This week I attended a seminar introducing some sophisticated industrial products, and I am sure that one message I took away from it was unintentional. The effort by large corporations to be associated with, and credited for, being "environmentally friendly" is a game they cannot win, and should not play.

You may have begun to notice, as I have, the prevalence of the term "sustainability." It refers to a very loose definition by which an organization or a product can be demonstrated to have no impact, or very little impact, or a declining impact on the global environment. To accept this concept, you will already have accepted the idea that the global environment is under threat of catastrophe. And, that the threat comes from humanity.

In some ways, the environmentalist war on business, especially manufacturing, has already been decided: in news reporting and marketing, "green" is good; it represents cleanliness, purity, innocence, and honesty. Manufacturing represents all the opposite qualities.

When manufacturers try to counter those assumptions by promoting their operations' and/or products' "sustainability," they have conceded the rhetorical argument. They are admitting that industrial activity damages the natural world.

In doing so, they are failing to take credit for centuries of human progress, which, in Western Civilization has always been measured by improvements in living standards. Work leads to prosperity, which leads to health and wealth. Health and wealth signify humanity's advances, because their effects lift everyone, not just the healthy and wealthy.

The contradictions to these equations, generally speaking, embrace an alternate ideal for humanity. Civilization is the enemy of human happiness, we learned from Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th Century, and his thinking has been influential on hordes of other contrarians in the decades since then: they cannot demonize business, industry, governments, financial institutions, organized religion, or any other emblem of civilized society, without fabricating some idealized version of humanity in a "natural" state.

Don't take the bait. It doesn't take much imagination to understand the truth about human life in the "natural" state. No sensible person would wish to be there. There is no shame in being prosperous, and there is no gain in denying the progress made over centuries of industry, and by industry.