Sustainable trumps green living and eco friendly on hot word trending. Thanks to Al Gore?

Sustainable trumps green living and eco friendly on hot word trending. Thanks to Al Gore?

August 7th, 2009  |  Published in Blog

These graphs are from Google Trends, which tracks the frequency of searches by term.

Wondering about that peak in 2007? 2007 is when Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth won an Academy Award (it came out in 2006), it’s also the year he split the Nobel with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and he was runner up for Time’s Person of the Year.

Take a look at 2004! I started writing about sustainable lifestyle choices at the end of 2006, but looking at this I wish I had started earlier.

Right now you may be thinking that ’sustainable’ has been used for a long time in other contexts, while ‘eco friendly’ and ‘green living’ are tied to the trend. Here are the previous terms with sustainability:

google-trends-sustainability

As expected. In this graph sustainability is likely getting a boost from the agricultural and business worlds, where corporations prefer the term. PepsiCo and Walmart issue Sustainability Reports, not Green Living Reports.

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Hello hello! I create content to engage people in all levels of a sustainable lifestyle and show how to take action through localized resources, interactive impact calculators, and the social aspects that make it all fun. There is a lot of generalized green living information out there, but it's the ability to act at home and with your community, and the emotional incentive to do so, that I work in. If you work in digital storytelling, environmental education, or sustainable travel, I'd like to know who you are, too. Twitter is best, but email is good also.

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