ABSTRACT
The idea of sustainability has to do with people's concern for the continued existence of society and humanity as a whole over the long term. Before we can solve the problems linked to sustainability we need to understand what they are, and this requires looking at things over very long timescales in order to attend to long-term temporal dynamics. Since the study of sustainability problems usually requires input from a variety of disciplines (sociology, economics, the natural sciences), it is extremely useful to be able to represent the temporal aspects of these problems within a shared conceptual framework capable of being used in every discipline involved as well as by practitioners. The following chapters elaborate the set of ideas grouped around the German word for ‘stock’, Bestand, as a basis for achieving this.
