ABSTRACT
From its origins in progressive-era forestry in the early twentieth century (O'Riordan, 1988), the idea of sustainability has been adopted across a wide range of planning and policy arenas to identify how humans should organize themselves and relate to their environment. With the diffusion of sustainability, the idea has been both praised and criticized for having many and contradictory meanings (Newton & Freyfogle, 2005; Redclift, 2006; Williams & Millington, 2004). The editors of this special issue (Voß et al., 2007) suggest that this range of meanings reflects a distribution of values and risks across a range of social objectives. Walker & Shove (2007) argue that this diversity is not only inevitable but also inescapable, since efforts to reconcile its multiple meanings fail because the language used to describe sustainability is both unstable and contingent.
