Very few people in mainstream politics today have begun to understand the nature of the impending sustainability crunch. They still see sustainability as an environmental issue, requiring measured and (hopefully) timely regulatory or market responses to keep the show on the road.

Only a handful of people, including the redoubtable and inspirational Tim O'Riordan, have resolutely kept on pointing out to them that sustainability is of course about the physical and biological systems on which we humans still utterly depend, is of course about the economic and social policies nations must deploy (however inadequately) to sustain those systems, but, first and foremost, it is about governance: who decides what on behalf of whom to secure which objectives over what period of time?

As Neil Adger and Andrew Jordan point out in their excellent overview, ‘there is no mystery about sustainability’. One way or another, the human species will end up living sustainably on planet Earth: the laws of nature and the laws of thermodynamics always have and eventually always will take precedence over our ephemeral and hugely arrogant ambitions to live outside those laws. Anyone can live as an outlaw for a while, as an individual, but at the species level, it is not smart and it's definitely not sustainable.

That much is certain. How we embed that realisation in our political and economic systems, and how quickly we can achieve that, is an altogether less certain question.