It has now been almost 10 years since the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission) published Our Common Future, the report that popularized the concept of sustainable development.The concept did not originate the work of the Brundtland Commission. In 1980 the World Conservation Strategy, commissioned by the United Nations Environment Program, argued eloquently for policies to ensure the sustainable utilization of species and ecosystems, and for an approach to managing living resources that emphasizes caution in dealing uncertainty about the long - term impacts of human activity on the environment.(f.1) The subsequent career of sustainable development has been intriguing. In 1985, while the Brundtland Commission still conducting its ambitious worldwide schedule of hearings, excitement widespread about the emergence of a conceptual framework that integrated ecological concerns a critique of exploitative political and economic relationships, particularly at the international level. Over the ensuing years the aspirations attached to the concept of sustainable development became more modest, the increased realization that it presented a genuinely profound challenge to existing economic development and resource management practices and their beneficiaries. By 1996, the malleable nature of the concept and the divergent ways in which it had been defined and interpreted led one Canadian scholar to suggest that since the idea of sustainable development was never very clear to begin with and is always being reformulated to suit particular purposes, a temporary moratorium on its use might be in order.(f.2) However, the perceived desirability of such reformulations can also be viewed as reflecting the power of the concept and subversive nature of the questions it can generate when invoked in the political realm. Hence the focus of this issue not on theory but on Canadian case studies in the real world of sustainable development. The articles collected here describe various responses to those questions.One response is simple denial, as described in Raymond Rogers's article on federal policy toward the northern Atlantic fishery. Denial in this case led, as it often does, to disaster: unemployment and a precarious and disheartening economic future for some 40,000 people; social devastation for communities economically reliant on the fishery. Another response is the use of economic power, wielded by means of the legal system, to silence critics of existing practices when these voices become too persistent. Joan Sherman and her colleagues describe a relatively mild example of this response, and Chris Tollefson outlines a much more aggressive variant: the use of strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPS). It is important to note that in all these cases, the response to critics motivated by a desire to protect existing distributions of wealth and power or existing political arrangements.A less confrontational stance involves assimilating the critical dimensions of sustainable development into existing discourses. This is what happens when resource managers overly reliant on neoclassical economics as a description of the world argue that if society would only assign property rights reliably and consistently, many problems of resource overconsumption and environmental degradation (the so - called negative externalities) will sort themselves out. There is a great deal of value in this argument, particularly in the context of the private appropriation of public resources such as rangelands and mineral reserves, a conspicuous feature of resource management in the United States. At the same time, at least by implication the work of Anders Sandberg and Peter Clancy warns us about being too sanguine on this point. Market - oriented approaches to sustainability also merit caution to the extent that they legitimize a broader political agenda of imposing the market and its meanings on almost every area of social and economic life, leaving unasked (and increasingly unaskable) the question of whether some decisions about how to allocate a society's resources and efforts simply should not be made on the basis of access to purchasing power. …