ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part highlights the importance of fitting alternatives conceived at wider scales to local realities, so that initiatives aimed at producing beneficial change can work with and for local people. It explores how global concerns and narratives are reworked into local practices, and investigates attempts at putting alternative lifestyles into practice. The part investigates the way local communities engage in sustainability. It also explores contested narratives of sustainability in mining practices in the boreal north—the Lake Superior Basin in North America and Sapmi in northern Scandinavia. The part agues how decisions about sustainable mine developments are not purely scientific or technical decisions and how the meaning of sustainability is open for interpretations. It examines the idea that concepts and models of agricultural sustainability need to embrace elements that are as much social and political as they are technical.
