There's a lot of journalism about poverty, but sometimes it just helps to see that there's a real person who becomes a real mom, who is working with unsustainable wages that could eventually destroy her.

We Americans are churning through fresh water at an alarming and unsustainable rate.

When you run a company, you want to hand it off in better shape than you found it. In the same way, just as we shouldn't leave our children or grandchildren with mountains of national debt and unsustainable entitlement programs, we shouldn't leave them with the economic and environmental costs of climate change.

If you want another world war, run up unsustainable debts.

A flat-rate poll tax would be politically unsustainable; even with a rebate scheme, the package would have an unacceptable impact on certain types of household.

In Greece, Italy and, to a lesser extent, France, unsustainable tax cuts and spending sprees added to households' estimates of their private wealth relative to their wage income.

Recession-resistant development produces things people need. Unsustainable growth churns out tinsel products that consumers have to be seduced into buying - until times get tough, when they quickly give them up.

Tyranny is increasingly unsustainable in this post-cold-war era. It is doomed to failure. But it must be prodded to exit the stage with a whimper - not the bang that extremists long for.

Now and always, hard-line policy and those who embrace it are vessels for darker forces that are at once self-cannibalizing and combustible. No good can come of them. They are unsustainable because their sense of righteousness denies human worth.

There's no law of physics that says we have to be an unsustainable society - in fact, quite the opposite. The planet's ready to work with us if we're ready to think differently, but we do have to make that jump and start to do things in new ways.

Growth based on debt is unsustainable, artificial.

President Obama has ignored or dismissed proposals that would address our anti-competitive tax code and unsustainable trajectory of federal debt - including his own bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform - and submitted no plan for entitlement reform.

Whether we are Democrats or Republicans, all Americans can agree that our health care costs are unsustainable - and the sooner we acknowledge that, the better.

Much of the blame for the Great Recession lies with abuses in the housing market - namely the creation of risky and unsustainable home loans that were packaged and sold as quality investments around the globe.

Economic gains on their own, without a vision for society to accompany them, will result in a squandered prosperity that will ultimately be unsustainable.

We have serious challenges regarding climate change, unsustainable use of natural resources, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, forests and farmland. Not to mention the huge inequality still prevailing in several parts of the planet.

The faltering of our suburban living arrangement is probably certain. The response of suburbanites is not. Will they elect maniacs who promise to make America just like it was in 1997? Will there be a desperate attempt to sustain the unsustainable by authoritarian measures? Will the institutions of order and justice fail in the process?

Corporate tax dodging impacts us across generations and over time. It is corrosive. It is unethical. It is unsustainable.

The brutal reality is that newer, more sprawling suburbs - and especially the cheap boom-years exburbs - aren't just a bit unsustainable, they're ruinously unsustainable in almost every way, and nothing we know of will likely stop their decline, much less fix them easily.

Why are fish unsustainable? Because they're popular. What makes restaurants work? Popular dishes that people come back for.