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Sustainability

Sustainability: What words to search?

Sustainability is a very broad topic.  Sustainability applies to many different fields of study such as earth sciences, biology, government and politics, business, agriculture, etc.  The concept of sustainability can, therefore, be expressed by many different words and word combinations.  You will need to think about a variety of ways your ideas on sustainability could be worded in order to perform the best information searches.

Just a few examples of topic areas and specific related search terms are listed below.  These are the words you can type in the search box in the library catalog, library databases, Google, etc.

Note: 
the * is a truncation symbol and in library databases will get all endings such as sustain, sustainable, sustainability, etc
the " " will bind the two words together as a phrase.  This is particularly useful in Internet search engines.

General:
green
"green movement"
sustain*

Agriculture:

"green agriculture"
"sustainable agriculture"
"factory farming"
"local food"

Construction:
"green building"
"low impact development"
LID
"rain gardens"
"green roofs"

Climate:
"global warming"
"climate change"
"greenhouse gases"
"ozone layer"
"ozone hole"

Fuel/Automobiles:
"fossil fuels"
"electric vehicles"
prius

Consumers
consumerism
consumption