ABSTRACT
This conclusion chapter presents some closing thoughts covered in the preceding chapter of this book. The First Principles of Sustainability indicate it is the process of building and maintaining global social systems of capable, accountable, adaptive, just, and free people who can make important decisions and trade-offs with foresight and prudence who foster the robust, self-organizing, dynamic, and complex ecosystems around the world for now and future generations. However, the discussion about measuring sustainability tells us that the nature of these challenges will require both objective and subjective measures, and this problem makes the essentially contested nature of sustainability an even larger challenge to govern. However, we should expect that moral struggles for survival among other problems will continue to host power struggles through the classic arenas of domination that will affect current and future generations. While it is very difficult to positively identity sustainability in complex social-ecological systems because they reduce economic welfare, increase inequalities, and degrade ecological systems.
