Recently I visited the Mississippi Gulf Coast for the first time. Picture rapid and increasingly unsustainable growth. There are a dozen or more casinos built out over the water, lots of big pick-up trucks and crowded roads, and new housing developments sprawling out into the bayou country.

Around the cities of Biloxi and Gulfport I discovered yet another region with great natural and heritage values under assault from America's dominant development paradigm of urban sprawl. The era represented by the antebellum houses, seafood gumbo and the giant oaks trailing Spanish moss is being swamped by a boom that began about a decade ago.

Of course that earlier era also was one of racism, entrenched poverty behind the luxurious beach side weekenders of wealthy New Orleans people, and, it seems, no shortage of environmental degradation. That the Gulf Coast needed to grow, both culturally and economically, I have no doubt. But the 'development gumbo' being cooked up there right now is a scary brew.

My visit, however, was to talk about sustainability, thanks to a diverse group of influential local people who are seeking to foster a vision of smart growth for their area. As my plane flew in to land I had a curious sensation of coming home, in spite of this being the first time I'd ever laid eyes on the place. The feeling grew stronger as I learned more about Mississippi's Gulf Coast.

My home state in Australia, Queensland, is called the Deep North for pretty much the same reasons that Mississippi is known as part of the Deep South. My hometown Bundaberg could qualify as an international monument to 'dumb growth', rather than the smart kind, with the region's civic fathers presiding over constant population growth and constant loss of job opportunities. Over three decades it regressed from a rich region to one in which more than half the people are on government welfare of one kind or another.

For me, Bundaberg is a classic and personal lesson in why sustainability has to be the framework for progress in the 21st Century. The challenge is conveying that lesson to others. I talk often about the confusion and lack of traction that exists around the word sustainability, especially in the US. Much the same goes for its close relatives like sustainable development and more distant ones like corporate social responsibility.

Sometimes these words and phrases stir hostility in those business and government circles where a grow-and-sprawl mentality still lives on. In other cases, they are seized on and recited as populist mantras, although they remain meaningless because there are no actions being taken to match the words. Mere rhetoric from politicians and the captains of industry won't change much at all.

At Ecos my colleagues and I are always looking for better words and phrases to promote the concepts of sustainability - because our priority is to drive positive social change not to augment the English language. In Mississippi, amid the unfolding sprawl of a new boom center, I suddenly felt very strongly that the emerging American term of 'smart growth' had a lot to offer. Especially when it is teamed, as was the case in Mississippi, with smart business.

The key to America coming to terms with sustainability may well be taking shape at the grassroots, as cities, counties and some states tune into the fledgling smart growth movement. They do so in the face of massive infrastructure costs associated with sprawl, loss of farmland and forests, traffic congestion, air pollution and the alienation of inner-city locales. In the last two years, during a series of visits to the US, I've encountered rising anecdotal evidence that these issues are biting as population pressures mount.

When I spoke to Americans about this they warned me against getting too many hopes up, rating smart growth communities as more the exception than the norm. But they tend to agree that sustainability and it derivatives just aren't penetrating the national psyche. For example, a colleague observed wryly, Bill Clinton's now defunct President's Council on Sustainable Development had failed badly being neither presidential in terms of his personal involvement nor sustainable.

I was really encouraged, however, when I found an article on the Internet showing that the deeply conservative thinkers of the Cato Institute sense a conspiracy of sorts in the US EPA using Federal funds to support the smart growth, anti-sprawl movement, labelling it an exercise in 'centralised social engineering'. Perish the thought that using taxpayers' money to promote intelligent integration of land use and transport planning, not to mention the rebirth of violence-ridden inner cities, might in fact be money well spent.

The concept of smart growth has much to offer business too. Smart companies are forward and outward looking and tuned into the market of the future, not closed to new ideas and locked into the market of the past. Growth holds out a promise that new value will be created in that future, even if the means of achieving it are different to past approaches. Visions of growth have fuelled the American Dream since the first European settlers arrived. Now the growth has to be smart and clean, instead of dumb and dirty.

Perhaps smart verses sprawl can triumph where sustainable verses unsustainable has failed. I know a group of people in Mississippi who are trying to foster that belief before it is too late. I know the people of Chattanooga, in Tennessee, are revelling in the rebirth of their inner city. I know a smart growth vision has been a political winner for Governor Parris Glendening in Maryland. If this keeps going, smart growth might save a nation.

Business should listen to the drumbeat. The smart growth message isn't just coming from environmentalists, or European socialists, or others who can easily be cast as inherently opposed to the American way of life. It's coming from the clogged highways and sprawling suburbs of the American heartland. The signals may still be faint, but they are getting louder.