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needs and wants, resources access, food security and empowerment for
all with concerns over the direct and indirect impacts of these impera-
tives on global, regional and local environmental changes - be they
degrading, destructive, or even benign. There is an ethical dimension to
such sustainability assessments that requires spelling out (Goulet,
1996). Major development concerns remain, just as there are ecological
concerns and long-term environmental consequences to seriously con-
sider (Redclift, 1987). This is because our global ecumene is growing
into a highly interconnected system in which non-inhabited and inhab-
ited regions are climatically tele-connected and the environmental
'envelopes' of north and south, east and west hemispheres are changing
in unpredictable ways (Monbiot, 2004; 2007).
Sustainable Development's Ambiguities
First and foremost in this deliberation on sustainable development's
ambiguous nature, is the mismatch between the power and conse-
quential political economic authority of neoliberal capitalism's
free-market messages and the eco-development messages that sus-
tainable development promotes. The latter's stewardship of global
environmental conservation and preservation is completely at odds
with the former's singular concerns for the short-term profitability of
neoliberalism's apparent need to derive maximum benefits from
unregulated resource-exploitation, energy-wasteful production meth-
ods, its market-driven objectives and the many deficiencies and ine-
qualities it causes (see Chapter 2.3). Indeed, as long as neoliberalism
remains as the global 'faith' guiding contemporary (and future) politi-
cal economic decision making, then a sustainable development that is
'socially just and fair for all' is highly unlikely. Neoliberalism's myopic
pursuit of unfettered economic development, 'at all costs', is contrary
to most sustainability objectives that favour long-term sustenance
and survival for the majority, with the ecumene being preserved for
future generations too.
One of the most obvious ambiguities results from the inclusion or
exclusion of people-centred development in the ecological concept of sus-
tainability when it focuses upon how the productivity of the earth's bio-
mass resources can be sustained, preserved and conserved. Similarly,
social scientists may exclude considerations of ecological sustainability
and natural resources conservation and preservation in their disciplinary
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