ABSTRACT
Sustainability is a very big concept, so big that it is virtually incomprehensible. Not surprisingly, there is a temptation for us to break the concept down into compartmentalised issues that seem easier to understand and manage, but this runs the danger of our being misled about the true nature of what is a very complex system. In his response to the question ‘What is the single most important environmental/population problem facing the world today’, Diamond (2006, p. 498) captures the essence of this danger in his answer that ‘The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!’ In other words, the real world is full of interactions and connections. At the end of the twentieth century, discoveries in network theory took what had been a largely abstract area of mathematics marching into the real world (Buchanan, 2002). From ecosystems to the Internet, from economics to the spread of disease, we are now beginning to understand how the way things are connected influences the behaviour, development and, importantly, the vulnerabilities of such complex systems. In this chapter we use the science of complex systems, including the new science of networks, as a means to gain insight into the general problem of sustainability.
