Introduction

As the era of late modernity fatefully slouches into the second decade of a new millennium, at least two contradictory responses to mounting evidence of increasing global environmental damage are apparent. On the one hand, the nations of the north, abetted by various international agencies like the United Nations and the World Bank, produce ringing statements of endorsement for the pathway of sustainable development and formulate protocols setting limits on the most worrisome problems affecting them. On the other hand, many nations of the south in alliance with environmental and peace and justice nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) advance locally based, nonhierarchical policy solutions that assign heavy responsibilities to the industrialized north to share in the burden of charting a new course beyond unsustainable practices and processes and toward global equity and environmental repair.

If the world is changing faster than academicians and policymakers can reconceptualize it, it seems that an acute problem of coming to grips with persistent problems of population control, sustainable development and international peace may lie in the difficulty of formulating a new vocabulary and conceptual framework. These would be adequate to grasp the complexity of the forces shaping key developments in the economics and politics of global change and their impact upon regions and localities trying to adjust or respond to these imposing elements. In debates over sustainable development, the concept of sustainable development remains contested, often mustering wide support and weakly-grounded consensus precisely because it is left unexplicated and not concretely defined (see Chapter 1).