy independence is resilience of supply. Thrift is resource efficiency. Caring for land you own is conservation. Refusing to pass debt to your children is responsibility across generations, the idea at the center of every definition of sustainability I know. Producing your own food, fuel and minerals is supply chain resilience.

Ask people on the left and you hear about fairness. They want clean air for the child with asthma who lives beside the highway, and safe drinking water at home. They want fair pay and safe conditions for workers, and a voice for the communities that live next to the plant, the mine or the landfill. They worry about the climate their grandchildren will live in. Those are sustainability priorities too. They cover the people and planet impacts that every project creates.

Put the two lists side by side and they describe one problem from two starting points. I define sustainability as our responsibility for whether others inherit the conditions to thrive or the consequences of our failure. A conservative reader hears inheritance: the farm, the business and the family name passed on intact. A progressive reader hears fairness to the people downstream and the people who come after us. Both readings are correct.

Labels on both sides end the conversation early

To many listeners, "ESG," "net zero" and "climate justice" now signal a side. So do "woke capital" and "climate denier." Each label tells the other person which team you think they belong to. Once that happens, people defend the team and stop looking at the problem. The effect is the same whichever side uses the label.

People can keep their beliefs. What I want our profession to drop is the habit of treating sustainability as a loyalty test. A flooded basement, a failed harvest, a power bill that doubled and a well that runs dry in August are problems for everyone who has them. They need solving whatever the owner's vote.

Project teams can describe impacts in terms anyone can check

Project professionals write most of the documents where these decisions get made: the business case, the impact assessment, the benefits plan and the status report. The words in those documents decide who keeps reading past the first page.

The PMI® GPM® P5™ Standard asks teams to look at impacts on people, planet and prosperity across both the project's process and its product. None of those impacts needs a political label. Teams can write them as measures: liters of water drawn per day, kilowatt-hours per unit of output, operating cost over twenty years, hours of downtime avoided, local jobs still in place after handover, asthma admissions at the nearest hospital, and tons of topsoil kept on site. A baseline set in those terms reads the same to a county commissioner in Texas and a city council member in Oregon.

Regeneration works the same way. Regeneration is a measurable increase in a system's capacity beyond its baseline. Soil organic matter rising on a farm, an aquifer level recovering and a local supplier base growing are all examples. A rancher and an environmental campaigner can read the same soil test and agree on what it shows.

Sponsors have a part in this. The PMI® GPM® Guide to Responsible Project Sponsorship sets out what a sponsor is accountable for, including what the project leaves behind. The guide and the P5 Standard are both PMI-GPM publications, available at pmi.org/learning/sustainability and gpm.org/sponsor. A sponsor who asks for measured impacts in the business case gives the approval meeting something to decide on other than slogans.

Sustainability is a human challenge. It belongs to the rancher, the nurse, the factory owner, the pastor, the student and the activist, who often live in the same town and vote for different candidates. Project professionals can keep it with all of them by writing impacts as measures and leaving the labels out of the business case.

¹ Colorado College State of the Rockies Project, 2026 Conservation in the West Poll, released February 18, 2026. Survey of 3,419 registered voters in eight Western states, January 2 to 18, 2026, conducted by Lori Weigel (New Bridge Strategy) and Miranda Everitt (Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates). coloradocollege.edu

² Pew Research Center, "Americans Are Increasingly Pessimistic About Avoiding the Worst Effects of Climate Change," May 28, 2026. Survey of 3,524 U.S. adults, March 16 to 22, 2026. pewresearch.org

³ Pew Research Center, "Americans' Shifting Views on Energy Issues," April 3, 2026. Survey of 3,524 U.S. adults, March 16 to 22, 2026. pewresearch.org

⁴ Feinberg, M., and Willer, R. (2013). "The Moral Roots of Environmental Attitudes." Psychological Science, 24(1), 56 to 62. doi.org

⁵ Texas 2036, "Gale-Force Growth: Texas Wind Energy, 2000-2025," based on U.S. Energy Information Administration Electricity Data Browser and Form EIA-860 data. texas2036.org

⁶ Zulauf, C., Schnitkey, G., Paulson, N., and Coppess, J., "Cover Crops and Covered Cropland, 2022 US Census of Agriculture," farmdoc daily (14):37, University of Illinois, February 22, 2024, using USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service data. farmdocdaily.illinois.edu

⁷ U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, "Service Provides Over $1.2 Billion to Support Fish and Wildlife Conservation and Outdoor Access," February 13, 2026. fws.gov