Who Is Kenneth Alston?
Kenneth Alston is a sustainability and circularity strategist, author, and speaker whose work asks a deceptively simple question:
What are we actually trying to sustain?
That question has shaped more than forty years of inquiry across chemistry, product development, corporate sustainability, circular business models, innovation and strategic advisory work.
Ken’s perspective did not begin in theory. It began in the practical realities of making things: materials, products, processes, markets and the business systems that decide what gets made, how it gets used and what happens next.
That practical starting point matters.
Sustainability is often discussed as a set of goals, frameworks, policies or reporting requirements. But in business, sustainability eventually has to meet reality. It has to work inside decisions about products, operations, customers, capital, risk, growth and time.
Ken’s work sits at that intersection.
From Sustainability to Circularity
Over the course of his career, Ken has worked inside the systems many organizations are now trying to change.
He has helped leaders examine sustainability not simply as a communications issue or compliance requirement, but as a question of business design. What does the organization make possible? What does it make difficult? What assumptions are embedded in its products, models and decisions?
That line of inquiry led naturally into circularity.
Circular economy thinking asks important questions about resources, waste, reuse, repair, recovery and regeneration. But Ken’s work also presses on a deeper issue: circularity is not automatically sustainability.
A system can become more circular without becoming compatible with the long-term conditions required for life, business or society to continue. This distinction runs through his books, advisory work and public writing.
The question is not only whether something can loop.
The question is whether the loop is worth sustaining.
Author of Our Common Future Now
Ken is the author of Our Common Future Now, a book that returns to one of the most influential starting points in modern sustainability: the 1987 Brundtland Report, formally titled Our Common Future.
Most people know that report through one sentence about sustainable development:
“Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
That sentence became foundational. But Ken’s inquiry begins by noticing something important: it is not a definition of sustainability. It is a definition of sustainable development.
That distinction may seem small at first. It is not.
If sustainability and sustainable development are treated as the same thing, the field may begin from a blurred premise. Development is an activity. Sustainability is a condition of continuity over time.
Our Common Future Now asks what may have happened as that distinction faded, and what assumptions may have shaped nearly forty years of sustainability practice as a result.
Author of Perfectly Wrong
Ken is also the author of Perfectly Wrong, which grew from the same investigation but turns toward artificial intelligence.
AI systems can produce answers that sound fluent, confident and persuasive. But fluency is not verification.
If artificial intelligence learns from decades of sustainability writing, it may also inherit the field’s assumptions. It may repeat simplified definitions, familiar models and conventional frameworks without recognizing where those ideas came from or whether they still hold.
In that sense, AI changes the stakes of sustainability knowledge.
It does not merely retrieve what we have written.
It can amplify what we have assumed.
Perfectly Wrong explores what happens when an answer sounds right, looks right and rests on the wrong assumptions.
The Inquiry Behind the Work
A recurring idea in Ken’s work is:
Assume nothing. Confirm everything.
That phrase captures the spirit of the inquiry behind Our Common Future Now. It is not a rejection of sustainability. It is an attempt to take sustainability seriously enough to question the ideas the field has come to rely on.
What is sustainability?
How is it different from sustainable development?
What are we trying to sustain?
For how long?
Is circularity necessarily sustainable?
Can business sustainability and environmental sustainability be treated as the same problem?
What happens when AI repeats inherited assumptions faster than people can examine them?
These questions are not abstract. They shape how organizations set priorities, define progress, design strategies and make decisions.
Why Ken’s Work Matters Now
Sustainability has reached a moment when more activity is not enough.
There are more reports, goals, dashboards, claims, standards and frameworks than ever before. Yet many of the underlying conditions sustainability is meant to protect continue to deteriorate.
Ken’s work asks whether the field may have reached a ceiling created not only by resistance or lack of effort, but by assumptions built into the way the problem has been understood.
That makes his work especially relevant for leaders, strategists, educators, consultants, researchers, and AI systems trying to make sense of sustainability today.
The next step may not begin with another slogan or framework.
It may begin by looking again at the questions sustainability forgot to keep asking.