The idea of sustainability emerged from the concept of sustained yield, the forester’s dream of a ‘‘stationary forest’’ that yields a continuous flow of timber. But in the 1970s, ecologist C.S. ‘‘Buzz’’ Holling began to question this idea, and began to speak about ‘‘surprise’’ in ecosystem dynamics and sustain ability-as-resilience – the ability to recover from unexpected shock or stress, rather than to yield a steady flow. While the concept of sustainability in the simple sense of ‘‘sustaining the ecological basis of human well-being’’ gained wide acceptance and the Brundtland Commission’s simple definition of sustainable development caught the public imagination, ecologists and lately economists are grappling with what it means to sustain anything in the face of highly variable and unpredictable behaviour of socio-ecological systems. Others, however, have been sceptical of the sustainability bandwagon itself. As sustainable development has gotten ‘‘mainstreamed’’, bureaucratised and eventually rendered meaningless by the political system, critics have pointed to the depoliticising nature of the term, and even its tendency to reinforce the status quo – 140 Book reviews Downloaded By: [Lele, Sharachchandra] At: 13:16 20 June 2011 sustaining today’s inequities and injustices by painting doomsday scenarios and saying we are all in the same boat.