ABSTRACT
Throughout the review and rewriting of this book we have been chasing a moving shadow called sustainability. This is a term that has achieved Olympian proportions in all brands of ecology, rural development, institutional continuance, and city- and nation-building. It is one of the words that characterized much of the thinking and anxiety of the latter half of the century and has denoted much of the international dialogue of the new millennium. Unfortunately for those charged with the business of making the word mean something fixed, understandable and enforceable, there is no single meaning and there is no agreement on how it is measured and recognized in an objective sense. The situation appears to be that, at the end of the 20th century, a word was decided upon to conjure up the desirable outcome of social and political endeavours. Scientists and professionals took (or were given) the impossible task of achieving definitive measurement of this word. The impossible task was to measure what was never potentially measurable: the immeasurable ‘sustainability’.
