Dear Fossil Fuel,

There is no easy way to do this, so I’ll just say it: I want a divorce!

Writing this letter is very painful for me, but the contents will not come as a great surprise to you. Our relationship has been wondrous at times, with ups and downs like every marriage. But you’ve been abusive for too long and pushed me to the limit. It’s taken decades of counselling to build up the courage to leave you, but after 300 years together I’ve decided it is time I grew up and faced the future as a responsible adult….

Among the myriad challenges facing the human species in the early years of this century there is one that shows up on every political and business agenda from Pretoria to Paris, Lusaka to London, and Windhoek to Washington: how to sustain economic growth. So dominant is this discourse that those who dare to question it can be readily dismissed as lunatics, so far outside the mainstream as to appear out of touch with reality. Can’t they see? We need to create jobs…

For five years, Fortune has sought “to gather “the smartest people we know” in sustainability from business, government, and NGOs” for what has become one of the leading events in this space – Fortune Brainstorm Green I attended each of the last three years, just returning from the latest version 48 hours ago. Having read Marc Gunther’s They Said it at Brainstorm Green this morning, I wanted to add my own honorable mentions for good content – and touch too what was not said.

SustainAbility Council member Gary Kendall shares this report following a recent visit to China – in particular a portion of his journey featuring a cruise down the Yangtze River and through the locks at the infamous Three Gorges Dam.

“That’s my new house” – my Chinese tour guide gestured toward a row of featureless apartment blocks beneath our vantage point overlooking the river – “and that’s where I used to live.” She showed me a photograph of a modest two-storey structure within the walls of the ancient city of Fengjie. It presumably remains intact, albeit more than 150 metres underwater.

This stretch of the Yangtze – roughly 660km from Chongqing to Sandouping – is much less a river than a lake these days…

1. Transitions

In a year that saw an Arab Spring take hold and unseat entrenched autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya (TBD on Yemen and Syria), the withdrawal of the last American troops from Iraq, a European Union on the brink of transformative change (and potential collapse), a titan of technological (and economic) innovation pass away, and the growing acknowledgement (in the form of the Occupy protests), that the entanglement of the American political and financial system is a Faustian bargain that must be actively fought and protested against, the theme of transition feels all too apt.

So too in the sustainability field, where in a world of seven billion inhabitants and growing, the five most urgent issues on the sustainability agenda are all perceived less urgently than they were in 2009.

With a dismal jobs report released in the U.S. just prior to the Labor Day long weekend – see this CNN Money article for details – the day and its moniker will be marked with a sense of irony and even despair this year by the many who fervently wish they could find paid employment. Securing work is a staggering task at present, as captured in this New York Times feature, Hope Fear and Insomnia: Journey of a Jobless Man. Greater confidence among those with jobs would be most welcome too; this economy feels a fragile thing.

A compilation of SustainAbility's current and past thinking on the future of energy.

Image: Oceana.org

Oceana, the NGO which, according to its website, is the largest organization focused soley on ocean conservation, has been running a new ad campaign in Washington, DC since about the first anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon accident (mid-April). I see the posters frequently on my ride to and from work on the DC Metro. The campaign is titled What If It Happened Here?, and depicts a DH-like drilling platform fire and the consequences – oil slicks, deployed booms, oiled birds – adjacent to the Golden Gate Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument…

The second in a series of blogs about what's on our radar: Germany moves away from nuclear.

Mark Lee reports from day one of Fortune Brainstorm Green.

It's time for a rethink on the future of nuclear power, but the answers are far from clear.

2011 needs to be the year, and the start of a decade, of absolutes.

Leaders with courage and vision are needed to secure the popular support needed for decarbonisation.

Gary Kendall on the hangover from COP 15, and the prognosis for COP 16 later this year.

I have been thinking a lot about energy lately. It seems that the issue is impossible to avoid...

During a recent away day I proceeded to pick a fight about the merits of purchasing so called "green energy".

Gary Kendall is uplifted to hear the remarks of Barack Obama's adviser Steven Chu.

John Elkington talks to Bill McKibben, the man behind 350.org, the global campaign on climate change.

Democracy and sustainability are twin agendas - but U.S. politics must be turned inside out to achieve Al Gore's vision