Sustainability is back.

It was ‘in' a few years ago but fell out of favor. Now that it's back, you might think it would finally put microbusinesses on the same page as corporate America.

But you'd think wrong.

As a matter of fact, it doesn't even give us anything to talk about.

In the parlance of corporate America, ‘sustainability' in business refers very specifically to environmentally friendly business means and methods that respect global climate change as good science and operating accordingly.

And don't get me wrong, that's good stuff. It begins to appear as if at least one form of socially responsible corporate behavior is becoming fashionable.

But this is not what ‘sustainability' means in microbusiness circles. Or, at least, that's not all it means.

Sustainability, among us, contemplates business ventures that don't have to lose their human scale in order to remain viable businesses, that may not grow very much in the traditional economic sense but make up for their lack of sales receipts in the richness and depth they can add to a life.

Sustainable microbusinesses are operated by people who use a different sort of scale to measure whether a given venture is worth pursuing. Sustainable microbusinesses respect everything — not only the planet, but their customers, their so-called competitors, their employees, their communities, themselves.

Right now, corporate America is trying to figure out how to marry sustainability with profit because, in corporate America, some things never change.

I don't know how that's going to work out for them because I don't know how you wed the sort of thinking that considers the planet to be precious with the sort of thinking that favors plundering the planet for profit — that is, the sort of thinking that got us here to begin with.

All things considered, I'm left wondering if corporate America will manage to evolve some meaningful change in the way they do business, or if we are about to witness the birth of just another marketing ploy?

Limited growth. Human scaled. Environmentally friendly. If I'm looking for sustainability that matters, I think I'll look to micros.